I knew people would focus on the f2p comments but I saw this...
"If you are in your late thirties (like me), there are probably two pivotal moments that will have shaped your life and prodded you onto the road to becoming a gamer. The first is Star Wars. Being born in the early 70s means that you are exactly the right age to have had your mind blown in a darkened cinema in the summer of ‘77."
...and just have to thank the author for bringing back the painful memory of me and my younger brothers getting hyped up for a week or more, and also during the whole trip to the cinema (by my mother and stepfather both no less) to go see Empire, only to get to the cinema to find it sold out for pretty much the rest of that weekend.
What's not painful was that it was soldout what was painful was being told to stop being such a whiny cry baby by my stepdad on the trip home. I was 7, my brothers were 5 and 3 and we were crushed.
So thank you Mr.Webb, for giving this late thirty-something, reason to complain on the internet about somthing that you wrote that is not f2p related.
Serioulsy though great article, it brought back a bunch of fun memories about the early days of video gaming.
Thanks for the whole pallet-load of nostalgia you lucky devil. The rise of the video arcade changed my late teen years forever. It also spawned one of my favorite, and yet also one of the worst motion pictures ever made. The movie Joysticks. Video games, juvenile jokes, insane characters like King Vidiot, gratuitous nudity ... ah the mamer ...uh MEMories.
Its strange to think that back in those days if you wanted to play a video game you had to venture out into the world of the living and bump elbows with other real live people. These days we just sit in our darkened rooms in front of a plastic box and the only other living human we ever see during a gaming session is the person who delivers the pizza. Well or the annoyed significant other who wants us to take out the trash, wash the dishes, mow the lawn, take a shower, eat something other than Mountain Dew and Cheetos, or just check that we are still breathing. I have to say I think we old arcade dinosaurs had the better experience.
Now as to the comparison between pumping quarters into a machine is equal to microtransactions ... utter, utter, bollocks mate. Sure game companies have always wanted our money, and of course they always will, the comparison there is irrelevant. Where the old arcade game differs vastly from cash shops is I don't recall that the amount of quarters a guy had in his pocket having anything to do with how good of an opponent he was in say a game of Street Fighter. Pumping in a few extra quarters didn't give them more special moves, more health, or armor. They just meant he got to play more.
With a cash shop anyone willing to spend the money has an immediate and usually dramatic advantage over the average free playing schlub. Here's a little video game nostalgia analogy. A cash shop player gets to be Mr Sandman, while the non payer will always be Glass Joe.
"Gypsies, tramps, and thieves, we were called by the Admin of the site . . . "
Am I the only other person here who remembers Ikari warriors? I remember playing it and going "Why doesn't every game have these twisty joysticks?!" Remember the old Microsoft Sidewinder joystick? I bought one because of that twisting feature. (Though I only used it in Mechwarrior 2+ )
I originally bought my joystick (I had a couple in my gaming time each more advanced then the next) originally for the fun ww2 era dogfighting games that used to get released in the early days of PC gaming (Aces of the Pacific, even had rudder pedals).
But it wasn't long before they stopped making those kind of games and then I discovered the mechwarrior series. My joysticks saw far more use thanks to mechwarrior, those games were the best. It's a shame that all the mechanized combat games they have been making the last few years have been about fast moving melee robots and not the quality fun strategic slower moving many types of guns mechs. One of the best eras in PC gaming.
The reason people hate the F2P model is because we've moved past it as a society.
The internet used to be pay by the minute in the early AOL/Prodigy/CompuServer days and the first ISPs. Then the companies made a deal of paying per month for your internet, guess which style people in America do more of? It's the subscritpion model.
Phones for a long long time were pay by the minute, land lines and cell phones now do monthly subs and a lot of those options are unlimited calling. More people now use subscription with phones for either x number of minutes contract or unlimited.
People have subscription for TV, some for radio, more for consoles (Xbox Live Gold etc.).
