Agreed, I’m hoping to impart my mindset on my daughter so she recognizes the trap before spending money on it. The games use an exponential growth curve, which means you can spend some money to be dominant for a little while, but the enemies will always catch up because that’s what it’s designed to do. So any power purchase is temporary and will set you up to feel like you need to spend even more to “keep” the “investment” you’ve already made.

Which also makes quitting harder because quitting entirely is admitting whatever money was spent on in game shit was wasted. It’s just sunk cost fallacy and there really should be regulation on shit like that.

And, to add insult to injury, the people running the game can decide at any point that it’s not worth running anymore and just shut it all down, leaving players that wasted tons of money with nothing.

I prefer subscriptions over that and still to this day don’t mind that I spent a lot of money on my wow subscription because I knew what I was paying for.