This guy wasn't proposing anything as crazy as pay-per-bullet. There's lots of games with limited ammo and you find more in the environment. Even in Doom you might run out of ammo for your favorite gun and need to put it away until you found another ammo pack in the level. This is why Valorant has a knife you can switch to, because if you waste gun ammo you run out on your main weapon. In Fortnite you have to find ammo and weapons in chests, etc. This guy was proposing an option to pay to refill your inventory immediately. But people heard "reload" and assumed something completely different.

The real problem with his proposal is it quickly falls apart if you think about it for even a minute. It's a classic pay-to-win mechanic. And once something is pay-to-win it becomes a slippery slope and a race to the bottom for the game makers. Every game has some amount of edge cases where you're playing only to realize "Damn, I'm out, this sucks. I'd pay a buck right now to refill." But once you add in some options to pay in those scenarios, the game maker has a perverse incentive to no longer make it an edge case. Some PM will realize if they make the rare event 10x more likely they'll make 10x more $$$$ and they're off to the races. They start messing with the ammo drop rates to create "pinch points" and now your super fun game really does require you to be "paying to reload" and it's not fun anymore.

This guy was trying (and failing) to present it as a player benefit but the reality is he know exactly where this road lead. It's the same place EA games with loot boxes landed in the end.

Arcades in the 90s used the countdown clock,more lives type buy in. You bought time, or they would make the game so seriously hard you had to feed it quarters to keep the game going. Paying on an instant 'hey you could use more ammo for 50cents' at a exploitive time is something I am surprised we did not see as a mechanic in arcades. But they probably would have if they had thought of it. But the idea of feed more quarters in to keep playing was most certainly there.

I remember there were arcade games where your health continuously drained and inserting another quarter would heal you. That's worse than a per-bullet price because you were losing even when there were no enemies on the screen. I don't remember the titles because I played those kinds of games exactly once and never again. Total rip off.

It sounds like you're talking about Gauntlet Dark Legacy. I also remember guides about how to leave levels with more health than you entered them (there were ways to regain health). It's hard to single this series out as "a total ripoff" among all kinds of arcade games designed to extract quarters out of you. You can't expect someone to stay on a screen or backtrack forever. Some games use a timer, some throw an endless amount of mobs at you. The nature of the game (which was built in part around exploration) was that they used the health amount as HP + timer.

I don't think that's a thing in arcade games. There are pay to continue in arcades, and pay to win in regulated gambling that are light on gaming aspect, but never seen one in arcades.

Maybe it's similar to how there are "Dungeons and Something" || "Something and Dragons" but somehow never both?

This was my impression: running out of ammo leads to death leads to paying for continue credits.