The strangest part of this - winning is literally impossible, right? They buy chips in the game, but there's no way to turn them back into money...
And the precedent has been set when it comes to these kinds of monetization strategies. It has been normalized by FIFA, Overwatch, Clash of Clans, and every other game that has MTX of some sort.
We can even point blame at the XBox game store for this, for being early to the "abstracting the currency you're spending from real currency" race.
All these casino games are doing is sliding down the slippery slope already carved by these other industry giants.
“It’s like living in Los Vegas”
Hmm now here is an idea. It’s not quite like living in Las Vegas because people that do that are regularly converting to physical goods for life essentials, they’re eating and getting a roof etc. Maybe these guys should build a town where you can redeem for lodging and food etc, then I’m in.
I posit that they'll simply carry around the "cashout" tickets, and scan them back into the system the next time they visit the casino. I hypothesize that they rarely, if ever, actually cash out.
I'm actually at a point of disbelief. I simply don't believe that gamblers spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a game they know will never make them any money. I'm open to the idea, but it certainly strains credulity. Why? Why would anyone do that? What would even drive one to do that?
It's addiction, it isn't rational.
You pay for the dopamine hit you get when you "win." The money - in real gambling - is a nice bonus.
But it's the hope of a neurotransmitter cascade in the brain that's really in charge.
See variable reinforcement schedules: https://allpsych.com/psychology101/learning/reinforcement/
My non-cynical take: gambling addiction seems pretty prevalent in at least American society and this is just the market responding to those conditions.
You can't really launder money through an app that offers no way to get money back out of it.
If there were a way to "gift" coins to people, which would allow them to be sold on sites like eBay, then you could launder money, because you'd be able to buy coins from Big Fish, and sell them elsewhere at a discount. You'd lose money on the flip but then, when you launder money, you always lose some portion of it (often quite a large portion).
(I don't know enough about these apps to know whether that's an option or not, but I suspect not.)
The only way Big Fish could be used to launder money is if they were owned by the people doing the laundering, who would then have a route to get money "through" the company. For third parties I don't think it's a possibility, unless they were in cahoots with the owners.
Actual gambling apps would provide a much better option for laundering money, which is perhaps a bigger motivator for regulation of that industry than addiction is. Or at least they would in a cash environment. Apps maybe less so because there's always a paper trail for the money (not to say it can't be done though).
Take all this with a pinch of salt because it's hardly my area of expertise but the main point stands: to launder money you have to have a way of getting money both into and out of a business.
dirty cash -> giftcards -> casino app -> app developer
I wonder if a 30% cost for big players is considered acceptable in money laundering. North Korea laundered $81 million (that they stole from banks) through Philippine casinos [1], so it isn't an outrageous idea that an app could be used for money laundering.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-08-03/a-baccara...
And if you do win... can cashing out for boring dollars ever compare to the excitement of being allowed to spin the wheel again - for the chance of an even bigger prize?
It's a finely tuned dopamine loop that's been perfected over centuries, designed with one goal: to keep susceptible people pulling the lever. The house, after all, doesn't win if you leave.
I can certainly see that being enough to persuade some people to spend hundreds, maybe even thousands. But there are always outliers, which is why I can swallow the idea - even though it's bonkers - that somebody might spend $400k over 8 years, or still be spending $600/month even though they know it's bad for them.
the stereotypically "male" kind wants to take risks, win big, prove they are skilled, etc. and will tend to play games like roulette or blackjack, or poker, or bet on sports and horses.
there is a different kind, associated more with slot machines and female gamblers, where they're not playing to win, they're playing to keep playing -- the slot machine produces a mental state that they find compelling and difficult to leave.
from the way people describe it it's comparable to "one more turn" in video games.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gacha_game [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvdtJsZpuQ4