As someone who grew up playing games like World of Warcraft and other AAA titles, I’ve seen how the gaming industry has evolved over the years—and not always for the better. One of the most disturbing trends is the rise of gacha games, which are, at their core, thinly veiled gambling systems targeting younger players. And I think it’s time we have a serious conversation about why this form of gaming needs to be heavily restricted, if not outright regulated.
Gacha systems prey on players by offering a sense of excitement and reward, but at the cost of their mental health and well-being. These games are often marketed as “free to play,” making them seem harmless, but in reality, they trap players in cycles of spending and gambling. You don’t just buy a game and enjoy its content—you gamble for the chance to get characters, equipment, and other in-game items. It’s all based on luck, with very low odds of getting what you want, which leads players to keep spending in hopes of hitting that jackpot.
This setup is psychologically damaging, especially for younger players who are still developing their sense of self-control. Gacha games condition them to associate spending money with emotional highs, which is the exact same mechanism that fuels gambling addiction. You might think it’s just harmless fun, but it’s incredibly easy to fall into a pattern where you’re constantly chasing that next dopamine hit, just like a gambler sitting at a slot machine. Over time, this not only leads to financial strain but also deeply ingrained mental health issues, such as anxiety, depression, and a lack of self-control when it comes to spending money.
Countries like Belgium and the Netherlands have already banned loot boxes and gacha systems, recognizing the dangers they pose, especially to younger players. The fact that these systems are still largely unregulated in many other regions, including the U.S., shows just how out of control things have gotten. The gaming industry has shifted from offering well-rounded experiences to creating systems designed to exploit players’ psychological vulnerabilities.
We need to follow Europe’s lead in placing heavy restrictions on gacha and loot boxes. It’s one thing to pay for a game and know what you’re getting; it’s another to be lured into a never-ending cycle of gambling for content that should be available as part of the game. Gaming should be about fun, skill, and exploration, not exploiting people’s mental health for profit.
It’s time for developers and legislators to take responsibility and start protecting the players, especially the younger ones, from these predatory practices.
World of Warcraft and Diablo are gacha. Every time you play, you are “pulling” and hoping for a good drop(item). What modern gacha games did, is take that gameplay/psychological feature and directly monetize it(instead of indirectly monetizing it through a subscription/1 time payment).
But both are gambling. I am ok with having age restrictions but we need to be honest with ourselves. And what is “fun” is whatever makes neurons activate. Gambling(ie rpg elements) has always been a core mechanic for many games.
I stopped playing WoW because it didn’t value my time. There is a limit to how much you can spend on WoW. Sure, you can buy gold, but it honestly won’t help you that much. The upgrades come from the weekly content, mostly.
And then there’s the mobile stuff where whales rule the day.
Modern gacha games are more exploitative and effective. But there is a reason why almost all conventional games have “rpg elements” nowadays. I am an old gamer and i remember when this happened.
Game devs realized that if they have “number goes up” mechanics in their games, those games will be more popular and they will sell more. Thats how all games, including multiplayer competitive games, started adding temporary progression(session based, ie buying items between rounds in counterstrike) and then permanent progression(unlocking attachments and prestiging in call of duty).
Quake and unreal didnt have any progression, yet they were very popular multiplayer games. Many people blamed the lack of “parallel progression” systems in starcraft 2, for its failure(sc2 eventually added more parallel progression). Mechabellum, an autobattler(the modern equivalent of an rts), has like 3 different numbers that go up, on top of unlocking unit abilities and skins.
The mobile game market is very competitive and game development is extremely fast and iterative. So they leapfrogged ahead of conventional gaming when it comes to all kinds of user metric manipulation(addictiveness, engagement, etc). Dont hate the player, hate the game.
Funnily enough, the most popular mobile games atm are by Hoyoverse and they arent even that exploitative. They are AAA games, with decent story, graphics, gameplay and the gacha is just there for the more vulnerable/rich people. IMO playing them as f2p is not only viable but actually more enjoyable(ie challenging instead of rolfstomping everything).
If only there were more conventional games as a service that could pump the amount and quality of content that Hoyoverse creates for their games. But Hoyoverse is a private company, probably funded by the chinese government, so they can afford to reinvest all those billions back into the game development, unlike other games. And it shows.
So ultimately, gacha is kinda like real life gambling. I am kinda ok with it, as long as it isnt promoted and its profits go to a good place(funding education or creating decent games).
But both are gambling.
Nah, they are not comparable in a meaningful way. Sure, at a high level, you can apply aspects of “gambling” to both examples. But the biggest and most important point is the ability to spend actual money for additional changes at “winning”.
People are against gaming because of some deep-seating fear of Random Number Generation by itself. They are against it because of how easy it is to lose money.
It depends on if you value your time or not. That’s what you gamble in WoW. If you don’t get your drop at the end of the raid, you lost time. When a new expansion obsoletes your gear, you lost time.
Oh wait, you literally have to buy play-time to even do the raid in the first place and roll the wheel. Not to mention the (sub)time it takes to level up and gear up.
Yeah. Just because you are not pulling out your wallet at every kill doesn’t mean you aren’t gambling and losing, both time and money.
In that case aren’t most games gambling? You fight a boss and you die. You have failed and you lose progress of the boss fight which means the failed fight was a waste of time. Gambling.
My actual point is that despite us having a relatively good intuition on what is gambling, defining what gambling really is is pretty hard. Be too broad and you will end up marking non-gambling things as gambling, be too narrow and you get things like lootboxes that definitely feel like gambling but don’t actually fit most legal definitions of gambling.
