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Some arcade games were much worse than others, some of them were basically on a timer, draining your health the entire time so no matter how well you played you'd have to keep dropping quarters in to continue. There were also games that outright cheated in terms of difficulty to extract more money from players. I avoided those kinds of games, but some kids were hooked on them.

The difference is that even the worst arcade games were only a problem for the limited time you spent in the arcade. They weren't sitting in your pocket 24/7 sending you notifications begging you to get back to the game or leaving constant threats that you're missing out on something. Arcade games had only a single currency, quarters or tokens, and those could be freely exchanged and never expired. You didn't need 30 tokens to play, while the arcade would only sell you tokens in a non-refundable pack of 50, but that sort of scam is commonplace in mobile titles. The arcade games weren't collecting massive amounts of your personal data and selling it to data brokers either.

Mobile games are so much more abusive than even the most exploitative arcade games were and people weren't happy about constantly plugging quarters into the arcade games either! That's a large part of why the console market took off. Sadly, it seems like we're coming full circle and even major console titles now sometimes look (and act) like shitty free to play mobile games.