“Oh I got so lucky! It only took 20 pulls to get Boobina!”
Yeah man, bet that felt a lot better than just unlocking her by doing her story quests like any normal game. Maybe you need to be a gambling addict or something.
Gachapon isn’t gambling, though I could see why one could be confused.
Gachapon (from which Gacha games get their name) is a Japanese word that essentially translates to “capsule toy.” It refers to the machine which you insert a coin and spin a knob, which causes the machine to drop a plastic (usually) capsule out of it. You know, like a gumball machine. Or those candy machines that were always full of banana hard candies near the exit at Ross or TJ Maxx.
With gachapon, you are paying for a capsule toy. You aren’t buying a specific capsule toy, you are buying a single capsule toy from the ones in the machine, and whichever one you get is random. However, you aren’t winning or losing, because you always “win the prize.” It might not be the one you want, but you always get what you pay for. Similar concept to blind-box toys.
With gambling, you spend money on a chance to win more money, usually. There is also a chance you win nothing and lose the money you spent. Gambling is when you spend money on something that can (and will often) give you nothing in return, which doesn’t happen with gachapon. With gachapon, you always “win,” but with gambling you very often lose. Gacha games always give you something valuable to the gameplay, even if you get duplicates of something you already have (makes the character more powerful, for example). Gambling often just takes your money and gives you absolutely nothing back except a sad, empty feeling.
Also, just don’t spend money if you don’t want to. It’s not hard. Nobody forces you to spend money on any game with a gun to your head (hopefully). Just have self-control, it’s easy. And if for some reason you don’t have self-control, work on it. Improve yourself.
Gacha games usually have enough free tickets built into it as rewards for playing the game that you can unlock almost everything you need to keep playing the game for free anyway. Just don’t expect to unlock everything in 3 hours.
I disagree that the reasoning you have makes gacha not gambling. It’s definitely still gambling if you ask me.
The crucial thing to note is that gacha and other loot box mechanics activate and exploits the exact same human psychological weaknesses as traditional gambling does. The point is to incite the player to keep playing “just one more time” because they might get that big win, that dopamine high fix.
That’s the underlying problem with gambling and the problem is the same for gacha and loot boxes. So I think it may as well be called gambling. But even if you don’t agree on using that term, hopefully you agree the the psychological effects are the same.
Great comment except the part about telling people to just have self control. The FOMO aspect that gacha and gambling rely on is a real problematic thing. These game exist specifically because they can tap into that.
Gachapon and gambling might prey on the same psychological tendencies humans have, but they are not the same thing, which is the point of my comment.
I fail to see why saying “If you lack self-control, work on improving yourself” is a bad thing to say, or somehow wrong. If you cannot exercise self-control, then you will not have a happy life. You will find yourself constantly broke from impulse spending on things you don’t need or that give you no return on value other than “I might miss it.” You do not need a gacha game for that, as there are plenty of other things in real life that can do the same thing that people here wouldn’t be downvoting or commenting on, for example:
attending a local farmer’s market
attending live musician performances
attending a live artist or author event
eating promotional food items at restaurants
attending hobby and art conventions
Everything has a time limit. Nothing exists for the span of eternity here, and thus everything has a chance to become, if it is not already, a time limited item or event that preys on FOMO for different personal interests. But if you have self-control, FOMO doesn’t have hardly any effect on you. Your do not HAVE to do X, or see Y, or buy Z. It is not a requirement of life. You aren’t going to ever be able to do, see, or buy everything you want. Its a fact of life. Self-control helps you realize this.
Saying no to yourself is powerful. You dont always have to say no, but self-control helps you to know when you should. And thus, it removes the power FOMO has over you. You stop caring about what other people think or say, and it gives you the power to stay financially responsible, and helps keep you mentally healthy.
Why is this bad? Even in the context of what I am talking about, if someone decides to play a gacha game, they should definitely have self-control. A person with no self-control will quickly find themselves peniless playing a gacha game, but they were probably going to be peniless eithout the gacha game too. Its not the fault of the game, it is the fault of the player.
Self control isn’t guaranteed for everyone. Your take here is pretty ableist.
You’d place blame on victims instead of abusers. Companies that have spent fortunes to make sure their systems go after easy targets. People who aren’t neurotypical, people who grew up with different cultures that didn’t prepare them for this or any of multiple other sources that would make them easier to take advantage of over and over.
To be fair, that’s not an issue isolated to gacha games. Plenty of modern titles take old style unlocks (skins, bonus characters etc) and turns them into small, often paid, DLC. It sucks but it’s a wider problem within the industry.
When I went on the main Genshin subreddit, I was so baffled that people do little pulling rituals, and even do parties with thematic food and decoration for characters to influence their gacha luck 😵💫 Maybe they didn’t take it that seriously, but it still felt like a very unhealthy attitude towards such a predatory game.
