I think it's a good thing that gambling has been legalized and brought out the shadows. But I really wish the advertising rules around it were changed. I would very much like it if the laws were similar to toy advertising in Japan. Ads are allowed, but you are not allowed to show ads for the product during the event.
In Japan you can't show ads for Power Ranger toys during an airing of Power Rangers. Draft King wouldn't be allowed to show commercials during a baseball game and definitely would not be allowed to show you the betting odds in the seventh inning to make sure you bet before the game is over. The betting ads are just so ridiculous and blanket the broadcast that they make it seem like you're weird if you aren't constantly betting on every game.
>I think it's a good thing that gambling has been legalized and brought out the shadows.
Why? It has increased the transfer of wealth from the poor to the wealthy and heightened poverty while providing nothing of value you can't get from a game that's not for stakes.
What social problems was underground betting actually causing? Was there actually some huge strain on police resources? Is it really a god thing that instead of a small number of gamblers being bankrupted by some shady characters, a much larger number are bankrupted by Disney? At least loan sharks and thugs put more money back into the local economy and small businesses.
> while providing nothing of value you can't get from a game that's not for stakes.
When I play poker, I don't get the same fun value when it's for nothing but the clay chips or even if it's for $2 total win (_when playing for pennies_). The _fun_ for me is when it's a $20+ decision, the _fun_ for me is to play against other people where the decision they have to make has _weight_ to it. I think that there is _fun_ to be had when you're playing for stakes that cannot be had when you're playing for nothing. When I throw the dice, it's not _fun_ to see if it lands on a 7 or 11 or whatever the rules of craps are. The _fun_ for me is the betting, the winning or losing of the money. If I just wanted to see who could get a set of numbers from random dice rolls without money involved, I'd play Yahtzee.
I agree that _some people_ shouldn't gamble because it's not _fun_ but an _addiction_. Just like _some people_ probably shouldn't drink because it's not _fun_ but an _addiction_ or shouldn't smoke weed because it's not _fun_ but _addicting_. That doesn't mean that there is _no value_ being added to the people's lives that _find it fun_ and don't find it _addicting_.
We may disagree on if _fun_ is of any value to people vs the harm that that _fun_ might give them and I think we both agree we should make it _really clear_ the consequences of the _fun_ someone chooses to have. But I disagree that gambling adds _no value_ whatsoever or the idea that what I find is of no value means that everyone should agree it adds no value. Let the players have their fun, tax the shit out of it, and offer help to those that have an addiction to it, just like smoking or drinking or anything else that we as a society have deemed not illegal but not directly beneficial.
I won't deny that poker REALLY doesn't work when it's for play money, and poker is honestly one of the greatest games I've ever played in terms of sheer depth and how much you can replay it.
At the same time, it's not the only great game I've played. When it comes to probability-centric games, I'm fond of Backgammon, deck builders, and computer strategy games which are all enjoyable when not played for stakes.
I think the first time Poker disturbed me is when I was at a table when somebody was going all-in every other hand for hours just bleeding a ton of money, not really playing the game, just having a sort of problem as everybody at the table stayed at that table swallowing the money. When you realise a lot of the fun the good players have who study poker strategy is not only at the expense of such people, but poker itself wouldn't be nearly as popular as it is if such people didn't exist and it was all very serious people reading strategy books who were all slowly losing money to the rake, the magic sort of fades. Even among the winning players, you see people who aren't technically losing money but can't stop themselves from playing despite the fact they're spending way too much time on the game, not really enjoying it, while barely making any money.
I don't know, Why not play a fun game where nobody has to suffer? You know who I see playing non-gambling probability games all the time? Former poker pros.
> poker REALLY doesn't work when it's for play money
I have a great college memory of taking an all-in no-money hand off a fraternity brother as a freshman prospect during rush week... with a pair of 3's (against an ace-high?).
Dealer to brother: "Why the hell did you go all in?"
