What is a Gacha Game, and How Can You Spend Your Entire Wallet on One?

It's just gambling, guys.

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What is a Gacha Game, and How Can You Spend Your Entire Wallet on One?

It's just gambling, guys.

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If you’ve been in the gaming sphere at all in the past couple of years, you’ve more than likely heard of games such as Hoyoverse’s Genshin Impact or Hypergryph’s Arknights or a litany of other similar games in hot discussion. These games and many others of their type belong to a genre called Gacha games. But these games, despite their similar visual styles, are quite different in many ways. To the untrained eye, they most likely seem like very different kinds of games, and yet they both fall under the Gacha umbrella. So what is a Gacha game? And why are they so often discussed in gaming?

Gacha is a term that is a shortening of the word Gachapon, or Gashapon, which refers to a particular toy brand that originated in Japan. Bandai Namco (a name you may be familiar with if you like games) invented these arcade-style vending machines, where you put money in and the machine gives you a random toy in a plastic capsule in return. The machines only charge about 2 dollars on average, so it’s no big financial drain for anyone who’s walking around with enough money to afford it.

The little capsule toys are nothing special by themselves, but they are released in small sets and the marketing encourages people to collect them all. They are a type of blind purchase– a transaction done without knowing what exactly the product is. As people insert more and more money to get the little toy that they want and collectors hoard large sets, a culture forms. Because if it hasn’t occurred to you yet, this is gambling.

But isn’t gambling bad, you may be asking? Well, yes! But Bandai has made billions of yen (millions of dollars) through their Gashapon machines. You have no doubt seen similar toys at your local stores, little blind boxes that encourage you to collect the whole set of themed figurines.

A lot of Gacha games are mobile games, platforms that are ostensibly easier to access and spend on. Image courtesy of Pocketgamer.

And now you may be asking what this has to do with the video games, because you have a lot of questions. The truth is that the only similarity between these forms of game is the chance-based reward system. Genshin Impact has you collect different heroes with unique features and abilities by spending in-game currency on sets of random rewards, any of them possibly being the hero you want. And the more objectively powerful a hero is, the rarer they are. All of these Gacha games work this way, they get you to gamble for rewards and give you the option to pay real money to gamble more. What’s more, these games are usually free, so there’s no barrier to entry for possibly dropping hundreds or even thousands of dollars on Gacha games.

These games also use a number of unique tactics to push people to spend money, such as showing players rare items just before giving them worse ones to give the illusion of a “near miss,” or guaranteeing a rare item after a certain number of rolls to encourage players to keep trying. These tactics smartly and subtly influence players into spending more money needlessly.

And the worst part? It works like a charm. People are evidently not afraid to lose life-changing sums of money on this game, these people even being dubbed ‘whales’ by the community and developers. It works by taking advantage of the brain’s reward system. When rewards are guaranteed but inconsistent, you are motivated to try and seek out those rewards more often than if they were simply guaranteed every time you tried. It’s why gambling is such a massive industry, our brains are psychologically wired to fall for it.

Loot boxes were a big deal in conversations about in-game gambling, even though they had no real benefit in matches. Image courtesy of Screenrant.

While these games are massively successful, they have faced pretty heavy backlash for these mechanics. Critics bring up the destructive nature of gambling and pay-to-win mechanics sucking the fun out of video games. The popular hero shooter Overwatch was the subject of the media’s ire for their loot box mechanics so heavily that it inspired real legislation about regulating gambling in video games. Studies done in the United States have shown that gamers who spend more on these games are more likely to develop real gambling problems. What’s more, people who are already prone to gambling problems have shown to potentially be at risk of significant financial losses. And although these games are not legally considered gambling in some places because the in-game items don’t actually have any monetary value, the damage they can and have caused is pretty clear.

But that’s not to say that these games are evil, or trying to take all of your money. Despite their reliance on getting you to spend money, a portion of them can certainly be enjoyed without spending a dime, and many of them are plainly good games that many people enjoy regardless. There are large online communities dedicated to Gacha games and some of the larger ones enjoy influential presences in the gaming sphere.

So to reiterate; Gacha games are simply games that utilize a Gashapon-esque mechanic that incentivizes spending via game mechanics which make use of a wide net of abilities and items to make the experience. Play them if you find them fun, but be careful not to spend too much! You can have plenty of fun whether or not you let a video game influence your purchase decisions.

If you liked this article, then there are many others in the realm of learning about video game genres that you should check out. For example, here’s an article about the best rogue-like games on Steam. Or, if that’s not quite your speed, then here is one about the best turn-based games on Steam.

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