You must use your pickpocket skill on your mother’s Cloak of Shopping, retrieve the Rectangle of Potentia. Carefully enter the Sacred Digits into the Portal of Reclamation to receive your reward.
Go carefully young adventurers, for the penalty for failure is great, and La Chancla is indeed fierce.
I can butt in on this a little bit. The problem with statements like this is that they treat “gacha” (the monetisation and unit recruitment system) as a genre when gacha games are too varied to be locked under this single umbrella (at least for a conversation like this). To name a few, you have games like:
Arknights (tower defence)
Azur Lane (bullet-hell kinda sorta)
Bang Dream (rhythm game)
Genshin Impact (action-adventure)
Girls’ Frontline (tactical autobattler)
Persona 5X (JRPG, just gacha Persona)
All of them play differently, offer different challenges and the impact of their gacha systems can be all over the place. Sometimes there are limited character pulls which have serious effect on gameplay (most of the modern titles), other times characters are super easy to obtain and improve as most of the monetisation comes from character costumes etc (Girls’ Frontline, Azur Lane for example).
Besides that, many of them have engaging stories, which combined with offering lots of content and being able to play them for free makes the whole thing even more appealing.
Not that the aspect of “oh cool, I unlocked new character” doesn’t play any role or that there’s nothing predatory about most of the games using this mechanic, it’s just that “gacha” mechanics aren’t always the sole or main factor keeping people playing.
TL;DR: They are just free games that can, but aren’t always, predatory with a specific gameplay mechanic. Often offer enough value for free players to have fun with them.
I agree with you but then I see people calling themselves gacha gamers and hopping into every new gacha regardless of genre or gameplay so I just assumed I just didn’t get it.
Oh, absolutely. I assume people who play exclusively gacha games do so due to the combination of F2P, regular content updates and excitement from pulling for characters/gambling but that’s just a personal guess. I don’t have any hard data to confirm it.
As for folks playing them regardless of genre, that’s not really exclusive to gacha games - there’s plenty of people who play whatever catches their attention, myself included. Strategy, racing, shooters, adventure games… if it clicks with me I’ll play anything (gacha or not). There’s too much fun stuff out there to limit yourself to a single genre, in my opinion.
MapleS had these “gacha machines ingame starting 10+years ago” thats how i knew what gacha was before it became a thing. I only played the main game until it got to grindy and required actual cash if you wan to further your account . it is then i started search cracked version which were fun for a time.
So do I, I’m just saying that many wonder “why people play gacha games” without realising (or caring) that there’s actual “game” part outside of the monetisation itself.
Yeah, I put 2000+ hours into Genshin over 4 years and have like 75 characters without ever spending any money. But the game is still so full of psychological dark patterns that would squeeze out the last penny from those whose personality or neurodiversity makes them vulnerable against such manipulation.
And yet again, the core of the issue of capitalism. As Stephanie Sterling put it many a time, the companies’ attitude is “Why be satisfied with a lot of money, when we could have all the money.”
My main game is the already mentioned Girls’ Frontline (the first one), which is thankfully old enough to come out before the modern monetisation practises and psychological tricks became the norm. There’s no limited pull currency, no need for character dupes (can be replaced by a resource that is so easy to get I can’t even spend it all), no character specific events to push the new and shiny unit etc.
It does have skin gacha for most (but not all) character skins but even then you can use farmable resource for that + getting duplicate costumes turns them into “Black Cards” which can be exchanged for specific outfit. It’s still a bad system and a black mark on an otherwise extremely free-2-play friendly game.
I feel like the most important part of playing gacha games is the ability to just walk away if a title ends up being monetised in a way that affects your enjoyment or well being (for those with lack of self-control). There’s plenty of fun to be had for free, no need to give into FOMO and suffering through predatory balancing decisions when there’s so many options on the market.
As someone with 2000+ hours in Genshin, I completely agree 😆 I only play for exploration nowadays because the story actively pushed me away, while the gambling never appealed to me. I wish we could just unlock characters via quests. I get no joy from a lucky draw, so I just treat gacha pulls in batches of guaranteed unlocks, like the price of this character is 160 pulls and that’s it. But the whole monetisation is disgustingly predatory for those who are even a little susceptible to it.
For the ones I play, the actual gameplay is the appeal; and I accept the gacha only if it’s reasonably permissive to free players.
The genre definitely has a recurring issue with power scaling, to get people to roll for the newest gooner bait, and when that becomes too apparent, it kills my interest. That’s the other thing: You have to prepare your sanity for the inevitable day you’ll stop playing that game and sacrifice hours of “character progress” to find something else fun. Heck, could just be another gacha that’s bending over backwards to cater to new players.
Any gacha.
“Oh I got so lucky! It only took 20 pulls to get Boobina!”
