[Reedx]

> I beg to differ. Most of the arcade games of yore were gated on skill; you could avoid having to pop in another quarter if you played well enough, and that was where the fun came from.

Sure, but that's a rather charitable way to describe it. What you're talking about is basically breaking or mastering the system by sheer force of will. And there is fun in that. But how much did it cost you to get to the point where you were able to play longer than a few minutes?

Arcade games were specifically designed to extract as many quarters as possible from players. That was the stated goal. If a game wasn't able to extract N quarters per hour, it didn't last long.

[ThrowawayR2]

> What you're talking about is basically breaking or mastering the system by sheer force of will. And there is fun in that. But how much did it cost you to get to the point where you were able to play longer than a few minutes?

Ah, but how is that different from, say, swimming, golf, tennis, or racing where one must rent a course or court in order to practice their skill? Yes, arcade games weren't called quarter munchers for nothing but, for the most part, they offered a reasonably fair deal.

In contrast, there's no analogy to be made between those sports and loot-box based game. One doesn't toss money into a sports equipment store until one randomly gets a drastically better golf club.