And close to 0% of children have credit cards to buy these virtual lootboxes. These mechanisms prey on getting children to beg their parents to spend money.
In practice a parent can easily forego allowing their children to make unsupervised purchases linked to the parent's card! That seems absolutely crazy.
You can have a debit card in the UK as a fairly young child. I think I got one at 12? I don’t know if there’s specific restrictions on buying in-game currency with them? I don’t know how they’d know though.
The first thing I did when I got a debit card was buy the 18 rated GTA Vice City!
Yes, and I never ran around with cash. Supposing I did get a cash gift before my teens, it would just sit in the "bank" i.e. a box in the dresser. Of course there were no gift cards or any of that crap back then, which is what you'd expect to receive today. I mean, as an adult now, what are you likely to receive: a gift card from a relative, or cash?
There's zero reason for a child to carry cash for no purpose. At any rate their lives are so structured usually that this notion that they're going to run to some store to convert it to prepaid cards is far-fetched to begin with.
I see a failure of parenting that some don't want to give credence. I'm not sure why.
So we should be locking kids out of the entire cash economy instead of just banning gambling microtransactions in games?
Btw. here they might need cash to take the bus home. And yes, people here let kids do that alone. Maybe because we live in a civilized society, who knows.