Brother: "Because we weren't playing for money."
Dealer to me: "Why the hell did you call with 3's?"
Me: "Because we weren't playing for money, and he wasn't either."
Mafia rings that make money from bookmaking and then also deal in drugs, prostitution, protection rackets, etc have been nearly eliminated and live on today primarily due to Hollywood, The Sopranos, etc.
That's like saying that the only harm of a drug war is to the street dealers. All things being equal, I'd rather not live in a town where organized groups of people have a strong profit motive to pop their competition off.
I won't deny that underground gambling has all sorts of collateral damage, I just don't think that Disney causes far more collateral damage than these criminals ever did just in a non-violent way. They're less thuggish, more Bernie Madoff in their effects on society.
I sincerely and strongly believe legal gambling causes far more harm than criminals ever did. The reason gambling gets legalised is not because legalised gambling reduces harm. It's because legalised gambling can balance the books for some politician before the next election, because they can sell it as being "pro-fun", because gamblers themselves will vote for them, and because the harms are abstract, diffuse, and blamed on the gamblers themselves.
One of the oldest debates in government imho... yes, vices are bad. Yes, they're also human nature. Yes, prohibition is problematic, yes, decriminalization also has tradeoffs. There aren't any "correct" positions on these. It's just a game of moving around the harms.
We have seen immense harm from legal gambling in the UK since it was liberalised some years ago, far more than any illegal gambling ever caused in the UK. Whether that is also true of the US I can't say but I suspect that it is true to some extent.
Illegal gambling was not a big problem in the UK. A lot of the harm from gambling does not hinge on legality. It hinges on the suppliers manipulation of human psychology to induce people to continue to gamble well beyond their means resulting in people stealing from employers and family and committing suicide.
"Fifteen years on from the dawn of the Gambling Act 2005, and the landscape has changed beyond recognition. A casino can now be accessed from your pocket 24/7 and half of UK adults gamble at least once a month. But hiding in plain sight is a world of regret, exploitation and shattered lives underpinning an industry that claims to be ‘just a bit of fun’ generating £14bn in profit.
The House of Lords Gambling Industry Select Committee estimate that 60 per cent of online gambling profits come from the 5 per cent of customers experiencing gambling problems, with estimates of disordered gambling rates ranging from 340,000 to 1.4 million. The industry’s practices create disordered gamblers and then exploit them. The harm caused goes far beyond financial losses. It is estimated by Gambling with Lives that there are between 250 and 650 gambling related suicides every year."
>I think it's a good thing that gambling has been legalized and brought out the shadows
I'm not 100% sure on this one. The problem with gambling is it involves huge amounts of money, generally far more than the base product it is attached to. Much like MTX in games has changed the meta-game from playing the game to actually needing to buy as much in game content as possible to play the game, productized gambling changes the meta from the product to gambling. The further enshitification of the world around us.
I'd go even further to legal, but not advertized when it comes to gambling. It is considered a vice for a number of valid reasons.
The proper way to legitimize a vice is with heavy regulation. Half the screen should be a scrolling red banner stating that you could ruin your life with gambling. Random chance games should show the result a split second after the decision, with zero fanfare (to avoid fake near misses).
Same goes for smoking and drinking. Provide the product in a plain container plastered with warning labels.
>Half the screen should be a scrolling red banner stating that you could ruin your life with gambling.
We've had that forever, the biggest effect it has is legitimising the gambling industry, helping legitimise the idea that it's gamblers fault if they get addicted, and thus expanding gambling and thus making people poorer.
>Random chance games should show the result a split second after the decision, with zero fanfare (to avoid fake near misses).
This is a more interesting idea, and I don't think it's totally unviable to enforce it considering most gambling happens through fairly centralised avenues (major companies, app store, play store). I think it could be effective and is certainly one of the better pro-regulation ideas I've heard.
