GTA Online Arcade Guide: Income and the Casino Heist

The GTA Online arcade is a two-in-one property: a passive income business that quietly fills a wall safe while you play, and the front-of-house planning hub for the Diamond Casino Heist. Rockstar added arcades in The Diamond Casino Heist update on December 12, 2019, and the property has stayed one of the most recommended early purchases ever since. This guide breaks down arcade prices, machine income, and how the basement turns into a heist command center.

What the GTA Online Arcade Business Is

An arcade is a retro-styled storefront that acts as a legitimate cover for criminal planning. The ground floor holds playable cabinet machines that generate passive cash, while a hidden basement (reached from the back office, where Lester reprograms a fortune-teller machine to reveal the staircase) houses the Diamond Casino Heist planning board and equipment storage.

You buy an arcade from the Maze Bank Foreclosures website in six locations. Owning any one of them unlocks the heist, so the cheapest option works exactly as well as the most expensive for that purpose. The differences between properties are price, look, and how close the building sits to the Diamond Casino and your other businesses.

Arcade Locations and Prices

There are six arcade properties, ranging from just over $1.2 million to roughly $2.53 million:

• Pixel Pete's (Paleto Bay) - $1,235,000 (cheapest)
• Wonderama (Grapeseed) - $1,565,000
• Videogeddon (La Mesa) - $1,875,000
• Warehouse (Davis) - $2,135,000
• Insert Coin (Rockford Hills) - $2,345,000
• Eight-Bit (Vinewood) - $2,530,000

If you only care about the heist, Pixel Pete's is the bargain pick. If you plan to live out of the property and run errands between the casino and the city, La Mesa's Videogeddon is the popular middle-ground for its central position. You can browse the wider GTA Online catalog of properties and vehicles on our GTA Online hub.

Arcade Machine Income Explained

The arcade business earns money through the cabinet machines you place on the floor. Income is passive: it accrues while you are online doing other things and drops into a wall safe in the back office for you to collect by hand.

The numbers that matter:

• Maximum passive income is $5,000 per in-game day. One in-game day lasts 48 real-time minutes.
• The wall safe holds a maximum of $100,000 before it stops accumulating, so empty it regularly.
• The cheapest cabinet (Monkey's Paradise) costs $90,000. You do not need the priciest machines to hit the cap.

To reach the full $5,000 per day, you need to fill every floor slot with a working machine. More cabinets mean higher earnings up to that ceiling, after which extra machines are purely cosmetic for income purposes. At the cap, the safe fills from empty to $100,000 across roughly 20 in-game days, so realistic collection means swinging by every few sessions.

The Arcade as a Diamond Casino Heist Hub

The arcade's headline feature is hosting the Diamond Casino Heist, one of the highest-paying heists in the game. Inside the basement you get a full planning area:

• A heist planning board where you choose your approach (Silent and Sneaky, The Big Con, or Aggressive), scope out access points, and pick your crew.
• Practice setups for skills like keypad hacking and fingerprint cloning so you are ready inside the casino vault.
• Storage for getaway vehicles and equipment gathered during the prep missions.

The first time you set up the heist there is no planning fee. Restarting the heist after a completed run costs $25,000 to re-plan. Because the take from the Diamond Casino Heist can run into the millions, that planning fee is a small fraction of a successful payout.

Upgrades Worth Knowing About

Arcade upgrades are bought from the in-game Pixel Emporium laptop and split into cosmetic and functional categories. Two functional add-ons stand out:

• Master Control Terminal - $1,740,000. This lets you launch missions and manage your other businesses (such as MC operations, special cargo, and nightclubs) from one screen in the arcade basement, saving travel time across the map.
• Drone Station - $1,460,000. Adds remote nano-drones you can pilot around the city.

Neither upgrade is required to run the heist, so treat them as quality-of-life purchases once your core money-makers are profitable. You can pair arcade income with other GTA Online money methods, and if you want a head start, see our GTA Online cheats page.

Is the Arcade Worth It?

For most players, yes. The arcade pays for itself slowly through machine income, but its real value is access to the Diamond Casino Heist, which can return far more in a single run than the property costs to buy. Treat the $5,000-per-day machine income as a steady drip on top of the heist, not the main attraction. Buy the cheapest location (Pixel Pete's) if budget is tight, or a central one like Videogeddon if you want a convenient base. For a visual tour of the interior and the heist board, our GTA Online screenshots gallery shows the property in action.

Sources

• Arcades - GTA Wiki (Fandom)
• The Diamond Casino Heist - GTA Wiki (Fandom)
• GTA Online Arcade Properties: All Locations, Prices and Upgrades - GTABase
• GTA Online: Best Arcade to Buy and How to Start the Diamond Casino Heist - Push Square
• GTA Online Arcade income: What to know - Sportskeeda
• The Diamond Casino Heist Coming December 12th - Rockstar Newswire