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Any game that offers a virtual currency purchaseable with real currency (be it coins, diamonds or energy rays) should be avoided. Especially if you have children.

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Don’t most games have those now?

Not at all. It's just that they have reached high visibility in some markets - mobile, concretely. It's a combination of marketing engineering and tacit complicity on the part of Apple/Google.

99% of mobile games do. If you want to keep your children away from these things, you don't really have much of a choice beyond not letting them have a phone at all.

One possible alternative to banning the phone or total surrender could be finding proper games for them, instead of these slot-machines-in-disguise.

One would need alternative App browsers for that, the default ones don't allow filtering out apps with in-app purchases since they are too lucrative. Here's one:

https://appapp.io/us/genre=Games;has_iap=false;supported_dev...

See also this site for safe kids mobile games:

https://www.commonsensemedia.org/

Hopefully they will open a store once Apple allows 3rd party stores

Thanks for this! I've been searching for this simple filter (no in app purchases) for a long time. Unfortunately, this particular site is Apple only, so I'll have to keep searching for Android counterpart...

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