This is a good point. The gaming industry probably doesn't even care if "most" people tune out the ads. They are marketing to the whales, or trying to turn people into whales, and like MTX in games, they'll figure out how to milk the whales until they're dry, with bonuses, new bet types, fewer clicks to place bets, etc.
If someone desperately wants to gamble, they should be able to find them. If all the industry is doing is meeting an otherwise unmet vice demand, fine, okay, whatever, it's better than mob-ran gambling rings, but why on earth should we allow it to manufacture demand?
An argument can be made that a world where someone who is hell-bent on gambling being allowed to legally gamble is better than one where he isn't. Fine.
But what argument can be made that a world where more people are gambling is better than a world where fewer people are gambling? Why encourage it? Who benefits from installing heroin vending machines in schools?
Because gambling is a normalized, built-in part of sports broadcasts. There's no mention of age limits, addiction, drawbacks, etc. I watch the UFC and it's not even a commercial but part of the actual show. Odds, favorites, sponsor messages, etc. are built right into the broadcast.
I don't think gambling is the worst thing out there but it's not a net plus for society and overall cheapens sports.
It's just endless and I think gambling is a vice. Why make your kid a sports fan if its not about any generally positive things (perseverance, cultural touchstones, physical fitness) and just about putting them on the track to becoming a gambler.
Sure those are bad too, ultimately my sports fandom was a way to connect with my father and friends locally growing up. Truth is it's just entertainment and there's other ways to accomplish those things in 2023.
These sports leagues are cashing in on the fact that live sports were the only thing propping up the lucrative cable tv and network tv business models, extracting whatever value they can. They are trying to transition to over the top streaming services and maybe it will happen or maybe a lot of people like me will decide there's more to life than if my local sports team defeats another city's sports team.
I think it's a good thing that gambling has been legalized and brought out the shadows.
From time to time, I try to look up the impact of the newly legalized gambling in the US. I can never find any good comparison about addiction, people who got into trouble because gambling is so easy now, etc. I still know people who put in bets with "their guy", and I also know people who were otherwise OK who now all of a sudden have an addiction because gambling is basically frictionless. Overall, it's a big question mark for me as to if this is a good thing or not.
A sibling commenter mentioned smoking ads. Even with cigarettes, you had to physically go to a store and physically pull out your payment method to buy them. With new online gambling, gambling is as frictionless as posting a tweet for anyone of age. Advertising is a big part of this yes, and like you allude to, the types of impulsive bets that are presented is even more ridiculous.
There's a far greater chance of harm to society in general by removing the stigma and making it easy than there ever was by making it something that only happened on the down low. Nobody's lives are ultimately enriched by betting unless you win a gigantic jackpot, and even then there are negative issues with that.
Disclosure - I work for Disney but not in a decision-making role, I'm a nobody.
Yes, the company has been making moves recently that look exactly like any other company in the market rather than sticking to family values in all things. But the company is also structured like any other company - it's publicly traded and the CEO, Iger, reports to the board and the shareholders and has a fiduciary duty to maximize the share price, which contradicts a duty to remain family friendly or keep with Walt's express preferences. So, it's not mystery to me why this kind of thing happens, it's by design. Personally, I think the fiduciary duty thing is not a great way to make decisions.
This is simply not true. They have duties to the shareholders and the best interests of the company, which is not the same thing as maximizing the share price.
It's sort of true. Like "no one got fired for buying IBM", no CEO gets fired for "raising share value". It's hard to argue that moves that raise the revenue and share price for a company are not in the best interest of the company and/or shareholders. Particularly when it's in a way that trades potential future value for realized value right now... the costs only get revealed in hindsight long after accountability for the CEO is possible.
Good point, I was oversimplifying. A strong CEO can make the case that doing X or Y, while it may not maximize the share price directly, is the right thing to do for other reasons. Iger is actually such a "strong" CEO, but he has to pick his battles and where to expend social capital too.
