Capcom is releasing "Capcom Arcade" for the iPhone:

Capcom Arcade will be free to download and initially contain four games: Street Fighter II, Ghouls 'n Ghosts, Commando, and 1942. The plan is to add at least one new game every month to fill up the arcade, and there are several different ways to go about playing the games contained within. Every day you'll receive a ticket that is good for a limited number of free plays for whatever games you choose. The final number has yet to be finalized, but will likely be between 3 and 5 free plays per day, though the unused ones won't carry over to the next day. If you run out of free plays but would like to continue playing, you can visit a young lady at the cashier counter and buy tokens as in-app purchases. Finally, you can also choose to flat out purchase any of the arcade games for unlimited play.

So you basicly get the games free untill you want to play more... then you can buy tokens or the entire cabinet.. What do you guys think? Will this business model with the old arcade games carry over to maybe a 3DS? or PSN & Live? Clearly Capcom is testing this model on the iOS devices...

To play Commando with arrow keys on a touch screen.

The idea with Arcade is cool though.

With a large enough library I can see many people just switching between games after their 3 play limit is up and never purchasing something.

I could see working on consoles. Because this is exactly how Xbox Live's Game Room works.

It's an interesting idea. I can certainly see it working for arcade games.

I wonder if it could be made to work with other games, like say your typical 10-hour adventure game. 1st hour is a free demo, and from there you can pass, buy a single playthrough for a reasonable fee, or buy the full game and play as much as you like. The publishers could basically hijack the rental market for their games.

If you purchase more "tokens," do those tokens carry over to following days? Or do the tokens you pay for disappear the next day as well?

Anyways this was quite a brilliant idea.