Gambling is a widespread activity, sure. But mostly when gambling and addiction is mentioned together, people don’t go for most types. A little wager among friends is gambling? Sure. Playing numbers from time to time? Alright a little charm. Organizing or attending a poker night among friends? Have fun, but don’t overdo it. A holiday trip to Vegas? Limit yourself to a budget and don’t go over it. You wanna be a regular member in a gambling den? Get your shit together. You are going on a cruise with gambling included so you don’t wanna let the government get a wind of your activities? What a naughty rich boy.

Going by all video games to be addictive, I’m going to assume you never played a proper story game without a grind element. By that logic of something simply having you spend time being an addictive activity, you can even call walking an addictive activity. A lot of games offer something novel, fresh or progressive value to them that makes them worth spending time on. Play a story game like Bioshock? You are in a world of treat with a book-like story telling that is also mixed together with engagement-enchancer elements like fps mechanics and abilities that will only take about 15-20 hours. Go with an RPG that is not just a dress-up or level-up, Disco Elysium for example? Your existential faculties are stretched to the edge for 50 hours. Hell, even go with Factorio. You will be playing a glorified lego game that helped you develop creativity and object grouping in your childhood, only with the adult version of that called engineering. These will not ask of you a specifically and horribly lengthened grind just to see purple sparks instead of yellow sparks. Especially in that these don’t have facsimiles like the most mobile gacha, moba, “rpg”, card, or similar other Korean or Chinese games pour out of a conveyor belt. You can enjoy playing these games, but don’t ask for praise or acceptance as they are as repetitive and ubiquitous as breathing or watching Windows XP screen savers.

Also, if we are going to count critical acclaim, community, genre differences, financial success simply as popularity, we would have facial mask producers as the most popular industry in the previous years, have some film received badly by critics be never heard of or vica versa, have only superhero films and no art film festivals, and only invest in gambling ever in all work efforts. These are all different aspects a game development company will consider, at least if they are not focused on solely financial success as shown in regurgitated gacha games.

As for gaming addiction, yes it is not different from playing gacha games or shiny copy paste games, really. These years, there are thousands of games that a gamer will hear or see of per year and be piqued about a hundred of them probably. Gacha games are alike in this regard: They will pour out tens of daily activities that will keep a gamer hooked all day long, same as those hundred games a year will keep another gamer on the hook all year long. This is only on the time aspect, tho. With gacha games, you get regurgitated daily missions one after the other; with 100 different games, you get at least 10 novel ones out of them and probably will play about 75 with a somewhat fresh aspect to them, and the game development industry is not a monolith on what games to release and profit from every year, unlike the gacha game maker being solely responsible for what daily activities to regurgitate and profit from.