Headline doesn’t match what’s in the report. It’s not just gacha; the question in the survey is inclusive of other games that offer in-game purchases (課金 in Japanese). So we’re talking about skins and boosts in MMOs, MOBAs, and shooters, hints in games like Candy Crush, etc.
The report posted here last week showed just how much MTX spending there is on PC, of which gacha is still a small part. I suspect there is a higher rate of gacha spending in Japan than there is globally (outside of China, perhaps), but I’d be surprised if gacha even made up half of the spending SMBC is reporting on here.
but I’d be surprised if gacha even made up half of the spending SMBC is reporting on here.
I wouldn‘t. Gacha is vastly more popular in Japan than PC gaming and it‘s not even close. It would seriously surprise me if mobile Gacha didn‘t make up the majority of spending in microtransactions.
I do believe people should have the right to spent their money however the f they want, but this becomes extremely problematic if you don’t at least regulate their spending behavior, either directly or indirectly.
So okay, now you have a society full of hopeless addicts, but at least nobody has to starve. Sound kinda… dystopian if you ask me
I really don’t think everyone is not an addict because of lack of opportunity. If anything I would say many addicts arise from an attempt to escape a reality that does not meet their needs.
Anyone into Genshin here? When do you think the urge to spend a lot starts? I’m AR19 now, I rolled 2 characters from 20 basic wishes (Noelle and Collei), and I think I have enough crystals and primos for maybe 10-20 wishes more which is likely to yield yet another 2 characters (or more if I’m lucky). At this point, I still have no clue when I should start wanting to spend real money. There seems to be so much content to earn primos and everything else I need organically.
In my experience, the urge only begins once you’ve completed the entire openworld and run out of content other than the endgame dungeons (spiral abyss, imaginarium theater). You have a long way to go before that point.
I only really ever got the urge to spend when I lost a 50/50 for a favorite limited banner character. I stopped playing and hopped to another game instead though, eheh
I‘m just spending 5 bucks for Welkins, swiping is for when you really want a character and have nothing left. But even then you drop one Mario Kart World and that should get you what you want. I have no idea what the point in whaling is, there‘s nothing hard in the game that needs it, there‘s nothing that even needs constellations. Maxing out a character just makes their numbers bigger (which isn‘t needed, see above) and doesn‘t change anything about their gameplay. I really don‘t get it.
But since you‘ve just started, you‘ll notice that eventually you won‘t be swimming in resources anymore. Still, you should be able to get a character every other patch even if you‘re unlucky. I guess the biggest opening people give for swiping is banking on „winning“ the 50-50, and then they don‘t win (duh) and then they’re frustrated and force it. As for why they’re swiping a grand and upwards into C6, I have no idea.
I can only speak for ZZZ, WuWa, and Genshin though. I‘m not in the picture with any of the others.
RPG enjoyers have talked like this since before computer games existed. I think D&D terminology for all their kinds of dice rolls and internal math would sound similar, but even more gibberish.
I haven’t played Genshin in a couple of years but it’s definitely one of the better ones from what I’ve seen. I played through f2p until I had a sense of the game and was confident in the content and monetization model. After that I did spend whatever it was, five bucks(?), for the “battle pass” but honestly as long as you have the time to grind then Genshin is fairly non-invasive. That grind is why I quit though, the end game was a slog.
I did play a lot a couple years ago completely f2p and in the late game the artifact farming gets really bad, to the point that you farm for weeks for one character. It’s not necessary to clear the story (at least in the past) but in the late abyss is mandatory and it kills any will to try off-meta/more fun builds. Still a lot of fun if you play casually.
Played Puzzle and dragons for like 3 years when mobile games where booming and spend like total of 300€ to it.
Honestly it was pretty good and did not feel nearly as predatory as many other mobile gatcha games I’ve played after that.
But it did kinda red pill me on F2P games, gatcha, fomo, peer pressure and many other manipulative methods these games use. The fact that Gungho ended up closing the servers down in Europe making people lose their accounts also showcased pretty well how temporary these games are.
Now if I’ll ever again play games with gatcha I’ll do no gatcha “challenge” run. It’s pretty good for gauging whether the game is actually any good and how fast you’ll hit the paywall.
I played a gatcha game with a friend when we didn’t know what gacha was and we where trying to build our teams by just playing the game and there where always massive difficulty walls that couldn’t be passed. So we both ended up spending around $500 CAD on that game and farming with our phones open on the game 24/7. We stopped after we understood how predatory the model was.
Yeah, I have never seen anyone talking about benefits of gacha model online. People only ever talk about it like it’s pure evil in its most refined form. Yet to hear anyone say how this model allows developers to fund basically F2P “Breath of the Wild” tier games with 100x more content.
I mean, it can be both at the same time. The games may be good as games (I play a few myself) but the mechanic can also be extremely predatory to those who have a problem with gambling and/or controlling their spending.
What I’m trying to figure out is exactly how pushy they are. Because I’m playing Genshin for a week already and there wasn’t a single moment I considered spending real money. Even a week worth of this kind of content (open world, quests, parkour, puzzles, minigames, bosses, mini bosses, multiple types of craft, randomized encounters, etc), is quite something and there’s still no sign of anything P2W on the horizon. Should I even expect some extra beefy bosses that are impossible to beat without buying crystals for tons of wishes? If not, then how is it morally different from any game that has any paid extra content at all? Like, you definitely can buy some optional cosmetics in almost any MMORPG game. People who can’t live without buying all the unnecessary cosmetics will proceed to spend a lot of money there as well.
The difference is in the details, that with other paid DLC, you actually get the thing you paid for, guaranteed. With a gacha, if they’re promoting some super-strong character, weapon, etc. that you want and you buy currency to spend in the gacha, you are not guaranteed to get that item or anything of the same quality/rarity in any of those pulls you make. It’s all random chance, gambling at its core. Exceptionally good or bad luck can start playing psychological tricks on you, such as FOMO (there will always be something stronger coming soon), sunk cost fallacy (you’ve already dumped this much into it and got nothing, what’s the difference with this much more?), and before you know it, if you’re not watching carefully, you’ve spent far more in in-game and/or real money than you realized. That’s far different than a one-time purchase straight-up for a cosmetic or weapon to use with no further need to spend any more, and that’s what gets people hooked like gambling. You may not have experienced this much because gachas tend to be very generous to new players in order to get them started out quickly as whales fodder and get them hooked on the adrenaline rush of “winning” in the gacha system before the gacha currency starts to dry up on them.
With a gacha, if they’re promoting some super-strong character, weapon, etc. that you want and you buy currency to spend in the gacha, you are not guaranteed to get that item or anything of the same quality/rarity in any of those pulls you make
I have only basic understanding of those systems, but it seems, there are “pity” systems which do give some guarantees that you get something if you fail rolling for it for long enough. I do agree it’s all very gamblish at its core though.
Most “pity” systems require hundreds of pulls beforehand, which unless someone saves months worth of free currency for those pulls, can be very expensive in real world money to get the currency to afford. In a way, pity systems are just designed to increase the amount of money players spend.
The only “pity” I dealt with at this point is guaranteed 4star for every 10 pulls. It can be anything though, not necessarily a character. But there are sometimes special offers (like tutorial pull) that indeed guarantee that you get a particular character or item for 10 pulls.
How do you think genshin impact would work with no gatcha challenge?
Meanin no gatcha pulls other than maybe forced tutorial one. You’d have to make due with only characters and gear you can earn without gatcha. Premium currency earned by playing can be used for anything else but not for any gatcha.
I recall reading that even the tutorial gatcha pull is always the same.
No money challenge so far sounds very realistic to me, but no gatcha at all? I’m not sure you can get characters except early game ones any other way. And those starter characters don’t even cover full list of elemental powers meaning you won’t even be able to solve some open-world puzzles that require certain elementals to interact with stuff. And I’m not sure those crystals can be used for much more than wishes (aka pulls aka gatcha? do I understand correctly it’s all synonyms?).
PS: also the tutorial pull isn’t forced I think? it’s just -20% meaning it’s 8 crystals for 10 wishes, but you’re free to not use it at all
Yeah no gatcha is no gatcha, no wishes so you would have to make due with starter characters and stuff you can earn without pulls/wishes.
Its basically challenge run that also tests how good the game actually is without any gambling elements.
In Puzzle and Dragons it was possible to clear dungeons to get new characters and some where really good. It was also possible to use premium currency for continues allowing one to use brute force methods to clear dungeons. It was also possible to pair your leader with friends leader reducing the need for gatcha.
(2) Also, I’m personally more interested in “no money” challenge. I like “gambling elements” tbh and enjoy all kinds of RNG in games: starting from randomized items stats in Diablo and procgen in roguelikes and ending with randomized perks in roguelites and stuff like pulls in Genshin. So for me “gambling elements” themselves aren’t something inherently bad and definitely not something I would want to avoid. For me, it’s social implications of gambling mechanics that are sometimes bad (in context of people who can’t control their spending), but not randomness or mechanics themselves.
(1) Well, all I can say for now is that my week of playing wasn’t enough to be able to say whether this is even possible at all. Maybe there will be more unlocked characters from regular questing later in the game, but so far I only got a single dendro character (Collei) from a random pull. And I think there were some open world mini-puzzles activated by dendro. I don’t think there were a lot of them though. Also they are definitely optional and not a big deal. Could also be possible it was intended for later game players going back with their dendro characters unlocked organically in the later questlines.
Buying a blind box, loot crate, card pack, etc. with a random chance for items is something that we as people have a high chance of finding addictive, like some kind of misplaced survival instinct. Genshin monetizes their game that way, and you may be lucky like me and not have whatever gene causes us to become crippling gambling addicts, but Mihoyo became a multibillion dollar company off of exploiting those people the same way you might find someone at a corner store playing scratch-off lottery tickets all day, or someone seated at a slot machine with a jar of quarters, mindlessly pulling the lever over and over again.
That’s quite different than if you say, “I’m selling item X. It costs Y.” Digital items that are arbitrarily only available for a limited time, more often than not through battle passes these days, are like gacha, similarly manipulative. I wouldn’t call MMORPGs some bastion of morality, either. I’m sure you saw the same stories I did back in WoW’s heyday of parents neglecting their children because they were helplessly addicted to WoW. Whether by accident or design, WoW took the addictiveness in Diablo’s design and, thanks to a lucrative monthly subscription fee, created an incentive for their developers to pursue avenues to keep players playing longer.
Some of the F2P games are great especially if you cant afford new games. In some you can just ignore all cosmetics and focus on getting good. Hell make using default skins your identity and some gamers may get extra salty if they get their ass handed to them by someone using “noob skins”.
As for gatcha games it depends largely where the paywall is. If its in the late/endgame then you may very well get tens if not hundreds of hours of enjoyment before you get there. Some of them also shower you with premium currency early on to get you hooked so you might eventually end up with pretty good team to clear most of the content without spendi g a dime.
Gacha is addictive as hell if you grew up with Pokemon and Final Fantasy both huge in Japan. I play a few as well for boredom and yes the weird atmosphere of whales (account with thousands invested) being awkwardly silent but have a following of pretenders.
I have spent thousands in gacha, though I’m more a ‘dolphin’ than a whale
Was #1 on server 10 and 11 in Memento Mori for a while, ran the top guilds there (NORTH and TRUE NORTH). It was really fun till one of our shift guild leaders usurped the guild and kicked half of the team on the night of our biggest Mass Combat push, losing us most of our territory. So I quit and got very, VERY bitter
That was 2 years ago and the only gacha I’ve played since is Pokemon Pocket tho as f2p this time (it is very generous)
If you want to know anything about dolphin/whale action in Memento Mori, Blue Archive or Reverse 1999 I’ll answer any questions
Another comment explained what it is but to explain where the name comes from, you remember those capsule machines where you had to collect all the toys? Those were called gachapon machines, often shortened to just gacha (i might be slightly wrong on a little bit of the words, but they are the capsule machines)
Games with casino style gambling to unlock characters or skins or whatever. Often times you’ll have like 1/100 chance to unlock a character you want when opening a “box”.
Hugly mobile popular games run like this with new more powerful characters releasing monthly
It’s definitely a psychological issue where these games are designed to slowly bleed their players without them noticing. The most I’ve ever spent on a gacha was $40 over 6 years and I regret that so much. It takes a wakeup call and education to stop people from being suckered in.
I felt I was taking crazypills. In what world does this headline and article not scream "These games are ruining lives because of extremely manipulative marketing tactics.
I assume the people who took this article as a personal attack are part of the 19%, but doesn’t want to realise they have a very serious problem.
I think there’s probably a hasty assumption that either this article is (it’s not) or that it could be used for (it probably will) judgment type musings about how young people are irresponsible and are the cause of their own struggles, similar to the avocado toast commentary.
The article itself is just the result of a survey that happened to focus on young people, and I agree it’s more appropriate to think of it related to a relatively new form of gambling/manipulation that’s causing problems
The way these studies are phrased feels gross and seem to only serve to perpetuate these problems by shifting the blame of systemic issues on the individuals suffering from them instead of the powerful people benefiting from wealth inequality that cause this kind of desperation.
