I don't like tokens or cards. I like open play, just pay like $20 for all day access. I'm fortunate to have places like that around. The pay to play model penalizes you for being bad at or new to an arcade title or pinball machine, which mega blows and discourages people from trying out random games they might lose quickly at.
this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2025
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We have a local barcade, but with actually pretty great arcade games. They charge a cover fee, close down to minors early, and charge nothing at the games themselves. It is the best thing ever. Makes the arcade experience honestly better than it was back when it was actually big.
We have a national videogame museum nearby that works with time slots, you pick an amount of time you want to be there or just get the all day pass, and inside all machines are on free play. I never liked arcades because of tokens, but man do I love single pay arcades!
The only thing I hate about the cards is that most arcades that use it (not all tho) do that bullshit where the cheapest game is an odd number of credits, but you can only buy an even number of credits so you are paying a minimum of $5 for a maximum of a $3 purchase, leaving you with $2 you can't so shit with.
Fuck this practice, and fuck the son of a bitch who invented it.
Off topic rant: county fair rides. My town has a decent-ish county fair every summer, and this past year my son was finally old enough to go on rides. Nothing crazy, but he kept seeing the Ferris wheel when we would drive by, and really wanted to go on it. My wife looked up ticket prices online, and saw that it was 2 credits a person to ride, so that would equate to I think like $6USD for the three of us to take a five minute ride around the wheel. We show up to the fair, and in order to use any ride credits whatsoever, every rider has to have their own ride bracelet. Those cost $2 each. Each bracelet had to be loaded with a minimum of $20 worth of ride credits. Meaning that for my family of three to ride the Ferris wheel one time, which should have cost $6, we would be paying $66. Luckily, my little boy is an absolute trooper, and didn’t go into a conniption fit when we told him we weren’t going to do any rides. But seriously, it blew my mind. It seems like companies are just extracting every possible penny from cherished childhood memories. Don’t even get me started on mall Santas haha
My only problem with the cards is there's not a good way to say "I'm waiting in line and want next". I miss just sticking a token or a quarter on the machine to line up. Note, this may have only been applicable for DDR, but it worked, dang it.
Use the card?
I dunno, a quarter or a token isn't a big deal if it gets lost, but if a card has fifty bucks on it its staying on my person at all times. Also, I'm not sure many people still know what it means in the first place lol
You’re standing next to machine anyways, I’ve never seen someone in line fuck off.
In Canada you would use toonies, that’s quite a chunk of change to lose regardless. If there’s enough of a line to justify leaving tokens, the group keeps everyone honest.
Edit or a spare empty card, doesn’t have to be the full one.
Sure, but you also aren't paying super close attention to the DDR cab either if you're in line. You're looking at things around the arcade and maybe pacing around a bit so that you aren't just hovering over the other people playing.
Not only that, but losing a toonie is absolutely not the same as losing $50 on a card. It's an entirely different scale. $50 is far more attractive than $2 to a potential thief
Also, where were you that the machine took toonies? Every arcade I've been in was loonies until they switched to the cards.
How’s the person supposed to know there is even anything on the card…?
$2 is a lot more attractive than a empty piece of plastic mate.
Lots of machines take up to 5 coins, air hockey has always been $2-3.
How’s the person supposed to know there is even anything on the card…?
Because it's an arcade and loading funds is what people do with those cards. Also, those cards are generally accountless, and not tied to any sort of identifying information, so snatching one up and pocketing it is trivial and nobody would give you a second look if you tried using it on another machine.
People use blank cards for this purpose all the time, and if there’s enough people to justify using tokens in a line. No one is gonna be able to grab a card without being noticed. So there’s a very good chance that someone is gonna be caught and get an empty card.
Yeah… that’s mighty tempting eh? If you’re foolish enough to use a loaded card and leave it unattended you kinda deserve it to be honest.
If my card was taken, which would be empty, I would go seek management and they would use the cameras to find the person instantly the only realistic end is the person gets caught with a blank card, gets banned and likely get police involved.
