If the consumer wants this, let them eat EA's anal grease. The rest of us can vote with our wallets. Regulation takes that choice away, treating us all like children who can't be trusted to make informed decisions.

Yeah, pretty much that.

You apparently missed one point. Companies hire people with deep knowledge of psychology and psychiatry to make people with addictive personality to get attached and go on excessive spending spree. They just teaching developers how to exploit a human weakness.
If in real life you'll find some senile granny, talk her into gifting some of her property to you and maybe even pour some substance in tea to make her more pliable and your clever little scheme will be uncovered - you'll go to jail. Even if you didn't do any physical harm and not even a single threat. Con artists don't hurt their victims, except financially, they don't force anyone into giving them money and yet it's illegal and punishable by law in all countries.

And that's exactly what those companies do. It's far worse than real casino - there you at least have a small chance of winning something. Yes, it's done so you'll get into playing more to win even more, hook, line and sinker but you can win and stop. In those games it's virtual some items that have no real value. And MaceyNeil described everything that's wrong with that little scheme, it's much more that people just getting addicted and spending too much.

As for market regulation - there are no real "free market" - everything is strictly regulated, a lot of do and don'ts everywhere. Like antitrust laws. Those aren't very efficient but they do exist and giants like Microsoft, Google and Apple got hit by those multiple times and paid some big fines. Imagine - you're a big company but you can't just easily buy every other company to create a monopoly and launch prices high into space. It's just illegal.

And if EA and others run casinos with elements of sports simulators they must be regulated as those (18+ or 21+ depending on the countries, limits on advertisements, and same taxes as real life casinos.
And what will it mean for us gamers? It will be waaay less profitable to make games (or "games") like that because of age limitations and much higher taxes so they will have to to go back to square one - start making high quality games with good gameplay to make people to buy them and just get less greedy. It will be better for us. And if some publisher will go bankrupt because they forgot how to do things like that... well... RIP, it won't be missed.

Some can bring f2p argument. Even f2p existed before that mechanics - games were funded by premium packages with experience boosts for a month for example and microtransactions with costumes, without any chance mechanics, without even abilty to buy ingame currency or any items that alter gameplay to make game really pay to win. And guess what - those games were profitable with just that. Also for pay to play MMOs were profitable too - 10 bucks a month and that's it. There's no excuse for the greed of current companies. They just do because they still can make money out of extra pure vacuum. Not even air.

Yea, I would like to second the right honorable Lesser Blight Elemental. Being a clueless asshat might not be a good thing, but it is a basic human right. Freedom to only do smart things, or what some group considers smart things, is no freedom at all.

That said, calling people out on being clueless asshats is also a basic freedom our founding gamer nerds fought for!

Well I am still playing Blizzard games at the moment. I am playing Classic WOW while at hte same time playing Live WOW, I just bought the expansion Shadowlands.

I play Overwatch and Heroes of the Storm from the time to time, but I only payed for ONE Loot Box from Overwatch and have not spend another one since then. I've unlocked a lot of things from both games by just playing as is.

I have never once payed real money for Hearthstone Cards.

What argument is that?
"F2P" doesn't mean much. If you make a 5 minute demo, with a "pay to unlock the rest of the game" button... that's technically speaking "F2P". (just an example)

I meant when people defend insanely greedy 90% pay to win gacha games. "But you can play for free".
For as long as i don't like roulette mechanics in the games even gacha games can be very different. I remember one where you couldn't even buy ingame currency and while they had a roulette the maximum token package was about $5 and that gave you 40 attempts and the maximum amount of those packages you could buy was 5 a week while non-paying players were getting 80 per week for free. Not to mention that they made system so generous that even 5 spins were giving you 40% chance of getting high end item. so with $5 you were guaranteed to get if not exactly what you wanted then something else equally good, duplicates after reaching maximum item level were running another free attempt again and again (10 times was enough) till you were getting a new item.

And when someone asked developers on facebook why limit is so low they replied "We need your money to run the game and improve it, but we don't need your LAST money, we belive that it's better when 100000 people pay a dollar each than one person will spend 100000. Especially if that person will a child who got access to his mom's or dad's phone. And we want people who play for free to enjoy our game that's why they only advantage paying players get is getting items they want slightly faster". Gacha game developer that doesn't want you to spend more than $100/month in the game. Maybe it's a space-time continuum anomaly and they are from a parallel universe?

Very different from most other gacha games with their $70-200 packages and 70% chance to get a common duplicate, 20% chance of getting mid tier duplicate and 9% chance to get some new common item and 1% or less - something good and new.

Especially when you hear about that recent $70 NBA2K1 gacha debacle where developers "forgot" to add new rare item for 30 minutes or so after its supposed release and people were trying to get it. They were saying that it was a mistake. Yeah... suure...