Apple and Google could easily remove these type of apps from their stores but of course they won't. They're culpable.
It shouldn't be possible to spend a hundred thousand dollars in in-app purchases.
It shouldn't be possible to spend a hundred thousand dollars in in-app purchases.
IMO this falls inline with smoking weed or drinking alcohol. If I choose to do something and it doesn't directly hurt others, why can't I?
I know, being drunk can cause accidents and kill people; same for drugs (weed is a bad example here) and destroy families and stuff, but it should still be my choice if I want to do these things myself.
Too much regulation is just as bad as no regulation.
All of this said, the only casino game I personally play is MyVegas which offers real rewards at real MGM properties (and others). I've spent maybe $100 real currency in the app since I started playing years ago and have gotten free nights at their hotels, tickets to shows, etc... so it's not allllll doom and gloom.
Society has decided that, for the good of society as a whole, this answer is no. That the good of society is more important than the desires of any given individual.
For example, most countries (an organized society) have laws regulating gambling (and drinking, and smoking, and ...).
There is a whole field dedicated to engineering choices of individual humans, it's called "marketing". Oh, and also "recruitment". The choices are entirely yours, sure, and yet they're still malleable and largely predictable. I bet there is even statistics "such% of population is susceptible to this tactics, and such% of population is susceptible to that trick, and there is this negligible % of those who pretty much can't be swayed in a reliable way, but they don't matter (too few of them)".
The thing is, government prohibition is just one of the least effective methods, but it is also the laziest and easiest and most obvious one which is why people come up with it all the time.
10,000 to one person may be the equivalent of 100 to another to 10 for another.
Lotteries are effectively government sponsored loot boxes and the reward chance is probably less.
I really want a “paid, no IAP” filter. The gameplay quality of those titles trends far higher.
An alternative is subscription, that seems to be the Apple Arcade model.
The lack of filter or parental setting to hide any apps with IAP reflects poorly on Apple’s customer centricity.