Oh, you mean that video, about blind boxes and gachapon.

Seen that one as well, really absurd to see that channel promote “healing your inner child”, by buying into something that feels like an amalgam of lootboxes, that ruined online games, and Funko-pops, which cannibalised physical game stores. I read through the comments many times to maybe understand, but it seems few people actually care about the gambling addicts there as well.

I’ve never played any of those games myself, but here’s what I have gathered from a video essay:

You just begin to play it somehow, you get introduced to the Gacha mechanics, and then it’s one of 2 ways: Either you spend a lot of money in the game because they are literally designed like Casinos to fuel your gambling addiction, like clouding your judgement how much a round of gambling is actually worth with many in game currencies.

Or you spend time in the game to grind premium resources, and your brain rewards you for it with the thought “at least I’m not spending money”, not realizing that the house developer also wins if you do that. An example i giving rewards for players who write strategy guides, something they otherwise would have to pay real money to a developer for.

We really have to hate more on those regulators who failed to protect gambling addicts from candy crush on crack.

Online subscription models, gacha and AAAA price tag games.

Not everyone wants to be a cybercriminal, god knows I’m one of them, but almost every person already has a backlog of games, an old classic that they want to experience again or community favourite that has gotten a lot of mods. Those are all free. And even if you want to spend money on something, why would you spend it on this year’s hyped up game when last year’s is still just as playable and at a discount?

That being said, I did buy Balatro full price, so I ought to know the answer.

In the past, I always felt good about never being on Twitter, considering how much people complained about it on Mastodon.

And then I realized I instead visited Reddit daily. To maintain my perceived superiority, I had to quit that and ended up here.