If you love the idea of playing classic arcade games, but don’t want to be tied down to just a single machine, you could always build a MAME cabinet. But that doesn’t give you the exact controls and screen of the original machine. If you’re an arcade purist, you need to play on the actual machines.
But if you’re like me, you don’t have the money or space to dedicate to dozens of arcade machines in your home. Well, assuming this new service takes off, you may soon be able to play different arcade machines all the time, using a model similar to Netflix or GameFly.
With All You Can Arcade, you can keep arcade machines in your house for a rental fee of $75 a month each, or you can trade them in whenever you feel like it for another machine. Renters can select to keep 1, 2 or 3 games at a time. The site provides not only geotargeted listings of available machines, but tools for arcade machine owners to manage their rentals and deliveries.
The site charges no delivery or pickup fees to renters. Arcade machine owners keep 75% of all rental fees to cover the cost of the machines and their costs. While I’m not certain there’s a ton of money to be made, there’s definitely an opportunity for arcade machine owners to earn a little extra money from their machines – as long as they can handle the local pick-ups and deliveries without too much expense.
At this point, the service is launching with a number of games available for delivery and pick-up in the San Francisco and Sacramento, California areas, but hopes to expand to other areas in the future.