The US is guilty of this too with our “Financial Literacy” propaganda.
Almost as if capitalism was specifically designed to shuffle all wealth from the bottom to the top in a neverending ratchet of human degradation and exploitation
I knew this was a fucked up industry when I heard they were successfully diversifying into women-centric gatcha games where the game is also centered on gooning over various character designs but the gatcha pulls correspond to specific romance scenes and interactions.
Japanese companies really have minmaxed exploiting every demographic. They have this garbage for the young people and pachinko parlors for old people and rural folks.
Funny thing is I know more women playing these games than I know dudes. Which of course does not reflect player statistics. I know that. But it‘s probably more popular with women than you would think based on character designs. I think it has a lot to do with cutesy Japanese pop culture that‘s appealing to a lot of people. There‘s a reason many Chinese and Korean games are copying it recently.
I had an argument with a guy who was in a shared friend’s discord server about this. He was adamant that, if somebody spent too much money on a game, then it was all their fault. Despite me going over several (clearly manipulative) tactics, all he said was that people who fell for these must be stupid and that they deserved it
Yeah later on he was kicked because of other (Similarly dickish) reasons
And if we were all smart people we would have far less laws. Sometimes laws protect us from ourselves. Anyone who has experience with addiction knows how hard it is to just stop. Instead of blaming people for their inability to stop we should emphatize and understand that this needs an intervention. If these predatory practices were illegal those people wouldn’t need to stop themselves because they wouldn’t be put in that situation in the first place.
Regulation of predatory practice. Taxation on the games to pay for rehab and support services for people that experience negative effects from it. It’s really easy to do, but every single gambling operation gets the big bucks from the heavily addicted. The whales are the entire business.
These gacha companies pay ridiculous amounts of money for psych profile info specifically to target vulnerable individuals, yet individuals don’t have that same kind of access or understanding
I’m so glad that I looked up some cheat codes for Turok 64 back in the day. It had two powerful weapons that were meant to be used sparingly after finding a rare inatance, in one case, or searching the entire game for pieces, after which you only got 3 shots with it. I used those two weapons until I got bored of them.
Then I tried to play the game again without the cheats and realized it was ruined for me. Why would I care to spend time searching for each piece of that weapon, knowing it only has 3 shots, when I was already bored with it?
And then later on, after I had been raiding in WoW, very focused on getting my loot upgrades, I noticed the loop of raiding to get better gear to get better at raiding to get better gear and realized it only had a point if I enjoyed the raiding, otherwise the gear didn’t matter, regardless of what stats or graphics it had.
Those two things together have made it easy to never spend any money on game progression. It’s basically spending money to either get bored of the game quicker by trivializing the powerful things (monetized cheat codes or powerups), or to avoid playing the game in the first place (getting the gear without the raid, when the whole point of the gear is to help with the raid).
And yeah, often the game isn’t worth going through the loop, but they design the early stages to give fast progression to build up an expectation but tune it so that it’s a slog grind if you don’t buy anything, hoping for a few bucks from people as they learn this, or a lot of bucks from those who set strong habits and never do learn.
And when progression is pinned to an exponential curve while upgrades are non-exponential but tuned to be ahead of the curve when you first get them, it doesn’t matter how much money you spend, eventually you’ll always be back at a curve that looks more vertical than anything else and you’ll need to spend money or wait a crazy amount of time.
There‘s a bitter irony in demanding parents doing their jobs because that‘s exactly why they don‘t have time for parenting. The cost of living is too damn high.
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Headline doesn’t match what’s in the report. It’s not just gacha; the question in the survey is inclusive of other games that offer in-game purchases (課金 in Japanese). So we’re talking about skins and boosts in MMOs, MOBAs, and shooters, hints in games like Candy Crush, etc.
The report posted here last week showed just how much MTX spending there is on PC, of which gacha is still a small part. I suspect there is a higher rate of gacha spending in Japan than there is globally (outside of China, perhaps), but I’d be surprised if gacha even made up half of the spending SMBC is reporting on here.
I wouldn‘t. Gacha is vastly more popular in Japan than PC gaming and it‘s not even close. It would seriously surprise me if mobile Gacha didn‘t make up the majority of spending in microtransactions.
This is why we really need a system where people can spend their whole paycheck and still be fine.
