Yes, people can be addicted to anything, but that's a false equivalence. Debilitating addiction to video games is incredibly rare in comparison to gambling, and someone addicted to video games isn't normally going to lose their life's savings. We're comparing cigarettes and potato chips.

Further, gambling is essentially a zero-sum game. The house always wins, equal to how much you lose, and pretty much every gambler loses besides the one or two rare examples who strike a jackpot the first time they ever play and then never gamble again. In contrast, buying a video game is a transactions both parties are normally expected to benefit from equally, and a video game's single player mode is expected to last at least 10 hours at a minimum nowadays not counting online play that lasts essentially as long as you want, while gambling machines need a constant input of money that adds up to much more over time. Even comparing to coin-based arcade machines, a session on one of those will last much longer for the price, and even in the microtransactions that have become common nowadays you at least end up with something more than the screen flashing some bright lights for a few seconds. So overall on this point, it seems to me like a gambling establishment is necessarily exploitative while a video game publisher isn't.