Subscriptions has become the model we work well with as a society. So when people start trying to take that away and change it to a "keep buying more crap for the game you play and end up paying more then you would have with just a subscription" model, plenty of us don't like it. And yes we also don't like playing a game where a person can ridiculously throw hundreds of dollars at it in a month and get an advantage. It's not some deep, tough to understand, psychological reasoning why people are against the model. It's actually plain and simple.
That's not exactly true. Oh sure, on the surface it seems correct but you have to remember that what is driving all of this is the idea that businesses are trying to figure out a way to get recurring revenue.
So with all of your examples, they seem true, the cable, the phone, music, but what it boils down to is "what are consumers willing to pay before we can charge them additional fees.
So cable has a subscription. But if you want to see the "good" movies or newly released films then you have to pay a bit extra. Going home at Christmas means my brother and I searching the "free" movies before I roll my eyes and say "let's just look at the pay per view and I'll pay for it".
A special event on cable? You pay for that event.
Phone? you pay for a specific plan but if you go over that plan you start paying a bit extra. My guess is that each plan aims at a certain "usage demographic" and just undercuts what the average time for each group uses. This way a person is always abutting his/her maximum minutes and has to fork over a bit extra each month. Not to mention the seductive use of surfing while using the phone and paying to download or upload things.
Your counter example for cable can be summed up as the current WoW and EQ2 models. They are still subscription games you can just also buy extras. Your view on those examples didn't equate to F2P style at all. But for what it is worth I don't buy extras in MMOs and I don't pay for events on TV either, I'm too cheap.
The phone example is still a subscription, you just pick which subscription model you want. And as we've seen some MMOs are going that route as well.
Nobody likes F2P because F2P MMO's are trash. F2P = PAY to WIN. Everyone knows this and there is really no sugar coating it.
The most skilled players I've ever played with have not been in F2P they have been in P2P. F2P is merely a passing trend that will appeal to super casual game players but will never appeal to any real gamer. Any real gamer, hardcore player or not will always value competition and balance.
I arcade games and grew up playing Street Fighter 2, but I would have never played at all if it had been as easy as plinking another quarter more than my opponent and "buying" a win. My other arcade passion was any racing multiplayer (2 or more linked machines) game like Cruisin USA. Again, I would never have loved this a game if i was able to buy my win.
In the end comparing arcade games to F2P MMO's is something that cannot be done. It should not be done. And if it is done I call it a "marketing effort" for F2P model MMO's and not an informative article or something worth writing about. Unless it's a lead in article to how XYZ game is bestest F2P game ever with the most balanced PVP ever and stuff.
Justin are you that naive? I mean come on, check out some of the item shop prices on some of these popular games before you insert foot and swallow whole. Just take Runes of Magic for example, I know more than one person that has spent 700-1000 on end game equipment in that game. In the 4 years I have been playing Eve I have not spent close to that much.
It was a good article until the last paragraph and then you came off as someone talking about a gaming mechanic that you had not explored very thoroughly. Shame on you.
Nice to see an article about old school arcade. Gaming in those days was like a real world club, you went out with your mates to game. These days the skinner boxes sit in our homes, a shame. There is nothing like beating a mate at a game when you can see his face, pure joy.
But where is the F2P connection? We paid in arcades, we pay in a P2P game, you end up paying in a F2P. If anything the F2P is the odd man out. This is not an issue about paying, it is about how much you pay and for what you are paying. If I had gone to Funzone the last thing I would have been thinking about was crappy F2P MMOs.
The reason people hate the F2P model is because we've moved past it as a society.
The internet used to be pay by the minute in the early AOL/Prodigy/CompuServer days and the first ISPs. Then the companies made a deal of paying per month for your internet, guess which style people in America do more of? It's the subscritpion model.
Phones for a long long time were pay by the minute, land lines and cell phones now do monthly subs and a lot of those options are unlimited calling. More people now use subscription with phones for either x number of minutes contract or unlimited.