Yeah man, bet that felt a lot better than just unlocking her by doing her story quests like any normal game. Maybe you need to be a gambling addict or something.
Eh at least it’s cheaper than actual casinos, let them have it lol
And then half the time, “Boobina” is like a 11 year old girl.
It seems like you DO understand why gachas are popular. They are gambling.
Gachapon isn’t gambling, though I could see why one could be confused.
Gachapon (from which Gacha games get their name) is a Japanese word that essentially translates to “capsule toy.” It refers to the machine which you insert a coin and spin a knob, which causes the machine to drop a plastic (usually) capsule out of it. You know, like a gumball machine. Or those candy machines that were always full of banana hard candies near the exit at Ross or TJ Maxx.
With gachapon, you are paying for a capsule toy. You aren’t buying a specific capsule toy, you are buying a single capsule toy from the ones in the machine, and whichever one you get is random. However, you aren’t winning or losing, because you always “win the prize.” It might not be the one you want, but you always get what you pay for. Similar concept to blind-box toys.
With gambling, you spend money on a chance to win more money, usually. There is also a chance you win nothing and lose the money you spent. Gambling is when you spend money on something that can (and will often) give you nothing in return, which doesn’t happen with gachapon. With gachapon, you always “win,” but with gambling you very often lose. Gacha games always give you something valuable to the gameplay, even if you get duplicates of something you already have (makes the character more powerful, for example). Gambling often just takes your money and gives you absolutely nothing back except a sad, empty feeling.
Also, just don’t spend money if you don’t want to. It’s not hard. Nobody forces you to spend money on any game with a gun to your head (hopefully). Just have self-control, it’s easy. And if for some reason you don’t have self-control, work on it. Improve yourself.
Gacha games usually have enough free tickets built into it as rewards for playing the game that you can unlock almost everything you need to keep playing the game for free anyway. Just don’t expect to unlock everything in 3 hours.
I disagree that the reasoning you have makes gacha not gambling. It’s definitely still gambling if you ask me.
The crucial thing to note is that gacha and other loot box mechanics activate and exploits the exact same human psychological weaknesses as traditional gambling does. The point is to incite the player to keep playing “just one more time” because they might get that big win, that dopamine high fix.
That’s the underlying problem with gambling and the problem is the same for gacha and loot boxes. So I think it may as well be called gambling. But even if you don’t agree on using that term, hopefully you agree the the psychological effects are the same.
Great comment except the part about telling people to just have self control. The FOMO aspect that gacha and gambling rely on is a real problematic thing. These game exist specifically because they can tap into that.
Gachapon and gambling might prey on the same psychological tendencies humans have, but they are not the same thing, which is the point of my comment.
I fail to see why saying “If you lack self-control, work on improving yourself” is a bad thing to say, or somehow wrong. If you cannot exercise self-control, then you will not have a happy life. You will find yourself constantly broke from impulse spending on things you don’t need or that give you no return on value other than “I might miss it.” You do not need a gacha game for that, as there are plenty of other things in real life that can do the same thing that people here wouldn’t be downvoting or commenting on, for example:
Everything has a time limit. Nothing exists for the span of eternity here, and thus everything has a chance to become, if it is not already, a time limited item or event that preys on FOMO for different personal interests. But if you have self-control, FOMO doesn’t have hardly any effect on you. Your do not HAVE to do X, or see Y, or buy Z. It is not a requirement of life. You aren’t going to ever be able to do, see, or buy everything you want. Its a fact of life. Self-control helps you realize this.
Saying no to yourself is powerful. You dont always have to say no, but self-control helps you to know when you should. And thus, it removes the power FOMO has over you. You stop caring about what other people think or say, and it gives you the power to stay financially responsible, and helps keep you mentally healthy.
Why is this bad? Even in the context of what I am talking about, if someone decides to play a gacha game, they should definitely have self-control. A person with no self-control will quickly find themselves peniless playing a gacha game, but they were probably going to be peniless eithout the gacha game too. Its not the fault of the game, it is the fault of the player.
Self control isn’t guaranteed for everyone. Your take here is pretty ableist.
You’d place blame on victims instead of abusers. Companies that have spent fortunes to make sure their systems go after easy targets. People who aren’t neurotypical, people who grew up with different cultures that didn’t prepare them for this or any of multiple other sources that would make them easier to take advantage of over and over.
Remember when games rewarded you with more game content by actually playing them? Pepperidge Farms remembers
To be fair, that’s not an issue isolated to gacha games. Plenty of modern titles take old style unlocks (skins, bonus characters etc) and turns them into small, often paid, DLC. It sucks but it’s a wider problem within the industry.
