Almost 19% of Japanese people in their 20s have spent so much money on gacha they struggled with covering living expenses, survey reveals - AUTOMATON WEST
I had an argument with a guy who was in a shared friend's discord server about this. He was adamant that, if somebody spent too much money on a game, then it was all their fault. Despite me going over several (clearly manipulative) tactics, all he said was that people who fell for these must be stupid and that they deserved it
Yeah later on he was kicked because of other (Similarly dickish) reasons
And if we were all smart people we would have far less laws. Sometimes laws protect us from ourselves. Anyone who has experience with addiction knows how hard it is to just stop. Instead of blaming people for their inability to stop we should emphatize and understand that this needs an intervention. If these predatory practices were illegal those people wouldn't need to stop themselves because they wouldn't be put in that situation in the first place.
Regulation of predatory practice. Taxation on the games to pay for rehab and support services for people that experience negative effects from it. It's really easy to do, but every single gambling operation gets the big bucks from the heavily addicted. The whales are the entire business.
These gacha companies pay ridiculous amounts of money for psych profile info specifically to target vulnerable individuals, yet individuals don't have that same kind of access or understanding