This is isn't a reliable strategy, since even if 9 out of 10 out times the judges agree and toss out the case, all it takes is for that one time they disagree.
Only in a very short-sighted way. Actions have long-term consequences, including brand identity actions especially when there are as many eyeballs as there are on Disney. These consequences hurt shareholders.
The advent of sports betting has become so fatiguing. It's impossible to watch a football game without back to back to back betting commercials. Announcers pre-game talking about odds, over-unders, etc. I can't help but feel like the chickens are going to come home to roost.
I've had a bunch of friends that went from never gambling to spending a few hundred dollars per Sunday placing random bets. All destined to lose eventually due to the insane 10-15% vig (ie. a coin flip is priced at -110 or -115).
The few friends (sharps) that I had that were able to earn a profit over a large enough sample were all eventually backed off by the major sports betting sites. One site backed off a large long term winner in order to "protect the player against creating a compulsive habit or addiction". It's literally a racket. You can't win long term. You can only lose.
> The few friends (sharps) that I had that were able to earn a profit over a large enough sample were all eventually backed off by the major sports betting sites. One site backed off a large long term winner in order to "protect the player against creating a compulsive habit or addiction". It's literally a racket. You can't win long term. You can only lose.
That's incredible, so these sites track gamblers and figure out which ones actually know what they are doing and then refuse their bets?
Current leadership is ringing what's left from one of the world's most recognized brands while retreating from Disney's original defining ethos that helped enable them to build and captivate audiences across generations. It's a sad display.
Disney used to have an extremely lucrative niche, based around safe family brands. Franchising and parks were their money printers and their movies where just vehicles of advertisement. They kept access to their legacy movies in short supply and kept demand constant.
Current leadership has turned the company into one of many media companies and have exposed themselves to a high range of risk factors. They wanted to become king of the hill and Iger mimiced the predatory growth of big-tech. You are right to point out that Disney joined the trend of pure growth-chasing (plus cheap money from big ESG/DIE asset managers which lead to another host of issues down the line).
Betting fatigue will set in, more states will legalize and the hype will settle. Disney might want to look longer term as in 2-3 years these investments will lose their "shine" and might be a liability. I could be wrong, but as an avid sport fan (and watcher of ESPN) I'm sure sick of the betting ads and I'm not alone.
I believe it will be similar to legalizing cannabis. In my local region, there was massive hype around the first stores and now there's too many to support the market, and the weaker stores are struggling.
A key difference here is that cannabis marketing is limited by rules similar to the rules around sale of alcohol.
Gambling lacks most of those key controls. For example, betting organizations are allowed to offer free trials of their product, you see a lot of that advertised on billboards. Get $100 free when you create an account.
Also, gambling mechanics can be integrated into other products. App Store gaming is a good example here, too.
In the UK, alcohol is sold as a loss leader by grocery stores. https://www.ias.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/rp05062008... and their rate of alcoholism is 150% of the USA's rate, where similar tactics are forbidden. I'm not saying that alone is responsible, but using it as an example of how looser regulation leads to more effective marketing and more participation.
I believe we'll see similar tactics, maybe something akin to bundling, with gambling here. Get $50 free betting credits a month with your subscription to Disney plus. Get $200 free with your ticket to Disneyland. Epic Games holiday sale with $10 gambling credits with every purchase.
The goal will be to integrate gambling with daily life enough that anyone with a problem will constantly have opportunities to spend, and for everyone else it becomes a normal hobby, one tap away on their phone at all times.
And this is a market where behavioral targeted advertising will really shine.
Hmm, I wouldn't say alcohol is a good example of something well regulated.
There should really be cancer warnings on every bottle to really whack people over the head that scoffing at smokers exposing themselves to lung cancer while drinking cancer juice is majorly stupid. People are mostly naive to how much risk they're taking by drinking. Less than smoking - but still a pretty decent amount.