If you consider spending money to be a game mechanic then this is still true lol
When I went on the main Genshin subreddit, I was so baffled that people do little pulling rituals, and even do parties with thematic food and decoration for characters to influence their gacha luck 😵💫 Maybe they didn’t take it that seriously, but it still felt like a very unhealthy attitude towards such a predatory game.
Yeah that’s not great
You must use your pickpocket skill on your mother’s Cloak of Shopping, retrieve the Rectangle of Potentia. Carefully enter the Sacred Digits into the Portal of Reclamation to receive your reward.
Go carefully young adventurers, for the penalty for failure is great, and La Chancla is indeed fierce.
I can butt in on this a little bit. The problem with statements like this is that they treat “gacha” (the monetisation and unit recruitment system) as a genre when gacha games are too varied to be locked under this single umbrella (at least for a conversation like this). To name a few, you have games like:
All of them play differently, offer different challenges and the impact of their gacha systems can be all over the place. Sometimes there are limited character pulls which have serious effect on gameplay (most of the modern titles), other times characters are super easy to obtain and improve as most of the monetisation comes from character costumes etc (Girls’ Frontline, Azur Lane for example).
Besides that, many of them have engaging stories, which combined with offering lots of content and being able to play them for free makes the whole thing even more appealing.
Not that the aspect of “oh cool, I unlocked new character” doesn’t play any role or that there’s nothing predatory about most of the games using this mechanic, it’s just that “gacha” mechanics aren’t always the sole or main factor keeping people playing.
TL;DR: They are just free games that can, but aren’t always, predatory with a specific gameplay mechanic. Often offer enough value for free players to have fun with them.
I agree with you but then I see people calling themselves gacha gamers and hopping into every new gacha regardless of genre or gameplay so I just assumed I just didn’t get it.
Oh, absolutely. I assume people who play exclusively gacha games do so due to the combination of F2P, regular content updates and excitement from pulling for characters/gambling but that’s just a personal guess. I don’t have any hard data to confirm it.
As for folks playing them regardless of genre, that’s not really exclusive to gacha games - there’s plenty of people who play whatever catches their attention, myself included. Strategy, racing, shooters, adventure games… if it clicks with me I’ll play anything (gacha or not). There’s too much fun stuff out there to limit yourself to a single genre, in my opinion.
To me Gacha isn’t a genre it’s a business model. And I understand their gripes …
MapleS had these “gacha machines ingame starting 10+years ago” thats how i knew what gacha was before it became a thing. I only played the main game until it got to grindy and required actual cash if you wan to further your account . it is then i started search cracked version which were fun for a time.
So do I, I’m just saying that many wonder “why people play gacha games” without realising (or caring) that there’s actual “game” part outside of the monetisation itself.
Yeah, I put 2000+ hours into Genshin over 4 years and have like 75 characters without ever spending any money. But the game is still so full of psychological dark patterns that would squeeze out the last penny from those whose personality or neurodiversity makes them vulnerable against such manipulation.
And yet again, the core of the issue of capitalism. As Stephanie Sterling put it many a time, the companies’ attitude is “Why be satisfied with a lot of money, when we could have all the money.”
My main game is the already mentioned Girls’ Frontline (the first one), which is thankfully old enough to come out before the modern monetisation practises and psychological tricks became the norm. There’s no limited pull currency, no need for character dupes (can be replaced by a resource that is so easy to get I can’t even spend it all), no character specific events to push the new and shiny unit etc.
It does have skin gacha for most (but not all) character skins but even then you can use farmable resource for that + getting duplicate costumes turns them into “Black Cards” which can be exchanged for specific outfit. It’s still a bad system and a black mark on an otherwise extremely free-2-play friendly game.
I feel like the most important part of playing gacha games is the ability to just walk away if a title ends up being monetised in a way that affects your enjoyment or well being (for those with lack of self-control). There’s plenty of fun to be had for free, no need to give into FOMO and suffering through predatory balancing decisions when there’s so many options on the market.
As someone with 2000+ hours in Genshin, I completely agree 😆 I only play for exploration nowadays because the story actively pushed me away, while the gambling never appealed to me. I wish we could just unlock characters via quests. I get no joy from a lucky draw, so I just treat gacha pulls in batches of guaranteed unlocks, like the price of this character is 160 pulls and that’s it. But the whole monetisation is disgustingly predatory for those who are even a little susceptible to it.
arnt these the anime games that are primarly played by a specific demographic.
For the ones I play, the actual gameplay is the appeal; and I accept the gacha only if it’s reasonably permissive to free players.
The genre definitely has a recurring issue with power scaling, to get people to roll for the newest gooner bait, and when that becomes too apparent, it kills my interest. That’s the other thing: You have to prepare your sanity for the inevitable day you’ll stop playing that game and sacrifice hours of “character progress” to find something else fun. Heck, could just be another gacha that’s bending over backwards to cater to new players.