They already have done it in a neighbor city. Its 100% banned, you cant even order online legally.
So, local case, by nature isolated from large scale effects of itself (after all people can buy it in the next city over), in state/federal scale politics, regulation and taxing is far more likely.
Alcohol and nicotine aren't questionable. Ponzi and scams are different because its literally stealing your money.
Yup, so gambling, alcohol and nicotine are most accurate comparisons. All of these? Legal, but regulated, PSA's against and heavily taxed with "official" discouragement purpose - while in reality, that means the government agrees that it's indeed a great way to separate fools from their money, and wants a cut of that pie, fools with money to separate from them aren't free, citizen. Say what you want, governments love getting additional things to tax, doubly so if they have a good excuse and don't damage actually important business in the process.
As such, i would predict that in the end this is how MtX situation will end up if it gets the average government's full attention. Now if the publishers tone down on it, don't push enough of it to raise controversy, and don't grow the cash flow so big that it gets the people in charge of making budgets add up interested, then perhaps they won't find it interesting enough to intervene much.
As I have said numerous times, all it is is digital trading cards and those aren't seen as devastatingly bad.
If all MtX were cosmetic only, that would a good comparison. But we all know it's not, and whether any specific game is has none at all, cosmetic only, or P2W is something that can change overnight with a single patch.
Yes. So both sides are shitty but I err against government regulation. I'd much rather sanction or take action against Blizzard over their allegiance to a foreign adversarial government stealing from the US by the tune of billions than because they made a model of Hearthstone that gets you to buy cards.
That's a separate matter of global market influence and the principle of lowest common denominator as applied to censorship. Very interesting topic, loosely related to MtX - MtX regulation anywhere significant in the world will also affect the practices elsewhere, as due to nature of the internet there are good reasons for everyone to have a standarized global MtX system.