There are many ways to pay for your arcade experience – quarters, tokens, card readers, etc. and naturally quarters have been the staple for the industry for quite sometime now as we are referred to as the ‘coin-op’ 
industry. But there is a new way for you to pay that was recently seen in Japan and that is through…your cell phone. It might not seem like the likely candidate for such a system at first but seeing how everything else can be done on your phone these days, why not pay for arcade games while you’re at it? The terminals seen by the blog Wired are by Edy and were placed on some Virtua Fighter 5R console at an arcade in Ikebukuro. The system is already supported by all three of Japan’s wireless providers and there are many phones that already have intergrated the technology for use in other services.
As for seeing this system elsewhere, I can only guess as to when it will come around. It depends on how widespread it becomes in other services first but as the writer at the Wired blog points out, it looks like this particular system can be integrated into older cabinets.
[Pay for your arcades by phone – Wired] [Discuss on the Forum]
You’re be lucky to see Virtuas Fighter 5R in a UK arcade, let alone a mobile phone payment system. >_<