I do believe people should have the right to spent their money however the f they want, but this becomes extremely problematic if you don’t at least regulate their spending behavior, either directly or indirectly.
So okay, now you have a society full of hopeless addicts, but at least nobody has to starve. Sound kinda… dystopian if you ask me
I really don’t think everyone is not an addict because of lack of opportunity. If anything I would say many addicts arise from an attempt to escape a reality that does not meet their needs.
Anyone into Genshin here? When do you think the urge to spend a lot starts? I’m AR19 now, I rolled 2 characters from 20 basic wishes (Noelle and Collei), and I think I have enough crystals and primos for maybe 10-20 wishes more which is likely to yield yet another 2 characters (or more if I’m lucky). At this point, I still have no clue when I should start wanting to spend real money. There seems to be so much content to earn primos and everything else I need organically.
In my experience, the urge only begins once you’ve completed the entire openworld and run out of content other than the endgame dungeons (spiral abyss, imaginarium theater). You have a long way to go before that point.
I only really ever got the urge to spend when I lost a 50/50 for a favorite limited banner character. I stopped playing and hopped to another game instead though, eheh
I‘m just spending 5 bucks for Welkins, swiping is for when you really want a character and have nothing left. But even then you drop one Mario Kart World and that should get you what you want. I have no idea what the point in whaling is, there‘s nothing hard in the game that needs it, there‘s nothing that even needs constellations. Maxing out a character just makes their numbers bigger (which isn‘t needed, see above) and doesn‘t change anything about their gameplay. I really don‘t get it.
But since you‘ve just started, you‘ll notice that eventually you won‘t be swimming in resources anymore. Still, you should be able to get a character every other patch even if you‘re unlucky. I guess the biggest opening people give for swiping is banking on „winning“ the 50-50, and then they don‘t win (duh) and then they’re frustrated and force it. As for why they’re swiping a grand and upwards into C6, I have no idea.
I can only speak for ZZZ, WuWa, and Genshin though. I‘m not in the picture with any of the others.
This entire comment feels like brain rot to me
RPG enjoyers have talked like this since before computer games existed. I think D&D terminology for all their kinds of dice rolls and internal math would sound similar, but even more gibberish.
I haven’t played Genshin in a couple of years but it’s definitely one of the better ones from what I’ve seen. I played through f2p until I had a sense of the game and was confident in the content and monetization model. After that I did spend whatever it was, five bucks(?), for the “battle pass” but honestly as long as you have the time to grind then Genshin is fairly non-invasive. That grind is why I quit though, the end game was a slog.
I did play a lot a couple years ago completely f2p and in the late game the artifact farming gets really bad, to the point that you farm for weeks for one character. It’s not necessary to clear the story (at least in the past) but in the late abyss is mandatory and it kills any will to try off-meta/more fun builds. Still a lot of fun if you play casually.
Played Puzzle and dragons for like 3 years when mobile games where booming and spend like total of 300€ to it.
Honestly it was pretty good and did not feel nearly as predatory as many other mobile gatcha games I’ve played after that.
But it did kinda red pill me on F2P games, gatcha, fomo, peer pressure and many other manipulative methods these games use. The fact that Gungho ended up closing the servers down in Europe making people lose their accounts also showcased pretty well how temporary these games are.
Now if I’ll ever again play games with gatcha I’ll do no gatcha “challenge” run. It’s pretty good for gauging whether the game is actually any good and how fast you’ll hit the paywall.
I played a gatcha game with a friend when we didn’t know what gacha was and we where trying to build our teams by just playing the game and there where always massive difficulty walls that couldn’t be passed. So we both ended up spending around $500 CAD on that game and farming with our phones open on the game 24/7. We stopped after we understood how predatory the model was.
Stopped playing Puzzle and dragons after clearing tower of gods for umpteenth time to “efficiently” consume my stamina so it would not get wasted.
Had this “wtf I am doing with my life moment” as I was no longer having fun and clearing the dungeon over and over was simply booring time waster.
Started ignoring daily login bonuses and only played when there was new content. Soon after that stopped playing all together.
Yeah, I have never seen anyone talking about benefits of gacha model online. People only ever talk about it like it’s pure evil in its most refined form. Yet to hear anyone say how this model allows developers to fund basically F2P “Breath of the Wild” tier games with 100x more content.
I mean, it can be both at the same time. The games may be good as games (I play a few myself) but the mechanic can also be extremely predatory to those who have a problem with gambling and/or controlling their spending.
