It quite literally isn't. If you're in psychology and neurology, this is quite literally a biological process that the human brain has very, very little control over, and they are absolutely the same thing. They're actually identical. The only difference is with the drugs, you have negative physical reactions to flooding your body with toxins. Microtransactions won't destroy your liver, but the addiction side of these things is IDENTICAL.

The thing you need to understand is that in the current day and age, so much data on consumer behaviour has been amassed that there are billion dollar algorithms that exist specifically to tell businesses everything about your behaviour and identify the precise mechanisms that trigger impulsive spending and extreme consumerism. The human algorithm is invaluable because we have effectively created a behavioral predictor that can tell corporations the best exploits (which are ABSOLUTELY physiological and hardwired into our biology as humans) and how to profit off of those to the highest degree.

Addiction to drugs simply predates the addiction to gambling and microtransactions because drugs existed first and historically have been accessible to particularly vulnerable people. These games with microtransactions are absolutely the exact same set of biological mechanisms that drive people to consumer behaviour we are discussing now.

Just because someone isn't injecting some gun or character skin into their veins doesn't mean the brain isn't giving them the exact same chemical reward (dopamine, serotonin) drugs do. How do you think drugs work? They're taking advantage of our chemical biology and giving us a shitload of positive chemical feedback from the hormones that literally make our brains function in a productive manner. There's a reason people with ADHD, for example, are extremely vulnerable to micro transactions, and it's because they have a dopamine deficiency that causes their brains to seek dopamine where they can find it. It's why tiktok is the adhd dopamine fire hose, and it's the reason micro transactions are a huge issue for people with ADHD (especially with object permanence being a huge issue that only amplifies the behavioral symptoms we see in their spending behaviour).

Marketing, sales, and products are at their core, structured to appeal to human psychology---specifically the psychology that gets us to spend, ideally repeatedly, and keep doing that. That psychology is completely physiological, and utilizes many of the exact same mechanisms that literal drugs and drug addiction take advantage of.

So yes, it's actually an extremely accurate thing to compare. The fact that this has to be explained in every one of these threads that I see goes to show how little of an understanding the average person even has on marketing, consumer behaviour, algorithms, and what makes a product sell.

It's also exactly why my career has been so fucking easy. I work in sales in the tech sphere and am heavy into marketing and sales / marketing psychology, and I take a direct interest in the physiological side of this field because humans, at the end of the day, are just a bunch of mobile meat computers that are very predictable, very easy to manipulate, and have an exceptionally hard time escaping that reality. I don't think some of you people realize how biological all of this really is. These billion dollar algorithms are worth this much money for a reason. The only difference between drugs and gambling is the mechanism / product itself, but the psychological mechanisms being used are the same, and the biology behind the psychology is very, very real.

You get the same mental reward doing a line of coke as you do winning at a slot machine, opening a loot crate, etc.

And I'll be the first one to tell you that corporations are more than aware of this. There's a shitload of time, money and manpower that goes into ensuring this shit continues, for a reason. It's unethical as fuck and I wouldn't be working in this if the VERY specific angle of marketing I actually do wasn't actually a helpful one (the actual product I work with is legal related and designed to get people legal help, rather than some dopamine slot machine). But I take a deep professional interest in all of this because understanding the psychology, biology, algorithms, and strategy at play here is essential to being very, very good at what I do because my product may not be designed to get the consumer a dopamine burst, but the tactics I use to sell that product to advertisers absolutely are ENTIRELY rooted in that. The end consumer isn't my focus, but the person buying and using my product that connects them to those consumers is, and alllllllll of the above applies.

Yall need to realize EVERYTHING about this species is biological. Everything you want is predictable with enough information on you, and across the wider human audience, human behaviour is insanely reliable. Why? Biology, baby. It's all biology.

The same strategy your local meth dealer relies on for repeat customers is the exact same strategy every corporation on earth is using for repeat customers. The only difference is the product and the social stigma. That's it.

Take it from someone who has made a whole career off this shit. I wouldn't be making this much money if it didn't work.