If that's the best analogy you can come up with, it's terrible.
The issue still is the same, parents who have no control over their finances. You can easily apply this to ANY digital sale since data doesn't have logistic constraints as a physical sale. You can keep buying until your bank says it's enough. Should we bundle MTX along with steam sales, psn sales, amazon sales, etc. ? I bet if we dig too deep, we will also find cases where people spent way more than they should have. While those stories are sad, it's difficult to see if they are fringe cases (10s in a population of millions) or something more alarming.
Also, what kind of parent controls exist in those games and any digital storefront ? Are they enough ?
And why did those kids never learned the basics on how to use money ? How they get access to a credit card ? To me those are far more shocking than the actual spending, really.
I don't think the parents in every case this has ever happened to have all acted flawlessly, in some instances, mistakes may have been made, or they might not have been aware of how these games or tech in general operate
I'm not saying the parents are 100% absolved of all responsibility, but neither are the developers of these games
If bad parenting and children being reckless is just something that has always been the case, what kind of things were kids in the 90s, or 80s, or 70s, blowing thousands and thousands of their parents money on?
To hand wave away how these games are designed, and to put all the blame on the parents, is just
weird, in that it's clearly not just a parenting issue
I don't understand why so many posters here have such a hard on for ignoring that these games are literally desiged to extract an unlimited amount of money from their players. Posters couldn't be happier to discount that completely and put all the blame onto something else
It's just weird. If good parenting is all that stands between a child blowing all their families money on digital JEPGs, then maybe that is worth looking into