People have subscription for TV, some for radio, more for consoles (Xbox Live Gold etc.).
Subscriptions has become the model we work well with as a society. So when people start trying to take that away and change it to a "keep buying more crap for the game you play and end up paying more then you would have with just a subscription" model, plenty of us don't like it. And yes we also don't like playing a game where a person can ridiculously throw hundreds of dollars at it in a month and get an advantage. It's not some deep, tough to understand, psychological reasoning why people are against the model. It's actually plain and simple.
All you have to look at is Netflix kicking Blockbuster's ass and you can see what Americans want. Unlimited monthly access appeals to us much more than pay by the item.
Pumping quarters or 20 cents, 'got a 20 bro?' :-) for us downunders, i think is more akin to the new era of DLC. With inflation a quarter in the 80's is probably worth $10 bucks now. However the games housed in those machines were in fact complete in every way, you payed for more lives or more health/time not for additional content that was puposely cut out to charge for later. IE mass effect, dragon age etc
I wonder what a MMO would be like that took it to heart and made the games that hard and simply charged no fees other than .05c to ressurect?
Its so awesome to see Funspot. hear on MMORPG.com i live in the new hampshire area and at least once every other month me and my gaming buddys get together and go to funspot and rock the classics.This artical truely made my day.I hope you enjoyed funspot as much as me and my friends do.
All you have to look at is Netflix kicking Blockbuster's ass and you can see what Americans want. Unlimited monthly access appeals to us much more than pay by the item.
Well and the ability to sit on their fat holes and have everything delivered right to their front door. (not a dig at the Americans by the way. I've seen this shut in behavior in every country I've lived in.)
"Gypsies, tramps, and thieves, we were called by the Admin of the site . . . "
I am misty eyed with nostalgia for games I'd even forgotten the names of. When I was a kid, my idea of paradise would have been to own even one of these boxy arcade machines so I could play until I fell down without having to deposit a single quarter. I still miss a lot of those old games. I'd love to play Galaga III again, and I could probably find it somewhere for PC, but playing with a keyboard and mouse just wouldn't be the same.
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.
Arcade games back then were extremely expensive to make and that is why they cost so much. Also there weren't too many people who had pcs at home to enjoy. Microtransactions are for money making purposes only not to enhance a game experience. If fools want to pay for little things the devs can already throw in at nearly no cost then a good businessman will take advantage of the fool.
And the award for most drawn out and forced comparison ever goes to..... this column.
Lets see if we were to actually make the comparison some what relevant then.
The arcade would have to charge you to enter telling you that all the games were free to play, but then want to charge you extra for the joy stick and buttons to actually play them properly.
Comparing arcade games to MMOs is ridiculous. The games in arcades are specifically intended to be quick, highly intense, transient experiences. An MMO is about a persistent experience, socialising with other players, and long-term investment in a game.
One of these types of game is suitable for the "pay a dollar for 10 minutes" revenue model, the other isn't. A major reason that so many people despise the "F2P" (and can we stop calling it free when most of these schemes end up costing far more than normal subscription games?) model games is that they lure people into investing their time, getting attached to their character, and building up social ties, and then start hitting them with the charges. The OP could as well have gone and enjoyed himself in a Nevada whorehouse and then commented on how ridiculously entitled and whiney those people who expect their husbands and wives to love them for free are. Prostitution is a much better revenue model!
Personally, I have nothing against brothels, but to pretend that they are or should be similar to a relationship is to reveal yourself as someone who has never really had one. I'm sure the moral is not lost on you all.
Well those pics certainly brought back memories! There was something special about the arcade where you all got together to play the latest games and see who would get the highest score. The socialization was great. That socialization is something that is missed with online gaming.
The OP could as well have gone and enjoyed himself in a Nevada whorehouse and then commented on how ridiculously entitled and whiney those people who expect their husbands and wives to love them for free are. Prostitution is a much better revenue model!
