Without being a gacha game, World of WarCraft is guilty of a lot of the same stuff.
I’m not a fan of trying to poison the well on this discussion by trying to bring in a lot of secondary issues and try to broaden the issue to the point of uselessness.
The biggest issue with gambling is the ability to lose your money.
Sure, you can waste time with World of Warcraft. But I can also waste time playing too much Baldur’s Gate 3, or Civilization, or by binging shows on Netflix.
But none of those allow me to spend thousands or tens of thousands by gambling on mechanics within the media itself.
How about we focus on that issue first?
But both are gambling.
Nah, they are not comparable in a meaningful way. Sure, at a high level, you can apply aspects of “gambling” to both examples. But the biggest and most important point is the ability to spend actual money for additional changes at “winning”.
People are against gaming because of some deep-seating fear of Random Number Generation by itself. They are against it because of how easy it is to lose money.
If you value your time, you wouldn’t be playing video games at all. As they are nearly an entertaining way to waste time.
All games waste either time, money, or both. So I guess we just have to make video games illegal now. Oh well. Was fun while it lasted.