What I’m trying to figure out is exactly how pushy they are. Because I’m playing Genshin for a week already and there wasn’t a single moment I considered spending real money. Even a week worth of this kind of content (open world, quests, parkour, puzzles, minigames, bosses, mini bosses, multiple types of craft, randomized encounters, etc), is quite something and there’s still no sign of anything P2W on the horizon. Should I even expect some extra beefy bosses that are impossible to beat without buying crystals for tons of wishes? If not, then how is it morally different from any game that has any paid extra content at all? Like, you definitely can buy some optional cosmetics in almost any MMORPG game. People who can’t live without buying all the unnecessary cosmetics will proceed to spend a lot of money there as well.
The difference is in the details, that with other paid DLC, you actually get the thing you paid for, guaranteed. With a gacha, if they’re promoting some super-strong character, weapon, etc. that you want and you buy currency to spend in the gacha, you are not guaranteed to get that item or anything of the same quality/rarity in any of those pulls you make. It’s all random chance, gambling at its core. Exceptionally good or bad luck can start playing psychological tricks on you, such as FOMO (there will always be something stronger coming soon), sunk cost fallacy (you’ve already dumped this much into it and got nothing, what’s the difference with this much more?), and before you know it, if you’re not watching carefully, you’ve spent far more in in-game and/or real money than you realized. That’s far different than a one-time purchase straight-up for a cosmetic or weapon to use with no further need to spend any more, and that’s what gets people hooked like gambling. You may not have experienced this much because gachas tend to be very generous to new players in order to get them started out quickly as whales fodder and get them hooked on the adrenaline rush of “winning” in the gacha system before the gacha currency starts to dry up on them.
I have only basic understanding of those systems, but it seems, there are “pity” systems which do give some guarantees that you get something if you fail rolling for it for long enough. I do agree it’s all very gamblish at its core though.
Most “pity” systems require hundreds of pulls beforehand, which unless someone saves months worth of free currency for those pulls, can be very expensive in real world money to get the currency to afford. In a way, pity systems are just designed to increase the amount of money players spend.
The only “pity” I dealt with at this point is guaranteed 4star for every 10 pulls. It can be anything though, not necessarily a character. But there are sometimes special offers (like tutorial pull) that indeed guarantee that you get a particular character or item for 10 pulls.
How do you think genshin impact would work with no gatcha challenge?
Meanin no gatcha pulls other than maybe forced tutorial one. You’d have to make due with only characters and gear you can earn without gatcha. Premium currency earned by playing can be used for anything else but not for any gatcha.
I recall reading that even the tutorial gatcha pull is always the same.
No money challenge so far sounds very realistic to me, but no gatcha at all? I’m not sure you can get characters except early game ones any other way. And those starter characters don’t even cover full list of elemental powers meaning you won’t even be able to solve some open-world puzzles that require certain elementals to interact with stuff. And I’m not sure those crystals can be used for much more than wishes (aka pulls aka gatcha? do I understand correctly it’s all synonyms?).
PS: also the tutorial pull isn’t forced I think? it’s just -20% meaning it’s 8 crystals for 10 wishes, but you’re free to not use it at all
Yeah no gatcha is no gatcha, no wishes so you would have to make due with starter characters and stuff you can earn without pulls/wishes.
Its basically challenge run that also tests how good the game actually is without any gambling elements.
In Puzzle and Dragons it was possible to clear dungeons to get new characters and some where really good. It was also possible to use premium currency for continues allowing one to use brute force methods to clear dungeons. It was also possible to pair your leader with friends leader reducing the need for gatcha.
(2) Also, I’m personally more interested in “no money” challenge. I like “gambling elements” tbh and enjoy all kinds of RNG in games: starting from randomized items stats in Diablo and procgen in roguelikes and ending with randomized perks in roguelites and stuff like pulls in Genshin. So for me “gambling elements” themselves aren’t something inherently bad and definitely not something I would want to avoid. For me, it’s social implications of gambling mechanics that are sometimes bad (in context of people who can’t control their spending), but not randomness or mechanics themselves.
(1) Well, all I can say for now is that my week of playing wasn’t enough to be able to say whether this is even possible at all. Maybe there will be more unlocked characters from regular questing later in the game, but so far I only got a single dendro character (Collei) from a random pull. And I think there were some open world mini-puzzles activated by dendro. I don’t think there were a lot of them though. Also they are definitely optional and not a big deal. Could also be possible it was intended for later game players going back with their dendro characters unlocked organically in the later questlines.
