Which, when you think about it makes sense. Why would consumer protection folks waive consumer protections simply because the would-be issuer confirmed there was no intrinsic value in the offering?
If you can't cash out it's just entertainment. That's why you don't have to be 18 to play pinball.
[actually the history of pinball and other arcade games is fraught with legal action, there were a few iterations of payout before we got to the harmless, kid-friendly machines of today, really good podcast about it, interviewing the guy who heads the Pacific Pinball Museum: https://art19.com/shows/the-madecast/episodes/6753c3e6-e12d-...]
"Kid-friendly" but really kid-robbing, though - AFAIK most of arcade games that let you win something, e.g. a toy, have subprograms that can override your victory, making it look like you've lost; those are triggered randomly, based on venue-configurable parameters like "max winning rate" and "daily wins threshold". This is designed to ensure the venue always makes a profit, by turning what's advertised as games of skill into games of luck.
What really angers me about this is not even that the nature of these machines isn't advertised to, or generally known by, parents and children, but that the way those overrides are implemented, they're quite literally gaslighting children (and for kids playing on such machines way too much, it's likely ruining their hand-eye coordination). There are many slow-motion / high-framerate YouTube videos demonstrating how these arcade games will fake input delays to turn perfectly timed win into what seems like split-second loss. And don't get me started on the fuckery that goes on with those "toy claw" games.
I feel there's something deeply corrupted about screwing up with children like that. I mean, when my kid starts playing a game and thinks she got good at it, and wants to show me how good she is, and then the software override kicks in and the game lies to her that she lost, what am I supposed to say? Gaslight her further by saying it was bad luck or still big enough of a challenge - when I know perfectly well the real reason is a bunch of greedy adults with broken moral compass adding a biased RNG to what they advertise as pure game of skill?
I worked in an arcade growing up, and you're not wrong about a lot of them--but pinball doesn't fall into that bucket. Every pinball machine I've ever seen is played pretty straight. Sometimes they have nasty game mechanics, but they don't have the issues you describe here (which is much more in the pseudogambling, Dave and Buster's style of games).
What frequently happens with pinballs though is that the score you need to get a free replay adjusts automatically so that the ratio of free games stays at a certain target percentage.
Absolutely true. That said, in practice, if you can hit a high score (usually extremely high anyway), you can hit the next one. It doesn't get harder to do, you just have to be consistent.
The difference between entertainment and a casino game is that a casino game is designed to try and get you to put in more and more money, where most entertainment oriented games will have you pay once for the entire experience.
Of course the gap between these is closing by the introduction of lootboxes and similar mechanics. I do think these should be regulated as it aligns the incentives to get people addicted to your game, which is a fairly basic variation on preying on the vulnerable. In addition I -- and I assume most people -- do not like getting treated as a money piñata.
