PenguinTD

You do realize that there are much worse scams irl for adults than gacha games right?

Unfortunately, human do learn "better" through experience (subject to personal trait that falls under a statistic distribution), and because of that a

• shit I should've saved the money used for 20/40/60 dollar cosmetics/passes/event only unlocks for this new game that I really wanted

is much much better than

• my [insert close relatives] maxed out my card now I am [insert big number] in debt.
• shit I bought a [insert expensive big ticket item] and I can't afford to pay the monthly now, what can I do? (just go check any financial help forum)
• insert that many other scams you can find common popped in forum that cost from hundreds to 100k+( cue people dump their retirement money into crypto )

I could afford to let my kid learn opportunity cost using the mtx, or dollar store toys, actual gacha eggs, etc once I start to let them handle their own allowance. They could also learn a bunch of marketing strategy that applies to them to make them dump allowance when talking with me later requesting to get more money to buy whatever they currently wanted. I'd rather spend that money as learning cost, than whatever forbidden method and then when they started working they dump their entire paycheck on those or even more expensive stuff because the sales convinced that they "can".

So yes, fuck them kids, let them stumble when they are short, let them trip to learn to pay attention on the road, let them whine for a month why they can't get extra to buy skin or whatever latest and greatest trending shit that some of their friends have because their physical or virtual piggy bank is empty. Fuck them with all the tricks at much smaller scale and let them learn from it.

There are much worse real life scam traps than the couple dozen or hundreds dollars worth of mtx (if your kid has that much allowance on their device.)

If he only have 20 a month he would have to come up with strategy to get what he wanted and then if he wants extra he has to work for it.

Your analogy would be like give your kid access to your bank accounts and CC without check. Learning opportunity cost without limited resource is a poor example.

Honestly, I think it's a good tool for parents (that cares) teach good financial habits from early age. It might even teach parents themselves better financial habits cause a lot of our economics are based on impulse buying behavior. (whether the impulse is generated by superficial, seasonal, compare to Jones, sales and promotions, government rebates, etc. )

If we follow the train of thoughts and going backwards, any "feel good" purchases should not exist and it's an abuse to the consumer. ie. why should you buy a game the torture you for hours with difficult bosses, put you through lots of stress, agony, twisted plots that might make you cry or angry and then you get absolutely nothing you can hold on to except for those "experience" itself. Your console breaks, disk scratched, save file lost, etc and everything would be gone except whatever that's left in your memory.

Why do you buy [insert brand name] shirts, tie, shoes, jacket, blah? This literally extends everywhere.

Let those gacha, impossibly time limited events, all be life lessons. You simply can't get everything, your time and resource are limited, it take special kind of people and dedication(both mentally, physically and financially) to get what they can do. You can't be lucky enough to be a billionaire heir or oil princess? well, too bad, learn to accept reality, just like learning not everyone can make the cut to sports pro-league even if they dedicated their life training for it, genetics decides a lot of factors for that, same for e-sports.

If you can't even bother to teach your children those, well, maybe it's also hard to ask you to review your life decisions.

Once my son is old enough to do basic financial decisions with allowance, I will just let him decide if he wants to use that to buy snacks he liked or whatever in-game currency he wanted. Just like we can't all afford a Ferrari or [insert expensive car], we compromise and make decisions to make us survive and then be happy enough to keep going.