When I started off the Gachapwned series, I devoted the very first column to explaining that the gacha business model is inherently a predatory way of monetizing a video game. And I framed that column as being a matter of establishing something as a starting point, an object of basic understanding: Gacha is a predatory business model. But I also clearly said something that wasn’t entirely true by stating that these games would be better without the gacha elements, as last week’s column made it clear that when you do strip out the gacha, it doesn’t make the game suddenly or indisputably better.
This was, in fact, altogether intentional. It’s the point I have been leading up to for the entire series because it is in fact extremely important. We have, heretofore, been discussing these games as separate entities, treating the business model as an albatross to their overall enjoyment. But it is time to acknowledge that this is perhaps the wrong framing. We should consider that the gacha is not simply the business model used in these games but a core part of what makes these games themselves.
In other words, the gambling isn’t the weakness. It’s the selling point.
At first glance, this may sound kind of unreasonable. The selling point of these games can’t be that predatory monetization model that we started off discussing as a predatory business model! But I want you to think about those first couple of columns in that context, because suddenly a lot of things make more sense. All of the elements of incentivizing you to spend are still there, but I want you to look at that through a different lens of the gamble.
Consider this. Let’s say that with all this “paying for a couple of extra pulls” stuff, the game developers decide to change their business models so that you just buy a character for the same price as they expect the average person to pay. In that context, the average payment may well be in the $10-$15 a month range. In other words, if all the developers wanted to do was to get you to buy a new character, you could just be sold that.
But that’s not what you get sold. You get sold pulls and chances with pity systems to assure you get something. Why is that? Because the gacha part is part of the fun. Pulling on a gacha… is… fun. It’s not a bug; it’s a feature.
So when we ask about gacha, we have to ask about why humans have vices.
I mentioned in that first column that we all enjoy doing things that are bad for us. Drinking and gambling are the obvious ones (there are good reasons that casinos are machines for making money), but even if you want to sit back and be very smug about how you don’t share those vices, I know that you have vices. You have desserts when you shouldn’t, or you like to sleep in, or you smoke pot, or whatever. I don’t care what they are. You do things that you know are bad for you.
This doesn’t mean that the vice in question ruins your life. There are lots of people who drink without drinking to excess, for example. But that doesn’t make drinking liquor good for you. If you get tipsy, you know you have had too much to drink already. You know that the vice is bad for you and knew it when you started drinking.
So why do we do it? Well, this may astonish you, but I am not actually a psychologist and do not believe that I can answer that question conclusively in a column on an MMO blog. The fact is that vices do a lot of different things for us. But I think there is an overall unifying factor to them, and it’s not just that they tend to be a little harmful along the way. It’s that the harm is placed in direct contrast with how they make us feel, and that feels like a touch of control.
I very rarely spend money on the gacha games that I play. I know that they are, in fact, predatory, and I definitely do not spend money to get one more pull before pity. But the act of doing so makes me feel like I’m winning. I smartly saved up my resources and look at me now, I’m getting your characters for free. I outsmarted you. No, I am not stupid enough to think that it’s actually a trick because, like, the system that I am using to get these characters for free were systems you put into the game to begin with. But it feels like getting away with something.
The rush is part of the fun. The pull of the slot machine, even if you know it’s almost certainly going to end with a loss, is the fun part. I have gone to casinos with $20 on hand to play cheap slots, and walked out with $0 on hand from that initial amount, and the slot pulls that I had were the fun alongside having dinner at a nice restaurant. It’s $20 for an experience, in other words.
But some people enter with $20 on hand and wind up thousands of dollars in the hole. Therein lies the problem.
In taking into account that the gacha itself is a vice, we also have to acknowledge that the vice can be dangerous and destructive even if it isn’t automatically so. The problem with gacha is not that every single person who plays one is a sucker who is going to waste huge amounts of money hard-pulling on things. The problem is that some people are. Some people are simply genetically wired for that type of addiction. Just like some people are going to start drinking and end up unable to function.
And if you think that I’m saying this as some abstract thing, I assure you I am not.
The problem with regulating vice isn’t that it’s difficult to address the vices of video games alongside the vices that are not that; it’s that vice is difficult to regulate in general because for most people it’s fine and for some people it’s turbo-grade bad times. But what I didn’t slow-roll with that first column was that we need to be able to understand what gacha games are and why they appeal to people because even if there are lots of layers to what make gacha games appealing, we have to face those layers authentically.
By simply saying “gacha is a bad business model,” we fail to understand why it appeals. By failing to understand it as a vice that is a part of the appeal, we treat it the same way. We reduce the people who are vulnerable to it into suckers and marks, people to be pitied instead of people who have a problem that needs compassion and help. And we let ourselves become distracted from real questions of addiction and abuse by papering it over with smiling soft anime-style artwork.
I reject this framing on every level. The fact is that gacha is a predatory business model, but it is also a predatory business model that has that as a core part of its appeal. It is, in its own way, like gambling – and we need to treat it the same way, both in the sense that some people can become very vulnerable to it and in the sense that you cannot “fix” it via simple removal.
You can play poker without real money, but most poker fans would argue that the game loses something in the process. Gacha is, at the end of the day, no different. And that doesn’t mean you’re somehow wrong if you don’t like it; after all, I don’t particularly care for poker. But that doesn’t mean I am immune to all vices, and vices are as endemic to the human condition as calling things the human condition. Only by understanding them can we address them.
So let’s wrap this up next week.
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.