Buying a blind box, loot crate, card pack, etc. with a random chance for items is something that we as people have a high chance of finding addictive, like some kind of misplaced survival instinct. Genshin monetizes their game that way, and you may be lucky like me and not have whatever gene causes us to become crippling gambling addicts, but Mihoyo became a multibillion dollar company off of exploiting those people the same way you might find someone at a corner store playing scratch-off lottery tickets all day, or someone seated at a slot machine with a jar of quarters, mindlessly pulling the lever over and over again.
That’s quite different than if you say, “I’m selling item X. It costs Y.” Digital items that are arbitrarily only available for a limited time, more often than not through battle passes these days, are like gacha, similarly manipulative. I wouldn’t call MMORPGs some bastion of morality, either. I’m sure you saw the same stories I did back in WoW’s heyday of parents neglecting their children because they were helplessly addicted to WoW. Whether by accident or design, WoW took the addictiveness in Diablo’s design and, thanks to a lucrative monthly subscription fee, created an incentive for their developers to pursue avenues to keep players playing longer.
To be fair there’s a range between $1,99 up to $150. The arcade hall from the 90’s with token exchange wasn’t much different.
Some of the F2P games are great especially if you cant afford new games. In some you can just ignore all cosmetics and focus on getting good. Hell make using default skins your identity and some gamers may get extra salty if they get their ass handed to them by someone using “noob skins”.
As for gatcha games it depends largely where the paywall is. If its in the late/endgame then you may very well get tens if not hundreds of hours of enjoyment before you get there. Some of them also shower you with premium currency early on to get you hooked so you might eventually end up with pretty good team to clear most of the content without spendi g a dime.
Gacha is addictive as hell if you grew up with Pokemon and Final Fantasy both huge in Japan. I play a few as well for boredom and yes the weird atmosphere of whales (account with thousands invested) being awkwardly silent but have a following of pretenders.
I have spent thousands in gacha, though I’m more a ‘dolphin’ than a whale
Was #1 on server 10 and 11 in Memento Mori for a while, ran the top guilds there (NORTH and TRUE NORTH). It was really fun till one of our shift guild leaders usurped the guild and kicked half of the team on the night of our biggest Mass Combat push, losing us most of our territory. So I quit and got very, VERY bitter
That was 2 years ago and the only gacha I’ve played since is Pokemon Pocket tho as f2p this time (it is very generous)
If you want to know anything about dolphin/whale action in Memento Mori, Blue Archive or Reverse 1999 I’ll answer any questions
1000 people is statistically shit.
someone help me understand what gacha is and what it means to these folks in simple terms?
Another comment explained what it is but to explain where the name comes from, you remember those capsule machines where you had to collect all the toys? Those were called gachapon machines, often shortened to just gacha (i might be slightly wrong on a little bit of the words, but they are the capsule machines)
Games with casino style gambling to unlock characters or skins or whatever. Often times you’ll have like 1/100 chance to unlock a character you want when opening a “box”.
Hugly mobile popular games run like this with new more powerful characters releasing monthly
I saw so many people in another instance relating this to shaming people for avocado toast rather than these games exploiting gambling addiction.
It’s definitely a psychological issue where these games are designed to slowly bleed their players without them noticing. The most I’ve ever spent on a gacha was $40 over 6 years and I regret that so much. It takes a wakeup call and education to stop people from being suckered in.
I felt I was taking crazypills. In what world does this headline and article not scream "These games are ruining lives because of extremely manipulative marketing tactics.
I assume the people who took this article as a personal attack are part of the 19%, but doesn’t want to realise they have a very serious problem.
I think there’s probably a hasty assumption that either this article is (it’s not) or that it could be used for (it probably will) judgment type musings about how young people are irresponsible and are the cause of their own struggles, similar to the avocado toast commentary.
The article itself is just the result of a survey that happened to focus on young people, and I agree it’s more appropriate to think of it related to a relatively new form of gambling/manipulation that’s causing problems
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Unfortunately people needs to eat, to pay rent, etc.
When your only choice is to work for a shady company, you can’t be chooser.
The way these studies are phrased feels gross and seem to only serve to perpetuate these problems by shifting the blame of systemic issues on the individuals suffering from them instead of the powerful people benefiting from wealth inequality that cause this kind of desperation.
