As I child wandering through the arcade with my meager dollar's worth of quarters trying to decide exactly which combination of machines would give me the maximum play value, I always wished I had the money to just play any machine I wanted and to play all the way to the end. That's why I was so enamored when I heard about the Las Vegas GameWorks arcade's unlimited play cards, which allow you infinite credits for a limited amount of time. I figured I could buy a two hour card, split credits with a friend, and knock out all the new light-gun games and some of my old favorites in one afternoon.
I hadn't considered that everybody else might have the same idea. It takes a while to find a machine at GameWorks; you either have to search and settle or wait in unenforceable lines for the people ahead of you to finish their game. Everybody's playing until the end. Each machine is occupied at lengths of about twenty or thirty minutes and then open for sixty seconds max until somebody else in the always-crowded locale jumps on for another thirty-minute playthrough. Every time I've been there I've seen at least one frustrated parent scowling at their kid to “play something!” They don't grasp that pretty much all the good games, and invariably all the ones you personally want to play, are occupied.
The ability to just play virtually any machine in the arcades of my childhood was a quality I took entirely for granted until I experienced hustling for open machines at GameWorks. It made me appreciate how the economy of the classic arcade invisibly kept players moving and machines open, and how the unlimited play system unexpectedly changes that behavior.
Consider the continue screen: the game's way of saying “fork over more money or clear the machine.” You pull a quarter out of your pocket and weigh your options. Discounting the billions of other things you could spend your money on, another quarter in this machine is one less in another. This game is trying its best to keep you from moving on, but all the other cabinets are screaming at you from their side art and attract screens to do just that.
A good arcade provides the most diverse mix of gaming experiences anywhere; you can jump between different novelties instantaneously. You've been enjoying this game with twin sticks…but that machine has a trackball. Or a lightgun. Or a sit-down motorcycle. And let's face it, you're just going to die more often as you advance to the higher levels in this game. With every quarter you spend on a machine, the novelty wears off and the cost increases. Perhaps you'd get more value starting an entirely different one.
If it's the concept of value that keeps players moving and machines open under the quarter system, that same concept of value encourages players to camp at machines under the unlimited play system.
Costs stay low and remain constant at all points in the game; every time you continue, you lose only the time you still keep playing. Similarly, there's no incentive to play harder and more efficiently to avoid death. This leads players to play longer, making for fewer available machines. This means fewer available novelties to lure you away from the game you're playing now, which compounds the effect.
This behavior is further compounded by the sunk cost fallacy, which leads to players irrationally trying to “get their money's worth” after buying the nonrefundable card. I have personally experienced all of these:
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Playing the most expensive machines instead of your favorites, increasing demand and waits for the newer and more extravagant machines that higher credit prices would otherwise regulate.
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Staying until your card runs out of time when you would otherwise leave, leading to more crowding.
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Continuing to play one game when you would enjoy yourself more overall waiting for and playing another; you paid for a full hour, and you can't waste time waiting for another machine.
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Similarly, playing a machine you waited for when you'd have more fun moving on: you waited twenty minutes to play this one, so you're not going to give it up in ten.
None of these pressures exist under the quarter system (save for the last, with reduced average waits) because there's no money down; you make your spending decisions at every continue screen. All of them lead to playing individual machines longer, which further reduces the incentive to try to move on. It snowballs.
Also, a lot of people have probably just wanted to see how Time Crisis ends since the 5th grade.
Now, I'm not saying that the unlimited play system is a good or a bad thing. It's a trade-off; sure, it's a bigger pain to get the machine you want, but when you do, you get to play it in its entirety for as long as you'd like. It's not bad for GameWorks that every machine is constantly mobbed, nor for the cabinet manufacturers who sell to them. It's just a weird, unforeseen-yet-obvious-in-retrospect quirk of arcade economics: Under either system, it turns out that the only way you can play to the end of the game is if everybody else can't.