Any game that offers a virtual currency purchaseable with real currency (be it coins, diamonds or energy rays) should be avoided. Especially if you have children.
Not at all. It's just that they have reached high visibility in some markets - mobile, concretely. It's a combination of marketing engineering and tacit complicity on the part of Apple/Google.
99% of mobile games do. If you want to keep your children away from these things, you don't really have much of a choice beyond not letting them have a phone at all.
One possible alternative to banning the phone or total surrender could be finding proper games for them, instead of these slot-machines-in-disguise.
One would need alternative App browsers for that, the default ones don't allow filtering out apps with in-app purchases since they are too lucrative. Here's one:
Thanks for this! I've been searching for this simple filter (no in app purchases) for a long time.
Unfortunately, this particular site is Apple only, so I'll have to keep searching for Android counterpart...