>>718643351
Home consoles were cheaper and there was multiple recessions from their peak to now where a Quarter has drastically dropped in value. The costs to making an arcade machine has also drastically went down since many will replace old machines with Raspberry PIs and emulation, even the Pi Zero.

A Quarter in the 80s would be worth 1 USD today. This leads to most machines being made to milk quarters since there is a limited amount of customers, which leads to prize machines being the most outspoken and arcades focusing on prizes.