I doubt it. Betting is very addictive to a lot of people and many won’t quit until they are cut off. When the sports book is in their phone, they will have a hard time resisting the temptation.
And the problem gamblers have leagues of sycophants that will happily yell at you that gambling is entertainment and it's fine and don't look at how bad gambling is in places like Australia that liberalized gambling and have pokies in the gast station and had certain people ARSON BOMB A GODDAMN YOUTUBER FOR TALKING ABOUT THE CORRUPTION IN THEIR GOVERNMENT
Just in imaginary numbers lets say the gambling market goes from 1 billion to 10 billion dollars per year, but 100 billion dollars of investment money comes in. Those groups with bad capitalization plans are going to fail to earn a return, but make no mistake the market has made more profit than ever before. The weak competitors eventually lose leaving a few mega companies raking in the profit.
Iger wasn't sure about the purchase of ESPN in the first place, and we can see why.
The story is really about how the internet has done a lot of damage to sports television, and sports media in general. Basically everyone covering sports has had to make significant cuts. When the value of ads drop, it doesn't take very long for gambling ads to be the most profitable. This isn't just an American story either: European sports media is also going all in on gambling.
If the pushes for ties with gambling get regulated to oblivion (and they might), ultimately what we'll see is that sports league's viewership rights will not keep going up forever, as they seem to have gone for decades. This is ultimately why this whole gambling deal happens: Today, it's really hard to make a good profit from the sports content, given the current subscription revenue, and how many ads you can really subject people to.
For those of us that wish for less gambling, I am not necessarily optimistic though: See also how the market of videogames that rely on gambling mechanics with real money pouring in for every roll are larger than the entire traditional videogame console market...and that includes sports games which are already relying on a whole lot of booster pack opening revenue.
>Today, it's really hard to make a good profit from the sports content,
Are you sure the “good” in this statement should not be changed to “sufficient”?
Just because broadcasters overpaid for broadcasting rights does not indicate profit, or even good profit, cannot be earned.
Although, broadcasters like ESPN do not even need to exist in a world with broadband. They are trying to stave off their inevitable decline in relevance, and so rather than shut down, they are willing to entertain business with people who they normally would not have.
But I am sure NFL/MLB/European Football Leagues and the rest could make plenty of profit selling video streams of the games directly to customers.
There's The Walt Disney Company, a publicly-traded company, and then there's the Disney brand (one of many under the Company's umbrella), as in Mickey Mouse, theme parks, Snow White, etc.
Conflating the two is pointless and is only done to create clickbait articles such as this one.
This feels like Disney is just trying to squeeze every last drop of juice out of their assets while they're in a bad place. Especially this deal which is interesting, but not actually BIG in terms of Disneys scale. They're giving up a significant 'value' for not amazing revenue.
Hot take - their involvement in gambling is much better than lobbying for copyright term extension and preventing Mickey Mouse from entering into public domain.
I'm fascinated with the Dave Portnoy angle to all this. He wasn't a good "fit" at Penn, but he drove billions in sales for them - which helped them parlay into the Disney deal. He got paid $500m for his company a few years back and now buys it back for $1. There's still a lot of "strings attached", like Penn gets 50% of proceeds in a future sale... but he's already claimed he wont be selling.
So is he a winner or a loser in all of this? I suppose it depends on how you value your "freedom" in exchange for millions of dollars.
It's actually a really complex answer. Yes, he did great work advertising for them, but there's a big difference between "Some guy over there advertising your product" and "Your employee advertising the product". The problem Penn had was that when they talk to regulators they can't say "We don't know that guy", so they constantly got in trouble with regulators and faced a lot more scrutiny because of the reputation of Dave. So it wasn't a match made in heaven, but also the ESPN deal is just such a big fish that no matter what given the opportunity Penn probably would've moved heaven and earth for ESPN.