Personally, I have nothing against brothels, but to pretend that they are or should be similar to a relationship is to reveal yourself as someone who has never really had one. I'm sure the moral is not lost on you all.
Lol, this coment excceds by far the hole content of the arcade-f2p article
The OP could as well have gone and enjoyed himself in a Nevada whorehouse and then commented on how ridiculously entitled and whiney those people who expect their husbands and wives to love them for free are. Prostitution is a much better revenue model!
Personally, I have nothing against brothels, but to pretend that they are or should be similar to a relationship is to reveal yourself as someone who has never really had one. I'm sure the moral is not lost on you all.
Lol, this coment excceds by far the hole content of the arcade-f2p article
Rofl
Totally agree on that one.
I think its the 1st time I agree with Malcanis, but man, he nailed it!
It's a better comparison than most people give him credit for, and I was wondering who would make it.
People forget that a lot of arcade machines were designed to be quarter munchers in the same way a lot of F2P games are designed to make you use the item shop. Gauntlet was one of the first that did so: your health would go down little by little and you would be constantly forced to put in more quarters to keep playing. Other arcade games did this too, like Combattribes and Xenomorph.
Others just made the game so brutally hard it was impossible to beat on one quarter. Smash TV is like this, and virtually all SNK fighting games always made the 3rd or 4th guy, let alone the boss, hard enough to steal quarters from you. Ikari warriors was very much like this.
In order to make money for the arcade owners, the purity of the original arcade experience slowly started to change to games designed to get more money out of you. Not all the ways were bad: just putting an ending on a game worked instead of letting people play for hours or until they passed out. Co-op games combined an ending with the ability to have multiple players play.
The difference is that one way increased revenue without busting the game or making it a chore to play. Some ways increased revenue and were incredibly fun and innovative: without arcade games I don't think we'd ever see 4 player co-op, or the fighting game genre. The other way sucked money by making gameplay harder. F2P are like the latter.
Once consoles came out though, arcade games had to embrace the "quarter munching" mentality. All games turned into quarter munchers: most racing games ended the game after a single race and asked you to put more quarters in to continue, the average playtime you could get out of a game dropped even further, with fewer side scroller and adventure type games released and more fighting games (where people would play single matches against others, lose, and the next player would come in.) They even started turning to redemption and skeeball games when they saw that it was easier to make fluffy experiences pandering to kids (COUGH FREE REALMS) than to make arcade games.
And now the arcades are dead.
I don't think you can make a perfect analogy: the arcades died because the makers shifted solely to consoles and they soon outstripped arcade games except in ways which made arcade cabinets impossible to afford, like multiplayer cabinets and deluxe ones. But I would say that a lot of the arcade's death was due to embracing the current F2P model and trying to use gameplay to gouge customers, who just left to "sub" games (console ones) instead of not gouging and looking for other ways to survive and prosper. Rather than play pricing games, they need to look harder.
Same with MMOS. New pricing plans can't hide a lack of innovation.
The OP could as well have gone and enjoyed himself in a Nevada whorehouse and then commented on how ridiculously entitled and whiney those people who expect their husbands and wives to love them for free are. Prostitution is a much better revenue model!
Personally, I have nothing against brothels, but to pretend that they are or should be similar to a relationship is to reveal yourself as someone who has never really had one. I'm sure the moral is not lost on you all.
Lol, this coment excceds by far the hole content of the arcade-f2p article
Rofl
Totally agree on that one.
I think its the 1st time I agree with Malcanis, but man, he nailed it!
It only hurts the first time. After that it gets much easier, baby.
Comments
I knew people would focus on the f2p comments but I saw this...
"If you are in your late thirties (like me), there are probably two pivotal moments that will have shaped your life and prodded you onto the road to becoming a gamer. The first is Star Wars. Being born in the early 70s means that you are exactly the right age to have had your mind blown in a darkened cinema in the summer of ‘77."
