As someone who spend thousands of EUR on MtG in my youth and who's wife had a father who was an alcoholic I'd like to disagree with 'I don't need the government to try to "protect me" from this.' USA is also currently in an opioid crisis.
This is both P2W and gambling, and its the combination which is the issue. RNG alone isn't an issue. Also, it is aimed at youth, who not yet can deal with gambling. How come a country where you may drive at age 16 and drink at age 21 doesn't care about digital gambling via the internet?
The argument is the same about other things like heroin, gambling, LSD, etc. The law is there to protect the people. If you want to break the law, then you are on your own, with all the repercussions which may come with it including: that your Battle.net account gets disabled/banned, that Blizzard or the player gets a fine, that you become addicted, that you have to pretend you are from another jurisdiction in order to play it, that you move to a different jurisdiction, or vote for different politicians in your jurisdiction. There's plenty of options for you to influence the current outcome.
> If people chose to not play them then they wouldn't monetize games like this, but it's pretty apparent that people are okay with this.
No, it is not "pretty apparent". Stop projecting.
> You want to use force via the government to stop those people from doing something they want to do and using "it's for your own good" as an excuse.
Yes, such is the basis of law.
> Games will absolutely shut out countries where they feel that handing regulation is too much for them. This will include games that don't conflict with the regulation, but it's simply too risky to figure out whether they do or not.
That's fine, I'm not missing out, hopefully more countries follow suit and may it provide incentive to change this rotten to the core industry.