The relationship with an arcade game is explicit and up-front: You put coins in to play, and you put more coins in to continue when you lose. If you were good,

The relationship with an arcade game is explicit and up-front: You put coins in to play, and you put more coins in to continue when you lose. If you were good, pretty much every arcade game out there could be completed on one credit. It wasn't terribly unusual for someone to get good enough to do that. F2P games just extract money from you randomly, repeatedly, indefinitely. Completion without payment is no longer a matter of skill; in many cases skill has zero bearing on how much a F2P game costs to play. Instead, they charge you money and to avoid paying, playing the game is dragged out in time, filled with more tedious repetition and grinding, or you have to wait 48 hours between actions instead of a handful of minutes. The developers know that nobody wants to wait 48 hours between actions in a city-building/dungeon-building game, and that nobody wants to plant and harvest the same crop a zillion times before buying a single upgrade, so they use those unattractive barriers as a lever to get you to spend money. Also, as a rather significant difference: For an arcade game to be successful they had to make it as appealing as possible and have lots of replay value, so you'd keep coming back and pumping quarters in to get better. They also needed a good skill curve, so it would take as long as possible before you got good enough to complete it on one quarter. And they wanted it to be fun enough that you'd still want to play even once you 'mastered' it in that fashion. In comparison, F2P games are designed around the assumption that players will quickly grow bored with them, and that many players will never like the game enough to spend money. They tune it all around averages and sums, around trying to extract as much money as possible out of the people who do pay, as quickly as possible and for as long as possible until those people quit playing too. F2P games are not built around dedicated, satisfied players.