...and just have to thank the author for bringing back the painful memory of me and my younger brothers getting hyped up for a week or more, and also during the whole trip to the cinema (by my mother and stepfather both no less) to go see Empire, only to get to the cinema to find it sold out for pretty much the rest of that weekend.
What's not painful was that it was soldout what was painful was being told to stop being such a whiny cry baby by my stepdad on the trip home. I was 7, my brothers were 5 and 3 and we were crushed.
So thank you Mr.Webb, for giving this late thirty-something, reason to complain on the internet about somthing that you wrote that is not f2p related.
Serioulsy though great article, it brought back a bunch of fun memories about the early days of video gaming.
Thanks for the whole pallet-load of nostalgia you lucky devil. The rise of the video arcade changed my late teen years forever. It also spawned one of my favorite, and yet also one of the worst motion pictures ever made. The movie Joysticks. Video games, juvenile jokes, insane characters like King Vidiot, gratuitous nudity ... ah the mamer ...uh MEMories.
Its strange to think that back in those days if you wanted to play a video game you had to venture out into the world of the living and bump elbows with other real live people. These days we just sit in our darkened rooms in front of a plastic box and the only other living human we ever see during a gaming session is the person who delivers the pizza. Well or the annoyed significant other who wants us to take out the trash, wash the dishes, mow the lawn, take a shower, eat something other than Mountain Dew and Cheetos, or just check that we are still breathing. I have to say I think we old arcade dinosaurs had the better experience.
Now as to the comparison between pumping quarters into a machine is equal to microtransactions ... utter, utter, bollocks mate. Sure game companies have always wanted our money, and of course they always will, the comparison there is irrelevant. Where the old arcade game differs vastly from cash shops is I don't recall that the amount of quarters a guy had in his pocket having anything to do with how good of an opponent he was in say a game of Street Fighter. Pumping in a few extra quarters didn't give them more special moves, more health, or armor. They just meant he got to play more.
With a cash shop anyone willing to spend the money has an immediate and usually dramatic advantage over the average free playing schlub. Here's a little video game nostalgia analogy. A cash shop player gets to be Mr Sandman, while the non payer will always be Glass Joe.
"Gypsies, tramps, and thieves, we were called by the Admin of the site . . . "
I originally bought my joystick (I had a couple in my gaming time each more advanced then the next) originally for the fun ww2 era dogfighting games that used to get released in the early days of PC gaming (Aces of the Pacific, even had rudder pedals).
But it wasn't long before they stopped making those kind of games and then I discovered the mechwarrior series. My joysticks saw far more use thanks to mechwarrior, those games were the best. It's a shame that all the mechanized combat games they have been making the last few years have been about fast moving melee robots and not the quality fun strategic slower moving many types of guns mechs. One of the best eras in PC gaming.
Your counter example for cable can be summed up as the current WoW and EQ2 models. They are still subscription games you can just also buy extras. Your view on those examples didn't equate to F2P style at all. But for what it is worth I don't buy extras in MMOs and I don't pay for events on TV either, I'm too cheap.
The phone example is still a subscription, you just pick which subscription model you want. And as we've seen some MMOs are going that route as well.
First thing I would have hit up is Revolution X, and if they didn't have it, that place amounts to squat.
Writer / Musician / Game Designer
Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4
Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture
arcade games =/= F2P MMO.
Nobody likes F2P because F2P MMO's are trash. F2P = PAY to WIN. Everyone knows this and there is really no sugar coating it.
The most skilled players I've ever played with have not been in F2P they have been in P2P. F2P is merely a passing trend that will appeal to super casual game players but will never appeal to any real gamer. Any real gamer, hardcore player or not will always value competition and balance.
I arcade games and grew up playing Street Fighter 2, but I would have never played at all if it had been as easy as plinking another quarter more than my opponent and "buying" a win. My other arcade passion was any racing multiplayer (2 or more linked machines) game like Cruisin USA. Again, I would never have loved this a game if i was able to buy my win.
