[saghm]

I honestly don't understand the logic behind policies like this. As a kid, my friends and I loved to buy Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards for a few years, and while I think most adults thought it was pretty silly, I don't recall anyone ever claiming that this was somehow equivalent to gambling for children despite it basically the same mechanism as loot boxes; most booster packs were essentially not worth the value once opened because with the exception of a few specific rare cards in each set, the cards were not very valuable even to a collector or player of the game.

I could see an argument that there's an issue with closed ecosystems where value of an item can be changed after someone has obtained it due to control by a centralized provider, but that's completely different concern to the idea of gambling being harmful.

[Retric]

As a kid I viewed MtG, baseball cards, etc as gambling and often heard them referred to as such.

The loot box issue is in part how easy it is to take this stuff to excess. My 8 year old niece racked up ~1,500$ worth of charges in a game when AT&T messed up permissions after a cellphone upgrade. It’s shockingly easy for people to blow arbitrary money on this stuff as the industry is optimized to be predatory as whales make up the bulk of profits.

So I suspect physical stores being really skeptical if an 8 year old showed up to buy a grand of Pokémon cards likely tampered the backlash.

[pessimizer]

It absolutely was and is gambling, and plenty of people complain about it. I've always thought it was disgusting to make a living off of pay-to-play games targeted at children. Morally somewhere around the level of being a pimp.

I don't even like it when targeted at adults, but we allow adults to do far worse when it comes to gambling. A lot of our hollow economies depend on it. But you really have to be a moral sewer to pay your rent from kids hoping to open the right bag to hopefully energize their often very narrow, often very autistic social lives. At best you're a carnie.

So there's one data point, take it as you will.