A Polygon video essay examines the confused and inconsistent way gambling-like content in video games is regulated and understood. It highlights how strategic deck-building games such as "Luck Be a Landlord" and "Balatro" have received high age ratings from app stores and ratings boards purely because they borrow visual motifs from gambling, such as slot machines and poker hands, despite containing no real-money mechanics.

By contrast, loot boxes and gacha games, which do involve genuine spending and exploitative reward mechanics, often pass through the same ratings systems with little scrutiny. Both featured games are one-off purchases with no microtransactions, underscoring the disconnect between how ratings bodies flag surface-level gambling imagery versus how they treat actual monetised gambling-adjacent systems.