The Arcade genre style of gameplay is associated with Arcade games is due to the environment of the Arcade, where the player is essentially renting the game for as long as their in-game avatar can stay alive. These games usually have a specific goal to progress in the game, such as aquiring a set number of boxes. There are obstacles which will kill the in-game avatar while it tries to achieve the goal (such as the ghosts in PacMan).

The sub-genre of Arcade Shooters is distictively different from Action Shooters in the fact that the enviroment moves around the player, instead of the player investigating the enviroment. It has moving targets and can require high lever skill depending on the difficulty. One such game series is House of the Dead.

Today's arcade games have found a niche in games that create a more socially-oriented hangout, with games that focus on an individual's performance, rather than the game's content, as the primary form of novelty. Examples of today's popular genres are rhythm games such as Dance Dance Revolution and DrumMania, and rail shooters such as Virtua Cop, and Time Crisis.