When I was a kid, everyone's parents brought us to the "video arcade" which was free to enter but the games would "bully" us to INSERT 4 TOKENS after dying a few times. Nobody got seriously upset about this.

The analogy is quite wrong, and even then the parent did provide some modicum of supervision (or control the spending in some way), inserting quarter do require slightly more effort than pressing a button to accept the charge on the credit card.

Yeah I remember blowing a lot of money at the video game arcade, but at least felt guilty when looking at my empty wallet.

If the kid can press a button on their phone to accept a charge on a credit card, the problem is with someone giving the kid a phone and hooking it up to a credit card, not with the game in question.

Game arcades were the original pay2win. Come to think of it, that's probably why I never played them...

Arcade games do fit some definition of pay2win, but also rarely gives advantages to the one putting the more coins in the machine.

Not that I would defend arcade games, as they are a dying breed, but competitive arcade games were somehow fair.

> but also rarely gives advantages to the one putting the more coins in the machine.

INSERT COIN TO CONTINUE

You could literally buy extra lives.

Again, re-framing it to competitive arcade game, giving extra lives might not be the help that is needed by the player (I have yet to encounter a competitive arcade game that is not fair), but where I find some popular competitive game egregious is that they do not only give advantage to people that spend time in the game (via xp style leveling or some kind of in game currency) but also give more competitive advantage to those who pay ( see world of tanks with premium ammunition ).

Your argument is however valid for single/cooperative arcade games, where the design is to gobble as many coin as possible.

Not to mention that the game 'drops' several cosmetic items and rewards them for 'quests' in-game, so the average person has about a 0% chance of distinguishing between paying and non-paying players

I'm not sure but maybe kids who play it a lot can distinguish a dollar-bought flying monkey from a game-drop weasel with a patch eye (I don't mean to demean the game, it's just very outlandish looking in regards to these cosmetics). And that leads to bullying based on sort or rarity of the item, perhaps? But then I think most would agree the problem is not _caused_ as much as _evidenced_ by the game economics

I don't play fortnite, but having been involved in other games with cosmetics, some of them quite expensive, most of the players would be able to easily distinguish the rare, expensive cosmetics.

Making the source of your profits be children's value signaling is ... unappealing.

There is a difference between selling a game and giving it away for free so you can sell peer's respect via hats (or whatever). Then your product is children feeling inadequate in a way that can be solved with money which is some sort of sign of the apocalypse.

You could make this argument about anything that is sold to kids, should we have a "you must be this old to ride the capitalism coaster" rule?

This is also hardly a phenomenon unique to video games.

I wonder how long till we get the articles about teens using fortnite for sex. https://xkcd.com/1289/