Yeah ... except the whole video game gambling is fine-tuned and relentless in its pursuit to prey upon the vulnerabilities and blind-sights of the very exploitable. It is an addiction machine fishing for kids to enthrall.
By all means educate your kids, but also make sure to protect them at their most vulnerable against an 'opponent' in a very uneven playing field.
As for your comparison to trading card game boosters: sure, there are some dimensions of the experience that are similar. Varying rarity and desirability of items contained in a purchased container that does not reveal its content until after purchase. There are also things that are vastly different. There are things like the virtualization of the transaction (spending online virtual coins, even though you purchased them with real money has been proven to be psychologically very different from a cash transaction), the sensory stimuli that are build into the opening rituals (real card packs at most can optimize the tearing experience and the smell of the freshly opened pack, which they do btw) which makes it a very different matter.
Sometimes there are real grey zones when it comes to the balance of overprotectiveness vs predation. It is not because the delineation can't be made extremely precise that we can't identify that some things are clearly outside of the acceptable middle.
IMHO lootboxes do not fall into this grey area, and are clearly a predatory mechanism that the most vulnerable should be prevented from having to be in a perpetual armsrace against.
It's not just virtual currencies, it's permanence and tradability, kids don't just buy booster packs and take what they can get, they trade cards in complex ways, in some cases gift them to friends who wants to play, and the stack of cards is a visual representation of how much you've spent, whereas in some games, PUBG Mobile for example, your cosmetics literally disappear after a fixed time and if you have many duplicates of a common item, you can trade them, but only for the in game currency that can only buy the cheapest forms of crates.
Also, depending on the platform kids can spend their parents money with no oversight if their parents don't understand how in app payments work, whereas most parents would never send their small child to a store with their credit card unsupervised.
Items disappearing takes this scummy business model to a whole new depth of viciousness.
A few years ago i wanted to get my young sons a Disney Cars game to play on my iPad. There was a new one available, it was very pretty, but reasonable progress in the game depended on building your town using coins, and every single building you placed, had a timer counting down until it would disappear.
I don’t like wishing ill on other people, but it’s very hard to think kindly towards whomever designs games like that.
Obviously I immediately uninstalled the game before showing it to my boys. Zero dollars for Disney. If they’d just put a price tag on the whole experience, even if it had been quite high, I would have paid it.
By all means educate your kids, but also make sure to protect them at their most vulnerable against an 'opponent' in a very uneven playing field.
As for your comparison to trading card game boosters: sure, there are some dimensions of the experience that are similar. Varying rarity and desirability of items contained in a purchased container that does not reveal its content until after purchase. There are also things that are vastly different. There are things like the virtualization of the transaction (spending online virtual coins, even though you purchased them with real money has been proven to be psychologically very different from a cash transaction), the sensory stimuli that are build into the opening rituals (real card packs at most can optimize the tearing experience and the smell of the freshly opened pack, which they do btw) which makes it a very different matter.
Sometimes there are real grey zones when it comes to the balance of overprotectiveness vs predation. It is not because the delineation can't be made extremely precise that we can't identify that some things are clearly outside of the acceptable middle.
IMHO lootboxes do not fall into this grey area, and are clearly a predatory mechanism that the most vulnerable should be prevented from having to be in a perpetual armsrace against.