Or would you just stand there dumbfounded instead of dealing with it….? There’s no situation here where the thief gets ahead, they’ll be caught 100% of the time if you are smart enough to seek management….
This is a wonderfully fake situation that’s easily dealt with to get mad at though lmfao.
The other 6 people in line keep an eye too, you can look away for a little bit, but you also use a blank card so nothing is lost.
I’ve never seen someone try and steal the change, why would they be tempted to steal an empty plastic card? Cameras have existed in these places for decades now, you’d have to be extremely dumb to try and steal some petty change when you’re are guaranteed to get caught, banned and likely get the police involved.
If your card was taken you wouldn’t go tell management? They would look at the cameras and deal with it immediately.
Yours inventing scenarios that don’t exist.
Why on earth would you use a loaded card? Ask for a spare, they don’t care, and usually know why you are asking.
People love making stuff up to be mad about.
Quarters/Tokens on the machine was a thing for Marvel vs Capcom as well. Always thought it odd Mortal Kombat and King of Fighters didn't have similar queues.
You would quarter up at every fighting game in my local arcade. Definitely not a Capcom or vs. game only thing.
They should have never gone to them. Arcades should be something you visit with a pocket full of quarters.
Disagree, tokens are fun! I have one from every arcade I've ever been to (and that's what I thought this post was going to be about, taking tokens from arcades) and they all have unique designs and make for great memorabilia.
Plus, logistically, tokens make sense:
-
The arcade can offer bulk discounts (4 per dollar vs 50 for ten dollars)
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The arcade can offer party packages ( I'd rather give my kids' friends a pot of tokens than a wad of cash)
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Tokens reduce the need for cash-on-hand, reducing the risk of theft
But I'm sure the main reason is it's what I was used to when I was a kid and teen.
They arrived when arcade machines started charging more than one quarter per play. They are there to make it easier to spend money, I mean once you bought them, why not spend them all?
I’m old though.
Arcades have to charge more than a quarter per play now due to inflation. The price isn't just you renting the machine for the duration of the play, it's you paying a small slice of the rent on the arcade location, the income of the workers, the maintenance of the machines, and the electricity for the lights, AC/heating, and so on. No arcades would exist today if they could only charge quarters.
Even accounting for inflation arcades should be cheaper.
The compute hardware costs much less and is much more power efficient.
Other power hungry features like lights and displays are both cheaper and more power efficient.
The argument that they still need to be expensive makes so little sense, other than the physical space they occupy.
Have you seen what modern arcade games are like? In order to set themselves apart from consumer hardware you can get at home, modern games have been leaning heavily into unique hardware gimmicks (of course this has always been a thing to an extent ever since Beatmania and DDR, but it's much much much much more of a thing now since these are effectively the only kinds of games that get released in arcades anymore). Which does mean specialized cabinets are more expensive now, and maintenance is a whole can of worms - Wacca at my local Round 1 has had display issues for over a year and I've just assumed it's never getting fixed because Marvelous is no longer servicing parts for it.
Look up how much a Maimai or Chunithm cabinet costs. We've come a long way from the JAMMA era when operators could get new games on the cheap by reusing an old cabinet and just swapping out the PCB.
On top of that, some modern games even require revenue sharing agreements where the operator has to give the publisher a cut of every credit played, which cuts into profit margins even further. I think they literally can't just charge a quarter for some of these games.
FUCK. OFF. I want to put tokens in the slots and hear the token go CLIPINK. It's part of the EXPERIENCE.
Ive tried explaining what arcades were like in the 80s....kids will never understand.
Yeeeeaaaaah. Kids today are just too busy with their skibidi toilet, and their school shooting drills. We didn't have either of those things when I was a kid. You know what we had??? Jurassic Park! And Jurassic Park is awesome!
It'll happen to them too. Kids those days will never understand waiting for the new skibidi
As much as I hate tokens, I hate cards even more.
