How to bring the coin-operated arcade machine experience to home game consoles. Save your quarters!

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Background:

In the ancient times of “video arcades,” progress in a game was partially limited by the number of quarters in a player’s pocket. Certain arcade games were often theoretically winnable by anyone, as long as that person was willing to spend $100+ on the attempt.

The Issue:

After home consoles killed the video arcade, this style of payment-gated gaming was temporarily extinct. But with the rise of mobile phones, the “insert a coin to progress” approach to gaming (e.g. “Pay $5 for 500 gems!”) has become the most popular method of monetization.

Essentially all of the most profitable games today are “free” with extensive options for in-app purchases*, ranging from totally fair to extremely psychologically manipulative!

[*] These were initially referred to as “micro-transactions,” but they’re often in the $5–$20 range, which isn’t especially “micro.”

Notably, in-app purchases are very “low-friction”: they typically just require a tap of a button (and ZERO rummaging through pockets for coins).

Proposal:

Let’s bring back the tactile element of inserting a quarter into an arcade machine, but for the home market.

This could actually be beneficial to players: it can be easy to spend hours at a time playing a game without even realizing it. It would be much MORE obvious how much time had elapsed if the player had to insert a coin into their console (see Figure 1) every few minutes.

Fig. 1: A mockup of how a game console might approximate the full experience of playing an old arcade game. It’s unclear whether the coins would later be automatically returned to the player, or if some sort of evil gaming consortium would go door-to-door to periodically collect these coins.

Addressing the Mobile Phone Market:

It’s unclear whether people would accept a giant coin collector bolted onto their cell phones, just to facilitate playing mobile games. Some alternate approach might be needed to support the lucrative mobile-gaming market.

PROS: Provides an income stream to game developers AND allows gamers to easily exercise self-control. What’s not to love?

CONS: May make the controller extraordinarily heavy and non-ergonomic once it is filled with like $200 in loose coins. It’s also possible that coins will be completely removed from circulation in the semi-near future.

Originally published 2026-08-03.