I don't think it should be banned, but it should probably be treated like gambling: strictly unavailable to minors. Minors are a huge market, so this should limit the appeal of this nonsense to games developers.
And it shouldn't just be games, but any kind of software product should exclude kids from any form of in-game currency that can be purchased outside of the game.
Fuck them kids. The primary victims here are adults - those are the "whales" these bastards hunt. Kids don't have a thousand dollars a month to blow on one stupid game, but hoo boy do a bunch of waifu-susceptible adults.
Nothing inside a video game should cost money. Games make you value arbitrary nonsense. That is what makes them games! There is no ethical form of charging real-world currency for that made-up value. Not even if it's "just cosmetic," or whatever other dismissive excuses people have for lootboxes with more steps. If all the game's money comes from stupid fake hats, then the entire game exists solely to funnel people toward buying stupid fake hats.
We are talking about game developers - the foremost experts on guiding experiences, disguising shortcomings, and making objectively worthless things seem like amazing rewards. And they want a siphon attached to your wallet. They will make their products objectively less enjoyable to frustrate and cajole you into forking over unlimited sums of your actual money.
And we're not about to shop our way out of this, before anyone glibly says 'juuuust don't buy it!' like that's a novel insight. I'm not-buying it as hard as I can. I'm warning others not to buy it. Guess what? It's still swallowing the entire industry. This abuse is the dominant strategy. It costs next to nothing, it risks next to nothing, and it turns a trickle of content in an avalanche of money. So of course it's in $60, $70, $90 games now. It's in every genre, at every price point. It's in single-player titles. All excuses have been disproven. It's just plain greed, and it's infecting everything.
Only legislation will fix this. If we allow this to continue - there will be nothing else.
Hmm, maybe a useful feature in lemmy would be to ignore votes by users who voted up a specific post, like a user configurable anti vote manipulation feature. Because this post is incredibly obviously artificially upvoted