On (1) I don't believe there's any difference... a factory prints cards according to the company's desired distributed, and a game's algorithm generates loot boxes according to the same distribution. Lootboxes and trading cars both have predetermined and known (to the company) and unknown (to the players) probabilities.

(2/3) agreed there is a difference, although it was still magical as a child and there was definitely something calling me back. A lot of those packs were interesting only because I watched 100 episodes of the greatest adventurer known to me (Ash Ketchum) and my own adventures playing Pokemon on the gameboy for 100+ hours.

Since those companies ostensibly don't want to publish the probabilities, potentially because they employ far more subtle 'personalized' addictive tweaks, you can not state (1). In contrast, the distribution for cards in trading card games seems fairly well known, not just to the publisher, but also to the buyer, and no 'personalized tweaking' can occur.

On (1), that assumes that the odds are fixed and not tweaked per player. That isn't necessarily the case. Even if it is, other parts of the game can be manipulated to make the purchases seem more rewarding than they actually are, as at least Activison has explored:

> For example, if the player purchased a particular weapon, the microtransaction engine may match the player in a gameplay session in which the particular weapon is highly effective, giving the player an impression that the particular weapon was a good purchase. This may encourage the player to make future purchases to achieve similar gameplay results.

https://www.rollingstone.com/glixel/news/how-activision-uses...

Baseball card companies publish the odds of getting certain kinds of cards.