Plenty of roguelikes or roguelites have locked chests that can only be opened after you play for an arbitrarily long amount of time. That is the same as a lootbox in a game that lets you buy lootboxes with in-game currency at a slower rate than if you paid for them, such as the example I gave with Genshin Impact, where you can open lootboxes while paying nothing but the game is also structured to incentivize you to pay.
Games that are designed to suck hundreds of hours of your time and cause addiction are nearly as bad as games designed to tempt minors and vulnerable people into gambling. I'm not sure why you're bringing up the former as a defense of the latter.
I bring it up because the majority of people who have a problem with mobile games do not have a problem with roguelites. Either you have a problem with both or with none. I'm firmly in the none camp, it seems like you're in the both camp. Either way, singling out mobile games like the text in Godot's documentation did is a mistake.
I've read the entire comment chain and the myopic focus on roguelites makes me feel like there's something that isn't being said.
Roguelites are designed for huge replayability so of course there's an element of randomness and difficulty in place of pure linear progression. Personally I don't see exploitative gambling/addiction mechanics in a game like Spelunky or Risk of Rain or Dead Cells.
It's utterly disingenuous to put these on the same level of cynical mobile titles that rub their exploitation in your face and continually blueball you with arrays of counters, timeout mechanics, fake currencies (backed by real money), and loot boxes. It's absurd to draw equivalence to the practice of exploiting 'whales' and young children, to squeeze as much money out of them as possible.
If Spelunky or some other roguelite had a mobile version that monetized every element of gameplay and made it 'freemium' then it would be another scummy mobile game, and would warrant the comparison. But not until then.
>One is optimized to provide gameplay experience and fun
It's not though, it's RNG-gating content and therefore not really optimize to provide gameplay experience and fun, it's hiding gameplay behind RNG, just like it happens with lootboxes. You happen to not be bothered by this fact because you enjoy the good feelings that come with finding new and unexpected items, but understand that the same feeling exists with the lootbox system, it just asks for money instead of time (which you have to spend to explore all the content when a game is RNG-gated).
Your dislike of one over the other is arbitrary and unreasonable, which is fine. But if you're going to ascribe moral value to things I'm not going to take you seriously because it's clear you haven't thought about it enough.
When it comes to compulsive gambling, the monetary risk is an integral part. People who suffer from it get their fix not by winning but by putting things on the line. This is why gambling is almost universally regulated, and yahtzee is not. It's mind poison for some people.
Saying that "time" is a currency sounds good on paper, but in this case it doesn't work. Those whales that spend tens of thousands of dollars on loot boxes would not have spent an equal amount of time otherwise.
But it's not gating content. You still go forward, whatever you get or don't get.
It just means that most of your runs will be different. And will enable you to do different things (maybe you get staff of freezing and freeze the lake, or maybe levitating boots and walk on water .)
Non of that gates you, just provides flavor, and different runs.
Sure some things are better and some things are worse, but my fondest memories is getting a win with hilariously bad drops.
In mobile games you cant proceed, until you buy crystals, or wait down the increasingly long timer, or simply can't kill a boss without a powerup from cash store.
> Plenty of roguelikes or roguelites have locked chests that can only be opened after you play for an arbitrarily long amount of time.
I am pretty sure that I have seen no such thing in Nethack, nor would I expect to see it in Rogue - the "rogue" part of "roguelike". Lootboxing roguelikes/lites are a subset of the genre, so it's not fair to use the entire genre as a defense of this practice.
So you would equate a digital blackjack game without real money involved to actual casino blackjack? I don't know if it's an expression in english, but it seems to be a case of "degrees in hell". Contributing to video game addiction isn't great, but intentionally siphoning money out of the wallets of whales is downright evil.
