Almost 19% of Japanese people in their 20s have spent so much money on gacha they struggled with covering living expenses, survey reveals  - AUTOMATON WEST
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Results of a survey regarding the spending habits of young gamers in Japan have been revealed - here's how they spend their money on games.
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52d

I wouldn’t mind microtransactions, gacha games and gacha mechanics if there were sane upper limits to spend.

I was trying to learn how different gacha games work and monetization in f2p games in general, especially obes for smartphones.

I was surprised about how similar all the methods across games are. Some were a lot worse than others though.

I think the monetization method is sometimes viewed as acceptable by some, because the games often have a lot of content and can be a lot of fun to play. The thing I really dislike is that it’s unfairly monetized. Some people pay the majority of the income, they are also known as whales. There are of course some people that spend small sums, but the whales is where it is at.

After Arcade games went out of fashion we had a nice long period in which players paid about the same for a game, and got the same experience.

Now vulnerable people are paying more than they can afford to finance the game for everyone, and still everone gets a limited experience.

Some of the games I enjoyed the most had terrible gacha mechanics. One of them had items and mounts with 1/500 chance per pull. Of course it is designed so that it appears as 1/10, but it is really 1/500. To justify this they had the PITY system. Yes, thats the actual name of it. The pity system makes it so that after buying 500 pulls ypu are guaranteed the mount.

The price for 500 pulls? 500$

After the free pulls you could play to get, about 480$.

So I actually can’t get the entire game for even 500$…

That was just one of many such instances. I could probably spend more than 10 000$ and still not unlock absolutely everything.

Was it purely cosmetic? Nope. It gave an advantage too.

Legislation that effectively adds an upper limit to unlock the entire game with a sensible maximum monthly cost for new content, is needed in my opinion.

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21d

vulnerable people are paying more than they can afford to finance the game for everyone

Well said. I think a lot of things in the world work like this, unfortunately. Like, some people have to work long hours or hard jobs because they didn’t choose a career path that would allow them to work less and earn more. I mean, it sounds very different, but it’s also kinda similar in a way. There are people suffering for the benefit of other people. Saying they could choose another job is the same as saying vulnerable people could choose to not be vulnerable.

Legislation that effectively adds an upper limit to unlock the entire game with a sensible maximum monthly cost for new content, is needed in my opinion.

Agree, this is a great idea.

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