Video games' gambling features have been making the news in recent years. E.g.
The government is asking for the public's opinion on the impact of loot boxes.
www.bbc.com
Wiki has this related topic, in a subsection of one of their articles:
en.wikipedia.org
I haven't followed the news closely on this and I don't know whether my following observation would be usually linked to this argument that video games have gambling industry features built in to their gameplay design:
Card kegs. Maybe these are like loot boxes, which do get mentioned in the context of gambling industry design in video games? You want to get certain cards. You can do a long, slow, tedious grind to accumulate 'gold' to 'buy' enough kegs for yourself. You might be chasing certain cards. So, it's like buying loot boxes in order to get a certain reward.
CDPR offer you a quick and easy way to acquire cards: pay cash. For nearly $100 can can buy 60 Ultimate Kegs. But there's no guarantee that you will get the card that you want. Hey, why not buy 10 lots of that to 'improve' your odds of getting that card that you want? Well, there's almost $1,000 gone.
Why are those cards hard to get? It's artificial scarcity and nothing else. The harder CDPR make it to get cards (via grinding for gold or shards to craft cards) the more desirable it makes it for the mug player to spend money to 'improve' their odds of getting 'that' card.
That looks a little bit gambling to me. Hell, it looks exactly like gambling to me.
I already responded to someone else's comment in another thread some months back and said to them that they seemed like the game was causing them problems and they should probably quit. From memory, they were jeopardising their university prospects by playing the game.
That kind of game philosophy is just nasty.