In the end comparing arcade games to F2P MMO's is something that cannot be done. It should not be done. And if it is done I call it a "marketing effort" for F2P model MMO's and not an informative article or something worth writing about. Unless it's a lead in article to how XYZ game is bestest F2P game ever with the most balanced PVP ever and stuff.
Justin are you that naive? I mean come on, check out some of the item shop prices on some of these popular games before you insert foot and swallow whole. Just take Runes of Magic for example, I know more than one person that has spent 700-1000 on end game equipment in that game. In the 4 years I have been playing Eve I have not spent close to that much.
It was a good article until the last paragraph and then you came off as someone talking about a gaming mechanic that you had not explored very thoroughly. Shame on you.
Nice to see an article about old school arcade. Gaming in those days was like a real world club, you went out with your mates to game. These days the skinner boxes sit in our homes, a shame. There is nothing like beating a mate at a game when you can see his face, pure joy.
But where is the F2P connection? We paid in arcades, we pay in a P2P game, you end up paying in a F2P. If anything the F2P is the odd man out. This is not an issue about paying, it is about how much you pay and for what you are paying. If I had gone to Funzone the last thing I would have been thinking about was crappy F2P MMOs.
All you have to look at is Netflix kicking Blockbuster's ass and you can see what Americans want. Unlimited monthly access appeals to us much more than pay by the item.
Pumping quarters or 20 cents, 'got a 20 bro?' :-) for us downunders, i think is more akin to the new era of DLC. With inflation a quarter in the 80's is probably worth $10 bucks now. However the games housed in those machines were in fact complete in every way, you payed for more lives or more health/time not for additional content that was puposely cut out to charge for later. IE mass effect, dragon age etc
I wonder what a MMO would be like that took it to heart and made the games that hard and simply charged no fees other than .05c to ressurect?
Its so awesome to see Funspot. hear on MMORPG.com i live in the new hampshire area and at least once every other month me and my gaming buddys get together and go to funspot and rock the classics.This artical truely made my day.I hope you enjoyed funspot as much as me and my friends do.
Well and the ability to sit on their fat holes and have everything delivered right to their front door. (not a dig at the Americans by the way. I've seen this shut in behavior in every country I've lived in.)
"Gypsies, tramps, and thieves, we were called by the Admin of the site . . . "
I am misty eyed with nostalgia for games I'd even forgotten the names of. When I was a kid, my idea of paradise would have been to own even one of these boxy arcade machines so I could play until I fell down without having to deposit a single quarter. I still miss a lot of those old games. I'd love to play Galaga III again, and I could probably find it somewhere for PC, but playing with a keyboard and mouse just wouldn't be the same.
I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals.
~Albert Einstein
Arcade games back then were extremely expensive to make and that is why they cost so much. Also there weren't too many people who had pcs at home to enjoy. Microtransactions are for money making purposes only not to enhance a game experience. If fools want to pay for little things the devs can already throw in at nearly no cost then a good businessman will take advantage of the fool.
And the award for most drawn out and forced comparison ever goes to..... this column.
Lets see if we were to actually make the comparison some what relevant then.
The arcade would have to charge you to enter telling you that all the games were free to play, but then want to charge you extra for the joy stick and buttons to actually play them properly.
Comparing arcade games to MMOs is ridiculous. The games in arcades are specifically intended to be quick, highly intense, transient experiences. An MMO is about a persistent experience, socialising with other players, and long-term investment in a game.
One of these types of game is suitable for the "pay a dollar for 10 minutes" revenue model, the other isn't. A major reason that so many people despise the "F2P" (and can we stop calling it free when most of these schemes end up costing far more than normal subscription games?) model games is that they lure people into investing their time, getting attached to their character, and building up social ties, and then start hitting them with the charges. The OP could as well have gone and enjoyed himself in a Nevada whorehouse and then commented on how ridiculously entitled and whiney those people who expect their husbands and wives to love them for free are. Prostitution is a much better revenue model!
