If you mention the term “gacha” to most people, what you will get is a reaction somewhere between disgust and anger or one of confusion. This strikes me as a little bit odd. Not because I think people who get angry about this are somehow getting angry about a great thing that does wonderful things for everyone, but because obviously these games make a whole lot of money. Titles like Genshin Impact basically rake in the cash, and that seems a bit weird if these titles are as widely loathed as they seem to be based on their business model.
You may think that my point is about to be that you should not be annoyed about gacha games. But that is not my point. My point is that there is, perhaps, a gap in terms of understanding.
The thing about gacha as a business model is that even as it is generally disliked, there is perhaps more going on beneath the surface, and people who know virtually nothing about it can wind up getting kind of blindsided when it turns out that the games in question are actually… you know. Fun.
I consider this a problem, not because people wind up getting tricked into playing bad games but because a lot of these are not bad games. They would be better without gacha, by and large… but they’re not bad games.
You can see it on down the line. Games like Genshin Impact as well as Honkai Star Rail and Granblue Fantasy are made by people who clearly care about the games that they’re making. Megaman X Dive is a now-defunct gacha game that celebrated the entire history of the Mega Man franchise from start to finish, and it’d be easy to write it off as a cheap cash grab. But I think it’s important to note that the designers of the game clearly loved the franchise itself so much that they worked to make an offline version that was playable forever for a single purchase price.
And the thing is that if you think these games are all soulless, cheap cash grabs, then when you start playing one of them, it’s easy to be surprised by the production value and the game itself and then find yourself sucked into the game. It’s also easy to not really be expecting to have fun, and find yourself paying money – possibly more than you mean to – because hey, you are having fun after all!
Gotcha.
The reality is that gacha, as a business model, is something that falls under the predatory monetization header, and that’s something I have beaten the drum about for quite some time. But the games are also frequently fun and enjoyable, and I think it does not benefit us critically if we pretend that is untrue. We are not well-served if we pretend that these games cannot be fun, and we do not prepare ourselves to deal with the predatory aspects of the monetization by pretending that the right answer is to just always say no.
Heck, human beings do lots of things that are bad for us but still fun. If you’ve ever enjoyed a bit of gambling or having a few beers with friends, you have done something that is bad for you, and you have probably wound up being fine. I am, at the time of this writing, having a beer. My father was an alcoholic. Treating alcohol as if it is life-ruining juice at all times would not prepare me for actually dealing with the realities of alcohol.
Thus, the impetus for this particular series of columns. We are all better served to understand and explore the finer points of gacha games – their benefits and drawbacks alike – if we understand both what gacha games are trying to do, why they are addictive and even fun, and equally importantly, how to be better and more conscientious players and customers.
So with that in mind… what is gacha? What does the term even mean?
Gacha originally comes from Japan, and it is actually a knockoff term. The original concept comes from Bandai in the 1960s, when it introduced gashapon toy machines. You insert some yen, turn a crank, and get a random prize capsule containing a small toy. The Tomy corporation introduced its competing brand, gachapon, in the following years. Because many of the toys were considered collectable items (which was obviously the goal), the concept got extended to blind-bag toys in general, and then to the game mechanic, which works similarly.
The core element of a gacha mechanic in a video game comes down to the idea of paying money to draw a number of random rewards. Usually, these draws are available in either single pulls or 10-pulls. Pay a certain amount of money, then you draw either a single or a set of virtual gachapon capsules containing… well, stuff. What the stuff in question is depends on the mechanics of the specific game, but it usually includes characters and weapons somewhere in there.
In other words, this is absolutely the same way that lockboxes/lootboxes work: pay money and get a random reward. The part where this goes into the next level is that the boxes in question contain a vital part of the game’s mechanics. In Star Trek Online, there are items you can get only from the game’s lockboxes, but there are numerous other ships you can just buy directly or build or whatever. In a proper gacha game, the lockboxes are the only way to get some items, and they are priced accordingly.
What is also important to note here is that you need all of these elements to be in place for a game to properly be a gacha title. Tower of Fantasy, for example, is absolutely a gacha game; it fits this model very cleanly. Diablo Immortal, on the other hand, arguably is not a gacha game even though it has a number of other systems that are definitely adjacent to paying money for a series of draws. You pay money to get more and better loot, but you are not directly buying pulls to gain characters.
This does indeed mean that not all predatory monetization is a gacha mechanic. But all gacha mechanics are predatory. They do rely upon obfuscating the costs involved in buying what you want, and they do so as a core part of how you engage with the game from start to finish.
However, they also usually include systems and concepts that obfuscate this further than just making it clear you have to spend money for a chance at getting the thing you want. In fact, one of the predatory systems that gacha games use is actually about making players not just believe but know that they can be certain to get the items they want eventually.
But there’s too much to go over in one column, and so this is just a first entry in what will be a limited series covering gacha games. The next installment will be discussing pity mechanics, the economy of the game design, and the ways that gacha games are built to trick players into spending money by giving you more things for free.
Many MMORPG gamers recoil from the term “gacha” – and for good reasons – but the subgenre is still raking in money from players, and it’s worth a deep-dive. In Gachapwned, MOP senior reporter Eliot Lefebvre tackles the highs and lows of the infamous gacha game genre and how it affects the MMO industry.
