The same arguments could apply to physical card packs (e.g. MtG cards) sold at tabletop gaming stores. Yet nobody seems to mind there?
Essentially, it's a matter of practicality and extent of impact on the public. Industry regulation with regards to some widespread practice is usually the final step of an extended period of failure to self-regulate [the practice that is producing some undesired side-effect].
Consequently, this limits the "whale effect"--even the most expensive decks of cards in "Standard" tops out at about $1200 ($20 times 60 cards), and generally MUCH less than that gets you championship level decks.
If the ONLY way to get an MtG card that was required to compete was to open $200 boxes over and over and over, I suspect that people WOULD start complaining.
Most of the "skinner box" games explicitly prevent you from being able to buy specific cards precisely to keep you on the hamster wheel.
My parents minded very much.
Basically my point is this: it can be perfectly reasonable to allow one form of gambling-like transactions where it is easy to ensure that the house is playing fair while outlawing a superficially similar one were making sure that the house is not cheating would require enormous regulations and oversight efforts.
Ps: Also, a manipulative pretend-random drop function could easily be made to adhere to defined overall droprates without sacrificing any individual manipulation. Detecting "bad luck" that only strikes when the system detects willingness to keep rolling the dice until some local goal is achieved would not be easy even with a complete dataset.
However for the second point, given what I know about programming as a discipline, I'm not sure that the probable bad actors have gone through a lot of effort to hide their gaming of the system, or that if they have made the effort to make said function that it actually works as envisioned and does not leave its own telltale traces.
I have vague memories of reading about this kind of dark pattern when I first heard about loot boxes, but I failed to google any references now so maybe my memories are diluted with imagination.
But why wouldn't it happen? How would the public find out? Tipping the scales just a little bit, at the right times, for the right victims, could be very effective at "increasing engagement". The whole thing would even be a/b-testable, so any internal arguments against would be futile. (You'd want to keep the "a" implementation around anyways, in case you need to present source to someone who should not see how the sausage is made)
I'd expect that's part of the point of regulating something that appears to be gambling as gambling, to ensure that it is, at least, fair (for some definition of that word).
Ummmm, they call Magic the Gathering "cardboard crack" for a reason ...
Some mobile game companies do billions per year. That kind of sales attract regulatory attention.
https://investor.hasbro.com/news-releases/news-release-detai...
And then you possibly don't realize how much you've spent, because unlike real cards, digital ones don't pile up.
It's definitely different.
as long as you aren't hiding game changing content in loot boxes (ie. all skins or something) I think they are perfectly fine.