Personally, I have nothing against brothels, but to pretend that they are or should be similar to a relationship is to reveal yourself as someone who has never really had one. I'm sure the moral is not lost on you all.
Give me liberty or give me lasers
Well those pics certainly brought back memories! There was something special about the arcade where you all got together to play the latest games and see who would get the highest score. The socialization was great. That socialization is something that is missed with online gaming.
All that talk about 70's arcade games makes me feel insignificant again, having only been born in '91.
Lol, this coment excceds by far the hole content of the arcade-f2p article
for Justin Webb
hey justin i used to live in Worcester Ma
and i remember fun zone
we used to vacation in NH every year
but i have a bigger arcade for ya if you ever wish to come and make the trip
5 floors of shear arcade awesomeness
come on down to Florida and visit Disney Quest
its something like $35 or so entry and play all you want
first time i went i was amazed by the shear number of arcade games and the variety they have is amazing
from the old school to the new school to virtual reality to just different
its defiantly an experience worth having
EDIT:
found a wiki page describing the place
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DisneyQuest
dosnt list all the games by far but it will give you an idea of what you can find
Haha! Noob. Now you little whippersnappers know how we feel when you kick our old asses at games like Halo 3.
"Gypsies, tramps, and thieves, we were called by the Admin of the site . . . "
Rofl
Totally agree on that one.
I think its the 1st time I agree with Malcanis, but man, he nailed it!
watching those cabinet pics gave me sensation of re-encountering that little ugly girl from high school, now turned a hot supermega babe!
It's a better comparison than most people give him credit for, and I was wondering who would make it.
People forget that a lot of arcade machines were designed to be quarter munchers in the same way a lot of F2P games are designed to make you use the item shop. Gauntlet was one of the first that did so: your health would go down little by little and you would be constantly forced to put in more quarters to keep playing. Other arcade games did this too, like Combattribes and Xenomorph.
Others just made the game so brutally hard it was impossible to beat on one quarter. Smash TV is like this, and virtually all SNK fighting games always made the 3rd or 4th guy, let alone the boss, hard enough to steal quarters from you. Ikari warriors was very much like this.
In order to make money for the arcade owners, the purity of the original arcade experience slowly started to change to games designed to get more money out of you. Not all the ways were bad: just putting an ending on a game worked instead of letting people play for hours or until they passed out. Co-op games combined an ending with the ability to have multiple players play.
The difference is that one way increased revenue without busting the game or making it a chore to play. Some ways increased revenue and were incredibly fun and innovative: without arcade games I don't think we'd ever see 4 player co-op, or the fighting game genre. The other way sucked money by making gameplay harder. F2P are like the latter.
Once consoles came out though, arcade games had to embrace the "quarter munching" mentality. All games turned into quarter munchers: most racing games ended the game after a single race and asked you to put more quarters in to continue, the average playtime you could get out of a game dropped even further, with fewer side scroller and adventure type games released and more fighting games (where people would play single matches against others, lose, and the next player would come in.) They even started turning to redemption and skeeball games when they saw that it was easier to make fluffy experiences pandering to kids (COUGH FREE REALMS) than to make arcade games.
And now the arcades are dead.
I don't think you can make a perfect analogy: the arcades died because the makers shifted solely to consoles and they soon outstripped arcade games except in ways which made arcade cabinets impossible to afford, like multiplayer cabinets and deluxe ones. But I would say that a lot of the arcade's death was due to embracing the current F2P model and trying to use gameplay to gouge customers, who just left to "sub" games (console ones) instead of not gouging and looking for other ways to survive and prosper. Rather than play pricing games, they need to look harder.
Same with MMOS. New pricing plans can't hide a lack of innovation.
It only hurts the first time. After that it gets much easier, baby.
Give me liberty or give me lasers