Comment by dataflow

> There's always this question when Valve comes up of, "why are people more upset about gambling for cosmetics in a game than gambling for power/features in a game?"

Do you have a link to this sentiment anywhere? It's the first time I'm hearing about it.

> Especially since Magic the Gathering and similar card games are very normalized, and have a straightforwardly more evil monetization strategy, since you need to do gambling there to even play the game, it's not cosmetic.

I'm not sure what you're calling "gambling" here, but the way I understand it, it's not merely "a game of chance that you pay money to play". A fundamental feature of it is that the odds are set deliberately so that you're statistically guaranteed to suffer a net loss to the other betting party ("house"). That's not quite the case for tradable items when the "house" doesn't control the price you might sell your item for; the market is the one responsible for setting the price. Note that I'm not saying that's necessarily always better -- there are lots of ways to financially screw people over besides gambling -- I'm just saying it's not gambling, and so it makes sense that people react to it differently.

For items that you can't trade (like where the platform prevents you), that's more similar to gambling in that respect, I think. But then it's less similar from the standpoint that there is zero financial redemption value for the items you win, so it's s arguably still not gambling.