So the “are loot boxes gambling” question is more than just discourse, there are actual legal issues, and thru them the viability of an entire business model, at stake.

Traditionally American law, citing back to Britain’s Statute of Anne, held that gambling debts could not be enforced by law. (This isn’t to say they weren’t contracted and enforced, it’s just that they were enforced outside the legal system by organized crime brutes breaking limbs.)

As state-approved gambling spread (often to undercut organized crime - state lotteries replaced city outfit-run drawings known as “policy wheel”, “the numbers” or otherwise, which were a regular profit source AND brought a wide network of otherwise upstanding businesses and citizens into their criminal enterprise as bookies or gamblers) these laws, curiously, remained. In some states you can even sue to recover cash-in-hand losses for a period after the fact.

Even where laws were reworked to make debts collectable so as to enable a gambling industry (like casino-owned Nevada, where this happened 50+ years after gambling was legalized) this requires a legal process, and then another one to enforce the judgement in the gambler’s home state, and of course only applies to debts contracted between two entities physically within state lines at the time.

SO the issue becomes: with developers increasingly building their business models on recurring in-game revenue streams (with the profit there there tilting away from the average-joe occasional spender to the rare but high-dollar, possibly compulsive “whales”, same as casinos) that’s a real question mark. If one of those whales dumps $7k on loot boxes and then contacts his credit card company to reverse the transaction, do you have any legal recourse to demand the money? And if you don’t, and the fact gets around that these things are effectively free, do you still have a viable business model?