A sticker pack "whale" might be down $50, these games might crave a hundred to a thousand times that. Also while kids make the headlines, grown ups are a far bigger market. Simply banning loot boxes for kids is to ignore the majority of the problem.
The price to fill the World Cup 2018 Panini Sticker album is on average more than 800 Euros. If you can swap with a couple of friends (10+) the average price goes down to ~300 Euros.
A sticker pack whale will spend hundreds of Euros. If you only wanna spend 50 bucks better get another hobby tbh.
£150 for 3x500 stickers at Amazon. That should leave you missing approximately 75 stickers, which you can buy as singletons directly from Panini, at £0.25 a piece. So you can do it for £170 with absolutely no social interaction required. Definitely an unreasonable amount for a bunch of stickers, but still peanuts compared to what a freemium video game can cost.
Just to be clear, sticker collection economy is also shady, it just doesn't have a societal impact remotely like that of loot boxes.
