Just because two things are "annoying", doesn't mean they have the same ethical problems.
The fun single player games only need to convince you they are a fun experience and you should buy them once.
Games with loot boxes are trying to convince you every day to spend money on them. Dunno about roblox, but often the items are visible, and "defaults" are often perceived as poor or noobs.
We can't be naive: It's a whole other level and companies are spending millions on manipulating kids to spending more and more money.
Of course a kid is gonna be annoyed if they get something other than what they want, but, to use a hamfisted but scarily apt analogy, are the kids yearning for the drug called sugar or the drug called crack/meth/etc. Both are "bad" but on completely different levels
Dunno man, when the “core gameplay loop” gets interrupted every 2 minutes with “do you want to pay to win?” Banners and 50% of the screen is covered in ads and trap buttons that pop up a purchase dialog when you press them accidentally (a given on mobile with touch controls), it’s fairly obvious the gameplay loop is the last thing in the developers mind.
> games allow you to spend money to rapidly get better
Audience is the problem here. It's obviously not a big deal if the platform is targeted for adults, but majority of users are underage. The platform can certainly implement guardrails for the vulnerable users if they wish to
Those guardrails exist. They’re called parents. My son doesn’t have a credit card and therefore doesn’t have robux. Having no robux, he can’t spend it on anything.
> the core gameplay loops work just fine without it.
Of course it's functional, it has to string people along for enough time to get them to start paying.
That doesn't mean grinding a system tuned to get you hooked enough to give up and pay is a 'just fine' as a game. It's openly deliberate malicious design.