Having said that, Sports betting is by far the biggest advertiser in the sports-media segment, so Penn have handed the company back to Dave and said "Oh, btw, you're not allowed your biggest source of revenue". It is undoubtedly going to be tough for Portnoy to make the economics work on a sports-media business without gambling advertising as a key revenue stream. Having said that, that's not necessarily what he cares about. He's rich, he's got his company back, he can say what he likes. If Barstool collapsed tomorrow I don't think he'd be happy, but he'd be producing new content within minutes.
Not sure he "drove billions in sales". Initial projections were to capture 15% or more of the US sports betting market but reality was somewhere around 3-5%. Major underperformer. There were certainly many problems with the product besides simply the brand but there's little evidence the brand was a net positive.
Great for Portnoy, he got the proceeds from a major "exit" (a few hundred million dollars) and he still owns the company.
> Penn’s “interactive” segment — consisting largely though not exclusively of its “online sports betting and casino app called Barstool Sportsbook and Casino” and its in-casino Barstool-branded retail sportsbooks — went from $121 million in revenue in 2020 to $663 million in 2022, and was up another 66% year-over-year in the first half of 2023, for a run rate of almost $1 billion.
Capturing market share != driving billions in sales. Especially in a highly competitive market.
You are attributing all of Penn's sports wagering revenue to Barstool. Penn owns more than a dozen casinos. Given the severe underperformance of the reality vs projections, many in the industry believed that the Barstool brand was a net negative to Penn's efforts.
If anybody believed that the Barstool brand was successfully bringing in revenue, some other bidder would have bought it from Penn. The fact that they abandoned it for nothing kind of tells you how much value Penn believed that it had.
It seems bizarre that gambling is a growing industry. I guess rich people with boring lives are at a point where they'll do anything for a short thrill.
There's lots of rich and famous young adults in the YouTube space that regularly go gambling, and it's honestly one of their most shameful habits. Especially if it influences a bunch of young people to also get into gambling.
There's also a giant new streaming platform, Kick, which is entirely backed by rich gambling sites and they're not afraid to bankroll big streamers to join their site.
Whether this really drives the industry overall would be a separate study, though. For one, this was conducted before federal legalization, in which case the lottery and charity bingo were probably the most accessible legal forms of gambling to most people who didn't regularly travel to Las Vegas. Those are inherently poor person forms of gambling. So whether this is still true we don't know. Maybe more importantly, the volume of individuals being larger in poor neighborhood doesn't necessarily mean the volume of money is larger. Phil Mickelson was just alleged to have bet over a billion dollars over the past 30 years. Assuming something like an average of a hundred thousand is enough to be "problem gambling" for poorer people over the span of 30 years, he matched 10,000 of them just by himself. It raises the question of whether gambling is a whale-driven industry or not.
Lottery and charity gambling is a bit of an interesting thing. It's a tax on the poor but it's not as if the government won't tax the poor if you take away gambling. Governments throughout history across societies have always avoided taxing the rich as they're savvy at avoiding taxes, whereas the poor always pay.
Governments and charities have restraint that for profit businesses just don't, and free market driven competition and efficiency is NOT a good thing in this context.
Mickelson may have bet a billion dollars (if you believe the rumors spread by a convicted criminal now selling a book, likely exaggerated) but he definitely did not lose a billion. The same source says it's approaching $100 million but even that number seems inflated.
It's not bizarre to me at all. Gambling is at the heart of the modern mobile gaming industry and its exploitation of its customers. On top of that, gambling companies are paying influencers to promote gambling like the cigarette companies used to pay movie stars.
It would be for the good of everybody if the entire industry, sports betting, casino's, p2w freemium games, lootboxes including for cosmetics, TCG "booster packs", paying streamers to promote this poison, all of it is better off if it were banned honestly. Every sale of any game should give people the same cards, same characters, same equipment, same cosmetics, none of this gambling garbage.
