exploitative business decision that has no technical reason for existing whatsoever
There is a technical reason, actually. The messages from Android are SMS, whereas the messages from immediate iMessage are encrypted and sent over a different channel.
But the net result is a lot of social pressure.
DLC is essentially an addon pack, an expansion of the original game with new levels, characters, maps, weapons, equipment, new gameplay modes, etc.
It sounds like you’re explaining what you want it to be. Some DLC is certainly like that, but quite often it’s not. Sometimes you get that kind of content as a MTX. People try to draw a line here, but there really isn’t one because it’s all convention. Some DLC require a download (e.g. the D part), many do not (i.e. just a DRM check when you launch).
Yeah, in the old days, you’d buy your expansions as a separate product (e.g. Brood War for Starcraft), but these days there’s a lot less formality and variety to it.
So if we try to craft some kind of law against MTX, companies will just call them DLC. The only difference is how they’re marketed; on a technical level, there’s no clear separation between the “good” and the “bad,” it comes down to how it’s marketed and the value you get. The only clear separation I can think of is things that are time limited (i.e. you can only buy it for the next X days), but that’s a practice in pretty much every industry and a practical necessity for copyright law (e.g. music is usually licensed for a set number of years, hence why older GTAs aren’t available for purchase).
I’m guessing there’s a mechanism to buy DLC from within a game, and if there isn’t, game studios would push for that to be created.
worst possible situation from the standpoint of a child or a person susceptible to peer pressure or with basically the same personality of a gambling addict.
I agree children should be protected here because they cannot consent. However, we don’t prevent people with gambling addictions from gambling provided they’re adults, because they are responsible for their actions even if they suffer from addiction. Adults are expected to take measures to protect themselves, children are not.
So I’m absolutely in favor of banning children from F2P games where profit comes from manipulative practices (either they’re being manipulated, or they’re being used to manipulate others, both of which are wrong). Maybe that’s enough to dramatically reduce these games, maybe it’s not, but that’s not the goal; the goal is to protect those who cannot consent.
make it illegal for a game to allow you to spend more than so much on MTX or Premium currency in a certain amount of time
That sounds overly restrictive. If I want to buy an expensive item, I would need to make that MTX several times over the course of days in order to get it? Why?
A better solution, imo, is to provide a mechanism for customers to set their own limits so they can self regulate. It would be up to them to decide what that limit is, so they get to decide what they’re comfortable with. But they should also be allowed to disable that limit as well, though perhaps with a multi-day waiting period so they don’t just disable it while drunk and render the whole thing useless.