'My son spent £3,160 in one game'

The benefits are largely obscured by in-game currencies, which exist primarily to obfuscate the true cost of inane in-app purchases; maximize the odds of having a useless residual balance (thus encouraging more spending); and reduce barriers to spending.

Games don’t have to prompt for confirmation to spend proprietary fake money. This removes an opportunity to reconsider a purchase, and dramatically increases the chance of accidental spending. And without a dollar value that players can easily reason about, it’s easy to not realize how much you’re spending. “35 crystal whatzits? Um, okay, that doesn’t sound like much.” Never mind the fact that you actually have to buy at least 50 whatzits to have 35, because the next lowest option is to buy 25.

I don’t have any data on this, but I’d be willing to bet that revenues from in-app purchases went through the roof when someone had the bright idea to switch to an in-game currency (and, eventually, multiple currencies).

The root cause of addiction is the same, whether it's a behavioural addiction like video games, exercise, gambling, or sex, or drugs. It's reward seeking behaviour trying to cause a rise in dopamine levels. The physiological effects of substance abuse is generally worse, but the cause is the same, from my experience and people I know the root cause is underlying psychological issues that cause people to engage in self destructive reward seeking behaviour as an unhealthy coping mechanism.

This is where I think that addiction education is completely inadequate. They teach you in school that a certain percentage of people who will do drugs (or gamble, or play video games) will get addicted, like it's some random chance. It's not a random chance though. It's easy to tell people to not do drugs, or not play video games, or to ban them from doing it, but fundamentally they're just going to engage in some other destructive behaviour if they aren't given the tools and support to engage in healthy coping strategies. We need to be teaching people how to identify addictive behaviour as it starts, we need to teach people how to reach out for support and to ensure that support is available, and we need to teach people mental hygiene. We tell people to brush their teeth and wash their hands because you don't want to get sick, but we never bother to teach people how to look after their mind.

Or (in this case) at least set up purchase alerting on the card.

There is, without doubt, a lot of garbage out there in these games for purchase. There are also a lot of issues with the way they get people to spend money.

That said, if your kid steals your credit card and spends a bunch of money on it, the issue isn't the game, it's that your kid is stealing from you. If he/she stole your credit card and bought clothes at the mall, you wouldn't blame the clothing store...

I think an obvious solution here is simply to strengthen consumer protection laws and shift the burden of preventing this from the consumer to the vendor.

The common thread in all these stories was "a kid spends a bunch of money, parent asks for a refund, is told no". But consider if the law says that digital goods such as this must be refunded on demand unless you can prove the purchaser wasn't a child. (If you want to really drive the point home, add a penalty clause for abuse, so you have to refund 150% of the total if there's evidence of any attempt to target minors, hide the charges, dark patterns, etc.)

If Apple becomes statutorily required to refund the money, they'll get very good very quickly at kicking bad actors off their platform.

This shouldn't be a system where parents try and protect themselves and their children and scummy vendors try and exploit them; it should be a shystem where Apple (and the other platforms and market operators) try to protect themselves and scummy vendors try and exploit them. Leave liability with the people most able to protect themselves, not the least able.

I don't think bans or treating games like drugs is needed; if you remove the financial incentive of being abusive, you'll stop the abuse.