The US is guilty of this too with our “Financial Literacy” propaganda.
Almost as if capitalism was specifically designed to shuffle all wealth from the bottom to the top in a neverending ratchet of human degradation and exploitation
You guys spend money on games?
I knew this was a fucked up industry when I heard they were successfully diversifying into women-centric gatcha games where the game is also centered on gooning over various character designs but the gatcha pulls correspond to specific romance scenes and interactions.
Japanese companies really have minmaxed exploiting every demographic. They have this garbage for the young people and pachinko parlors for old people and rural folks.
Funny thing is I know more women playing these games than I know dudes. Which of course does not reflect player statistics. I know that. But it‘s probably more popular with women than you would think based on character designs. I think it has a lot to do with cutesy Japanese pop culture that‘s appealing to a lot of people. There‘s a reason many Chinese and Korean games are copying it recently.
The widespread deregulation of gambling in the US is heading that way too.
I had an argument with a guy who was in a shared friend’s discord server about this. He was adamant that, if somebody spent too much money on a game, then it was all their fault. Despite me going over several (clearly manipulative) tactics, all he said was that people who fell for these must be stupid and that they deserved it
Yeah later on he was kicked because of other (Similarly dickish) reasons
Yeah American is a victim blaming culture
I mean, he’s not wrong. it is something within their power to control, and only they can stop the cycle.
addiction is a hell of a drug though.
companies that prey on the vulnerabilities of humans like that should be regulated no different than drug, alcohol, or firearm companies.
I agree they’re partially at fault, but to deny the part the company played by creating artificial FOMO, sales, and gates is barbaric to say the least
It needs more regulation, I agree. Particularly for premium currencies (which thankfully the EU seems to be doing something about)
And if we were all smart people we would have far less laws. Sometimes laws protect us from ourselves. Anyone who has experience with addiction knows how hard it is to just stop. Instead of blaming people for their inability to stop we should emphatize and understand that this needs an intervention. If these predatory practices were illegal those people wouldn’t need to stop themselves because they wouldn’t be put in that situation in the first place.
Regulation of predatory practice. Taxation on the games to pay for rehab and support services for people that experience negative effects from it. It’s really easy to do, but every single gambling operation gets the big bucks from the heavily addicted. The whales are the entire business.
I mean…
The unfortunate reality is that both parties, the customer and the game company, are culpable and both share blame
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These gacha companies pay ridiculous amounts of money for psych profile info specifically to target vulnerable individuals, yet individuals don’t have that same kind of access or understanding
This is NOT a both sides thing.
Oh hey its the victim blamer. Mods deleted our discussion.
It is as much their fault as it is any addict’s fault, which is to say, partially but not entirely
I’m so glad that I looked up some cheat codes for Turok 64 back in the day. It had two powerful weapons that were meant to be used sparingly after finding a rare inatance, in one case, or searching the entire game for pieces, after which you only got 3 shots with it. I used those two weapons until I got bored of them.
Then I tried to play the game again without the cheats and realized it was ruined for me. Why would I care to spend time searching for each piece of that weapon, knowing it only has 3 shots, when I was already bored with it?
And then later on, after I had been raiding in WoW, very focused on getting my loot upgrades, I noticed the loop of raiding to get better gear to get better at raiding to get better gear and realized it only had a point if I enjoyed the raiding, otherwise the gear didn’t matter, regardless of what stats or graphics it had.
Those two things together have made it easy to never spend any money on game progression. It’s basically spending money to either get bored of the game quicker by trivializing the powerful things (monetized cheat codes or powerups), or to avoid playing the game in the first place (getting the gear without the raid, when the whole point of the gear is to help with the raid).
And yeah, often the game isn’t worth going through the loop, but they design the early stages to give fast progression to build up an expectation but tune it so that it’s a slog grind if you don’t buy anything, hoping for a few bucks from people as they learn this, or a lot of bucks from those who set strong habits and never do learn.
And when progression is pinned to an exponential curve while upgrades are non-exponential but tuned to be ahead of the curve when you first get them, it doesn’t matter how much money you spend, eventually you’ll always be back at a curve that looks more vertical than anything else and you’ll need to spend money or wait a crazy amount of time.
Let me guess
Parents need to do their fucking jobs.
These gaming companies (parasites) need to lose all their IP protections.
There‘s a bitter irony in demanding parents doing their jobs because that‘s exactly why they don‘t have time for parenting. The cost of living is too damn high.