And here's the kicker - atleast if you were allowing the kid to place a bit on football or the horses it provides them with a real life maths equation (why we were never taught to calculate in terms of mortgages and credit card repayments etc is beyond me) and provides atleast the possibility of a financial return.
As stated in an earlier post, as these games generally have a short shelf life coupled with the fact that you only really make it easier anyway), there isn't any real upside the to the investment..........
A lot of things like that are to get to the endgame quicker. I used to play WoW and as an endgame raider it was all about getting to max level as soon as possible because you needed to gear up for raiding the newest content. Getting to max level takes a lot of time, especially from level 1 which would take you months unless you played 24/7.
Back in the day, people in WoW used to buy ingame gold from dodgy Chinese online sellers and some even bought levelling services to have someone level their characters for them, all against the rules of course. You otherwise had no choice but to grind the gold to buy things in game and you had to put in the graft to level your character.
Nowadays though Blizzard have realised the money they could make and you can now just buy a gold token for a fixed price, I think it's around £15 and you can even buy a levelling token for £50 to take a character from level 1 to max level saving you months of time.
DLC's and ingame items are just a part of the massive revenue in games now. It makes sense because in the past they sold 1 game for £40 for each person playing but now that one sale can represent £100's from one person.
I suppose the one plus side is many games are becoming free and instead rely solely on optional DLC's/ingame sales, for example COD Warzone, Fortnite etc. COD and Fornite in particular are funny ones because their stores only offer things like cosmetic changes which don't even help you in the game however the sales are showing that gamers can't get enough of it.
I believe the newest COD brought in over $1bn for Activision in just 4 months following its release.... God knows how much they are making from Warzone too.