Many of those games are actually implementing gambling with their virtual currency. They have events where you buy an entry ticket using the in-game currency then either double/triple-up or lose-it-all as the result of some random event.

I'm surprised this is even legal in the US, and not caught for app store TOS violations. It seems they've simply replaced the concept of casino chips with virtual currency. They do have some 'gameplay' outside of this but it is not much different from the various frills on video slot machines.

As long as you don't have a way to exchange back for cash, it's likely protected under all the same laws that make Chuck E Cheese legal.

And a lot of these basically copy the 'packs' mechanic from collectible card games, so those would have to be affected too, by any new law.

That's the beauty of it, they don't even have to hand money back to the user.

The trick is to make the user perceive value in whatever digital artifact their are providing. In the eye of the user it then becomes the same as money.

Make the user invest their time into the game. Time is money right? Create fake rewards for arbitrary actions. Then when they are properly hooked, ramp up the difficulty level to a limit where just paying a bit of money would make the game as fun as it was during the evaluation phase.

This is sort of like what advertising does to people in real life.

No really.

An ad convincing me to try X energy drink at least results in me getting an energy drink.

Games like this are selling you on a worthless digital item.

The idea is that advertising often gets people to buy things that are bad for them (like maybe an energy drink?) that takes up resources to produce. Maybe people buying virtual digital items is better for society than buying a brand new Corvette.

Countries have already started banning some games with such mechanics, like loot boxes; e.g. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43906306