I agree with several things in your post, but I don't want legislators anywhere near my games.

It's not ideal, but I actually think it's a good thing that e.g. gambling is restricted to adults. A fairly difficult topic IMO. Ideally, people would just be educated/interested enough to identify and avoid scams. Definitely hoping for that.

But there's no gambling involved here. I agree with the parent poster, the last thing I want are out-of-touch politicians legislating more things they don't understand. That would be a worse outcome than all the scammy games in the world.

I think there's at least an interesting debate to be had. Why is gambling restricted to adults? Presumably because children are unable to comprehend the way in which it persuades you to spend more than you ever intended to. Or maybe it's because the money is unlikely to be theirs.

Either way, you could argue that Candy Crush is the same on both counts.

Candy Crush, Farm Ville, most prominent examples of F2P are nothing short of gambling. Zynga (and I presume King as well) has large teams of psychologist focusing solely on making the game as addictive as possible and exploiting that addiction, i.e. making addicts pay.

What are you talking about? There is no chance involved in most of the F2P games, without which there is no gambling. That's what the word means!

Candy Crush is ostensibly skill based, being a bejeweled-match-3 type game and Farmville and the like are based around time, not chance. (You get X actions per day, and can spend money to get more actions)

Skill-based? Candy Crush is based on the whims of a random number generator. It's Puzzle Quest but the RNG costs you money.

It does nothing of the sort. You are under no obligation to pay them for extra shots, and this thread is filled with people who haven't.

I think calling this a bubble is akin to calling slot machines a bubble. Unfortunately I feel like these types of scam games are here to stay and like slot machines, will make up a large portion of the industry's total revenue.

Yes, I don't actually think this kind of stuff is going away. I merely hope it's going to be less lucrative (it's insanely lucrative right now) and more frowned upon. And I really don't think that all games will look like that in the future, that is the main point I'm trying to make.

And yet others are sinking to the lowest common denominator, and hardcore studios are slowly learning about F2P. I love the current indie movement, but it's not strong on mobile, because players are being trained not to pay for games and indies tend to produce full content with an upfront price rather than use the "scam" mechanics. There are definitely titles that manage to walk the line well (e.g. with episode or item IAPs) and I think we'll see more of those.

Look at race games that have many versions.

The early version will be $10, no in app purchases. The latest one will be $0.99, with a million in app purchases.

In-app is fine. (As someone else says, devs need to get paid.). But some companies exploit confusing conversions (X gems to unlock! Y gems for $0.99!) and similar shady tactics.

And they do it because it works.

People do filter buying decisions by price, or number of good reviews.