I disagree, arcades were far more expensive per hour for the vast majority of people ("Just one more quarter and I'll win"), even at prices of games back then. They were also much more addictive, consisting of short simple challenges and playthroughs but with a high difficulty curved. They were 100% engineered to get a player addicted.

With today's prices you can buy an average game on sale for like 30 attempts (25 cents is the 80's is nearly a dollar today).

You could easily bankrupt yourself from it, hell there's even a SpongeBob episode about it.

Also once you had the ability to save, you could turn it off and walk away without losing your current attempt.