I hated tokens because it abstracts the cost. Some places - 1 token = 1 quarter. Fair. Others, 10 tokens for $4. What the hell? (Cards do this too)
I also just hate coins in general. Too many times I put a token into a machine for it to not register. Or I have to play the eject & pray method.
There's a lot of arcades where I live. And I only go to the ones where it charges you real money using a credit card, or is unlimited play.
Card-based credits allow the arcade operator to offer finer-grained pricing options than tokens that can only be spent in integer amounts. Whether that's a pro or a con is debatable, they can put less popular games on 'sale' to attract players to try them out, or they can gouge you on the hottest new title. It's also very much a way of obfuscating prices so you don't even realize how much you're spending. And are you really getting the best deal by loading your card with the maximum amount of credits at once so they give you a bonus, or is that just how they get you?
In the grand scheme of things though, I'm a lot less bothered by it than I am by the way modern arcades are mostly just gambling for kids now. At least most arcades still keep a few rhythm games in the back, actually I do love that arcade rhythm games are going through a sort of modern renaissance right now, but that's kinda just the only thing still worth going to an arcade for anymore.
Roxy’s Arcade in Cambridge, MA uses tokens and I don’t see that changing any time soon. I also know a few places in MA with pinball machines that take quarters and I’d be surprised if they changed.
shout out to the galloping ghost in chicago. massive, massive arcade full of vintage cabs, some of them super rare. they charge a door fee so no cards or coins, but if you make a day out of it you're plaging hundreds of dollars of games for like 20 bucks or something. they even have an R360 G-Loc cabinet, although you need to call ahead to make sure they have an extra hand on site to run it. i didn't know you needed to call and when they told me i could come back tomorrow and i mentioned i drove in from out of town, they gave me a free admission card for next time, so very nice people working there too!
I haven't been to one that uses cards, but I would prefer tokens or actual coins over the card. The only arcade near me is a bar arcade, and all of the machines take quarters. I love it.
People are too quick to prioritize convenience and not think about the intangibles. The experience is diminished as we race to the bottom of doing everything as fast and efficiently as possible.
This is why arcades (and many other things) have largely disappeared and with it the benefits of an open social space.
Now you game alone in a room with digital socialization instead
Ugh. That's a bummer.
There's an arcade bar in Dublin city and it's called "Tokens". Great place with a great name and it does use tokens. The putting in of the coins is a visceral part of the arcade experience.
Thats awesome! Id love to go there
Yeah arcade with a few pints is a winning mix tbh. They have a decent number of arcade machines and about 10 or so pinball machines. Good times!
One thing I do like about boop cards rather than physical tokens and paper tickets is that redemption games will never run out of tickets mid-way through paying out a jackpot, and all the attendant can do is refund your token.
That said, I really miss the pavlovian response of the shlunk-CHUNK of the coin falling into the coin box and knowing that fun was about to happen.
Those tokens are unsanitary as all hell. Good riddance.
Everything you touch is "unsanitary as all hell". Like, you think whatever's on tokens stops there and isn't on the machine you're playing, the door handle you're turning, the counter you're touching? In the last hour you've handled shit way worse and you'll handle much more of it before the day's over.
You realize that people carry wipes and wipe the handles before they play lots of machines.
The tokens have ridges, and are their own separate issue since they can hold on to grime and germs, unlike smooth handles, and counters.
Jeeze, use a little critical thinking eh?
Lots of arcades switched over during Covid due to this exact reason, but go off mate.
I have literally never seen someone wipe down an arcade machine in the 5 decades I’ve spent playing video games in public. You just have to assume a kid touched it and it’s covered in snot. But it’s like owning a cat. You just have to not think about it too much.
But yeah…. You’re actually both right. Money is really gross. So is everything else in public, or the world for that matter. It’s why we have immune systems. Can’t just accept that everything has to be gross though, we also need to keep things sanitary. But we can’t clean everything all the time! So how clean is clean enough? Everyone draws that line in a slightly different place.
And so here we are.
The arcades I go to have wipe stations, multiple through out the arcade. Covid made them mandatory.