Lootboxes pushed it over the edge, and showdowns like this are only going to come down against the gaming industries, because for a long time they've been skirting in under the edges of related laws that are pretty fucking clearly applicable in most domains (in the US as one example, individual states vary in wording, but in most selling something with a random result of obviously varying 'value'-which is often not affixed only monetarily-is the bar used) when read literally and to legal technicality.
The computer and card gaming industries have been playing a game of chicken for a long time with gaming (gambling) laws.
Saying it's not gambling? That's fucking asinine sophistry, and I hope they get burnt hard for it. Gambling has clear psychological addiction pathways (it's basically a nearly ideal form of operant conditioning, given the mix of reinforcements and randomness), kids (up until ~20s) are fucking awful at all of the related cognition to (a) games of chance (b) future outcome weighting and (c) abstract valuation (including money), and when it's siphoning off money in the process the harm becomes pretty immediately clear. But realistically, a large part of their market is kids, a lot of their marketing is aimed at kids, and that's simply going to be unavoidable to take it into account when crafting anything. Saying that they want different regulation from, say, regulation primarily aimed at casino gambling: I would be ok with that.
