Even for non-average people, gatekeepers like Gentoo's or Debian's package maintainer(s) do a great deal of good.
I lean WAY left and still agree the free market would have solved this ages ago.
I spent a few minutes looking over his shoulder.
A bit of gameplay followed by increasing amounts of gambling for power ups and constant reminders to buy power ups. This should be absolutely illegal.
Dark patterns upon dark patterns manipulating the kid to squeeze his parents for real money, by habituating gambling habits and normalizing a horrible experience.
Apple will never address these issues because these games make them truckloads of money.
Why is it different?
Having safer defaults is fine, but why is there no way for alternatives to exist? (30% of all revenue is why BTW)
All the boy’s friends play the game and similar games. It’s an uphill battle and an extraordinary pressure on the parents to control each game that gets played and micromanage to that extend - to the detriment of their relationship with the child, because fighting these intentionally instilled addictive patterns will create upset in the child and tension in the relationship. The game devs pay psychologists to create the addiction at scale which the parents just cannot compete with.
In reality parents have finite amounts of energy and a finite numbers of battles to fight. Eat your food, go to school, do your homework, keep your phone charged and call me when you need me to pick you up. That kind of thing.
Having week longs drama forbidding a game that everyone else plays is just not on the map.
It's more the nickle and diming people hate, not the actual gambling. And I don't know if we can or should regulate that.
But the games discourse online isn't exactly giving games like Fortnite any slack despite no longer using lootboxes for its monetization. Or on a fighter game (of which few ever used lootboxes) for offering dozens of skins.
That's the dangerous part on what to or not regulate. Do we want thr government regulating how many add-ons or cosmetics a game can sell?
And given how much scammy shit there is on the two major AppStores, I would say that it is clear as day and night that Apple and Google utterly suck as "gatekeepers".
They'll open up the floodgates and average people will end up dealing with fake Epic apps. A decade from now maybe that same courtroom would better appreciate the value of a trusted gatekeeper.
Look at the PKI industry, they have a greater need for integrity but there's still a healthy market of certificate suppliers.