At great expense to my carrier I have out and out refused to take part in creating these predatory practices. If you could hear the contempt that "some" game devs have for their customers, you might never buy a game ever again. It really is quite shocking...and the contempt exists from top to bottom, its everywhere. That isn't to say there's not a vast number of of honourable people in the industry, not at all.
It's only to say that we as a whole are allowing the demons run amok.
I have seen the damage that compulsive behaviour can do to our most vulnerable in society.
Lives ruined, homelessness, suicide, familial dissolution, the list goes on.
Children, people with mental dysfunctions, suffers of brain injuries, even people with Parkinson's disease (on l-dopa).
All the people in our society that can control themselves the least are the target. And these people are precisely the target, specifically these people, the 0.001% of players that make up the majority of their revenue.
Some companies find out who they are and continually and specifically court them with free t-shirts, beta access, 'free' in-game gifts, etc. In some companies its a whole department that do this kind of customer management. Developing personal relationships all to keep them hooked.
Now most companies don't do this, its much more automated and in-game that this Catfishing, if I can use a term like that.
At the fundamental level predatory games are not actually games they are variable ratio reinforcement schedule machines. Think Guinea pigs in a lab being rewarded for pushing a button.
An ultra advanced slot machine that continually changes it's odd's depending on what the app thinks you will be vulnerable too. And it attacks.
Now, if you aren't a vulnerable person you will see the obvious things like the pop-ups asking you to spend money or a timer mechanism. And you might think how stupid people must be to fall for that, but you wont see the game's dynamic balancing, because you are not the target. If you're not the target you will never progress further up the attack protocol. So it will always just look like an innocent game to most people.
Its insidious and immoral.
(I'm mostly talking about mobile games...mostly)