> Gambling is at the heart of the modern mobile gaming industry
Gambling is at the heart of the entire global financial system. Everyone with RobinHood, a brokerage account, a 401(k) or pension participates in the great roulette wheel known as the Stock Market. We're all placing bets--just on MSFT or AAPL instead of 14 and 29. Or our retirement account is putting it on Red. Some of us here are putting it in their startups, but at the end of the day, it all boils down to wagering money on unknown future events, which is the definition of gambling.
This isn't even close to the same thing and you know it. Purchasing capital assets in a retirement account is not equivalent to a bet with a binary outcome, especially when the other option as a saver is to simply hold cash instead, which is also not riskless and has never outperformed ownership stake in a broad sampling of all businesses over the average workspan of a human laborer. Putting excess income into stock is a bet stock will outperform other asset classes. Keeping it in cash is a bet cash will outperform other asset classes. Not saving for retirement at all is a bet that whatever your country's form of nationalized pension is will be enough, or you'll die before you retire.
The reason using all of your disposal income on roulette bets as a retirement strategy is bad is not because there is some probability of increasing your bankroll and some probability of decreasing it. It's bad because the long run expected outcome of repeated bets is negative. The house always has an edge. That dynamic is exactly reversed when putting retirement savings into a stock index. Betting that your entire national economy won't collapse for over four decades is inherently a smarter bet.
Your point is that the gamble has a positive EV (true), but it's still gambling. Instead of betting against the house, you're betting against other investors, and the "house" (financial institutions) takes a small rake. So OK it's more like poker than roulette.
Aside from the gamification you see with Robin Hood, I don't have much issue with gambling on the stock market as it's one of the few gambles that makes the average bettor wealthier, so it doesn't have the same socially deleterious effect. Bettors may be going up against far more vicious sharks than you will ever see at a poker table, but that doesn't seem to be reason enough not to play the game.
It just needs to be strongly regulated, and not in the way it is now, where wealthy people are allowed more freedom than the poor.
One grift I've noticed with sponsored gacha streams is how the streamer always have exceptionally amazing luck. They always manage to pull a top-tier character very quickly, and then they spend the whole stream showing it off.
This kind of behavior is beyond predatory and should really be illegal, because it's obvious that the streamer is playing with far better odds than regular people.
Heck, if you want to keep it legal that's probably fine as well, but at least require clear disclosure when the streamer is getting improved drop rates.
There are many salty streams where the streamer does not get what he wants. Having done some gacha pulls and received what I wanted on the first pull with 0.07% odds, it truly is random. One card I have took... let's just say a lot of money... to get. Characters are available for a limited time and then may or may not ever return. For example, the rare character Fujino in FGO could be summoned in 2020, then there was no idea whether she would ever return. It turns out she did return in 2021 and 2022, but her next projected availability is in 2027.
I am not saying that the streamer you referred to does not receive preferential treatment, but FGO streams are definitely random.
I think gambling is rarely rich people with boring lives seeking a quick thrill and more often not rich people living lives of quiet desperation chasing a dopamine high that they can sort of back-rationalize as a get-rich-quick scheme. Gambling is absolutely predatory, it exploits a flaw in the human firmware that used to make us good hunter gatherers but now just makes us targets for people who understand the bug.
It's not rich people who are gambling. It's folks who, like when marijuana was legalized, now have an easy/legal outlet to gamble on sports they were already watching without having to deal with a booky and the risks that entails.
More ruined lives to follow. I had a few friends in college whose lives were ruined by gambling, one of them even died. Perhaps the pendullum will swing back the other way after it does a lot of damage in our society. Online gambling is like having hard drugs in your pocket all the time.
In Japan you can't show ads for Power Ranger toys during an airing of Power Rangers. Draft King wouldn't be allowed to show commercials during a baseball game and definitely would not be allowed to show you the betting odds in the seventh inning to make sure you bet before the game is over. The betting ads are just so ridiculous and blanket the broadcast that they make it seem like you're weird if you aren't constantly betting on every game.