Gaming and Gambling used to be separate until what year? What gaming product broke this barrier?
edit: not hating, i love magic but booster packs started this whole thing IMO. The idea being you can get players to purchase products many times over
It was more people buying boxes back then, opening, and selling the cards for profits (university mid 90s) than me buying lots of MTG in the hope to find something. We also played mostly with what we had, perhaps professional tournaments changed that.
Funnily, cards that people played back then, are worthless today, cards we considered average, are worth 1000+ EUR. Still have ~5000 EUR MTG cards somewhere.
I don't know how the relative market caps compared, but I remember reading years ago that a hat in TF2 had sold for $14k...
But also never bought a key. Recently sold old loot boxes for $15 each, nice.
Blackjack, roulette, craps, slot machines, poker, and many other games have long been used for gambling.
Also sports betting has been a thing for nearly all of human civilization.
Computer Games used to have nothing whatsoever to do with Gambling, until about 2010 its seems (going from the other comments in this thread).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackjack_(Atari_2600_video_ga...
I remember Texas Hold’em being a thing on the early days of the internet as well.
Gambling video games have been around a long time. I see this as just another moral panic not unlike the “Doom causes school shootings” narrative.
Also of note, in many jurisdictions that regulate gambling, companies have found loopholes that offer arcade style "games of skill" that are still like 99.9% games of chance to get around gambling regulations. So gambling is also becoming more like gaming. It's enshittification all the way down.