If your friend can afford that, it's honestly none of your nor our business to tell her how to spend her money.

If your friend can't afford that, why is the problem Uma Musume and not your friend? We could regulate gacha games into extinction, but that only means your friend will just find another avenue to spend $700 dollars of unaffordable money in.

If anything, I would at least take solace in the fact your friend isn't spending her money on things that would matter of factly cause tangible harm like drugs and alcohol instead.

Seems a lot like victim blaming. "Just have more willpower than teams of full-time psychologists and billion-dollar marketing budgets can erode" is basically "Worried about being mugged? Just be stronger than all the muggers, lol."

In case you weren't aware, the vast majority of people have "more willpower than teams of full-time psychologists and billion-dollar marketing budgets can erode". There are a few who unfortunately do not, but the world shouldn't have to bend over backwards to save them from themselves.

Who’s “bending over backwards” here? When gambling is regulated, nothing of value is lost. Also, when a ‘few’ people are capable of propping up an industry worth hundreds of billions, your definition of ‘few’ is pretty suspect.

I'm definitely not judging, I also spend too much money on stupid things and we're friends - we commiserate about it.

I just meant it as a concrete example of how the parasocial marketing tactics GP mentioned in these games get people to spend way more than they had planned to (or that you even could spend in "classic" games)

I agree spending beyond one's means is bad, but why is that blamed on what the money is being spent on rather than who is spending that money in the first place?

We never seem to blame the source of the problem in any of these discussions, blaming one scapegoat after another in a frantic and futile attempt to blame anything but the actual problem. It prevents any meaningful answer from coming to bear.

The source of the problem are manipulative businesses models that are disappointingly still legal.

Not much you can do. This is stuff pretty much what every form of modern advertising wants to do, especially these days with social media like Twitter/Tiktok/Instagram/etc. It's no different than how modern musician artists aren't selling you music anymore but a "brand" and "personality". Because music doesn't make the money (not for the artist at least), it just drives fans into buying merch/concerts/etc.

It's not exactly new either. Toy lines were doing this as early as the 70's by leveraging colorful mascots in commercials and commisioning thinly veiled ads they called cartoons to keep the brand awareness. We simply have better tools to do this today.

At what point are you going to stop or finish eliminating those "manipulative business models"? The guy who keeps wasting his money is just going to move onto the next one.

No, the source of the problem are people who can't responsibly manage their finances. Whether that stems from something within their control or not is irrelevant.

If I wanted Ayn Rand banalities instead of serious answers, I would have asked as such.

Is the goal here to solve problems or is it to just feel good about being edgy?

If it's the latter, then yes we can keep avoiding addressing the actual problem.