But your parents can’t just buy the toy. The only way to get the toy is through the element of chance - sometimes with a near zero win chance - by spending real world money.
The only reason it’s not de-facto gambling is that there are consolation prizes, but in most peoples’ view that doesn’t make it morally okay to push on children, nor does it make it completely not gambling either. It’s just gambling with consolation prizes.
Wait, there are still mobile games without monetization?
Plex has this, but not sure if you have to have an active account signed in for the other streaming services or not.
Sure, added that note in an edit. There’s no answer here that doesn’t result in your early death.
I don’t think OP knows what they mean with this question. The top two ‘serious’ answers are coffee and tea, which is just “hot water with shit mixed in”. Anything you drink is water with shit mixed in. Any answer that isn’t “water with shit mixed in” means you die, either within months or minutes. Most answers that are “water with shit mixed in” would still kill you fairly quickly if that’s all you ever drank.
The only possible explanation I can see for why the Apollo dev’s number could be “wrong” is if reddit plans to charge on a sliding scale, i.e. the more requests, the more the price is reduced per request. Or the other possibility would be that they “negotiate” a rate with the app developer, i.e. “determine how popular your app will be based on the cost barrier to entry”.
You keep relying on the Chuck E. Cheese anology, but it simply doesn’t work. At Chuck E. Cheese the prizes are a bunch of toys that your parents could otherwise buy, and the fun is in playing the games themselves which pay out tickets toward earning those prizes. That is in no way the equivalent of gamble boxes in video games.
Gamble boxes contain prizes that can’t be bought outside the game, and in nearly every case contain prizes that can’t be bought with the “consolation prize” (i.e. “tickets”) that are dropped when you otherwise win nothing or very little compared to the actual prizes. And there is no inherent “fun” in clicking an “UNLOCK BOX” button compared to actually… playing a game in order to earn prizes. Not comparable at all, really.
If you’re going to try to convince people they’re not gambling (and you have quite the uphill battle to fight), you’re better off likening them to blind bag grab-packs of card games / collector cards / toys, etc. - Pokemon, Magic the Gathering, sports cards, blind-bag toys etc. That is their closest real-world equivalent. Many would argue that those are also a form of gambling, as well.