Your definition is so broad it encompasses almost all games and as such is useless when you want to use it to regulate gambling on games.
It is gambling becaae there is a “house” you at playing against, whoever sets the odds and has a financial interest in them.
If you’re playing a singleplayer game, you are still triggering the same mechanisms, but no one is profiting from you staying up until 3am playing a singleplayer game you already paid for.
So all subscription games are gambling? What about Fallout 76? It’s not gambling if you just buy the game but if you buy the subscription the game becomes gambling despite the game fundamentally stays the same and the subscription doesn’t add any RNG to the game?
If you value your time, you wouldn’t be playing video games at all. As they are nearly an entertaining way to waste time.
All games waste either time, money, or both. So I guess we just have to make video games illegal now. Oh well. Was fun while it lasted.
While I definitely have a lot of issues with how fast people said “Gacha and loot boxes are okay if it is Genshin Impact”, I have the same general reservations I did back when it was about loot boxes in Overwatch or nu-Battlefront 2.
Yes, it is real shitty and a great way to pad out a game into a grind. And the goal is obviously to encourage RMTs to bypass it.
But also? It is like people for got ARPGs and MMOs and the like. The common refrain among older “gamer” Millennials is something like “I almost flunked out of school because of WoW/Everquest” and the like. And a lot of us have stories about staying up all night doing Bhaal runs to get a specific drop in Diablo 2 and so forth.
And, at the end of the day, it is the same thing. It is a way to artificially increase engagement with the option to RMT your way out of it. Studios have found ways to pull all those RMTs into the game itself (so that they get a cut on every legendary sword sold) but it is still the same skinner boxes.
Not to mention games like Balatro or Vampire Survivors that take massive inspiration from casino and slot machine design and mechanics. Yes, they don’t have additional purchases (DLC aside) but there is something to be said when EVERYONE owns a ten dollar game because everyone who touches it can’t stop gushing about the flashing lights and bells.
And, much like with loot boxes, I am really hesitant for any “We passed some random ass legislature. Mission Accomplished™”. When the underlying skinner box concept is still the basis of so many games.
Thanks for calling them out for being Skinner Boxes (also known as an Operant Conditioning Chamber). When my friends were having addiction issues with WoW 20 years ago, I called it out as being addictive because it was a glorified skinner box. Nothing has changed, it’s just become more exploitative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber
For anyone unfamiliar, it’s a science experiment. There’s two rats in two boxes. One rat has a lever that, when pressed, drops food to the rat. The rat only presses the lever when it is hungry. In the other box, the rat has a level that randomly outputs food, but never consistently. A lot of the time, it produces nothing. The rat in that box spends all day long pressing the lever. Since it has no idea when the food will come, it panics and never stops trying to get more food, unsure if it will starve if it does not.
This is Diablo/World of Warcraft and the “Epic Loot” problem. People are clicking on the games endlessly looking for that top tier loot drop. It’s the same thing, because the results are inconsistent, people get addicted to the grind of trying to find the “best” item.
Also, thanks for pointing out that it doesn’t matter what game it is it’s still not okay. It wasn’t okay when it was WoW, it’s not okay when it’s Genshin Impact.
While I understand and agree with your premise to a point, aren’t you advocating for the removal of all randomness in videogames? As long as random factors are tied to outcomes, games will always be playing off that desire that the Skinner Box highlights. I’d argue that the entire modern rogue-lite genre is predicated on the fact that sometimes you will get “better” powerups, upgrades, etc., which leads to better outcomes. Auto-chess games are similiar, where hitting good random rolls leads to high powered teams and easy wins.
Mastery of both these genres requires both a wide birth of knowledge, and flexibility as you make due with what you are offerred, rather than simply always having the best things at all times. These are skills that are fun to have tested and build master in, and I don’t really think we should eliminate that from games. I agree that the worst offenders are simply trying to feed off human addiction rather than build are emergant gameplay situations, but any rule that targets the addict chasers is likely to catch other games with randomization in the crossfire.
I understand I didn’t make it clear in this comment and I apologize for that, elsewhere in the thread I made clear that I don’t want games like WoW/Diablo/Borderlands/Balatro to get banned, but I do think it’s important to recognize how their systems work and can impact people with addiction/gambling issues. I think we haven’t ever actually had a conversation about that aspect of these games, and I think it may be an important one to have, even if it only deeply affects a small sliver of society. Out of 9 billion people, a sliver is still often millions.
Also, and I do apologize, (especially if it was just a typo) but it is actually “wide berth” not “wide birth.” Otherwise, I agree with your point. However, I really did have friends who struggled with WoW in functionally the same way I have had other friends struggle with drugs and alcohol. They were in the minority, but they existed. I think it’s important to find ways to help those people deal with those issues without impacting the large number of people whom it does not. As I said elsewhere, I personally don’t have good ideas how to achieve that, I just know the conversation should happen. I would hope more clever and thoughtful people than I could have good ideas.
but there is something to be said when EVERYONE owns a ten dollar gam
Because it’s the game of the year.
…and because literally every mechanic in the game is random. The whole game is a skinner box. I say this as a fan of Balatro.
To quote myself from elsewhere in the thread: The blinds are random, the jokers are random, the store is random, the planets are random, the tarot cards are random, it’s all random.
That’s literally what gives Balatro an addictively replayable quality.
How are the blinds random? They scale. Every game is “random” if you want to boil it down.
While there certainly are problems with other games, at least every game you mentioned is fully transparent about the price tag. Balatro doesn’t exploit whales by concealing how much it’ll cost to get anything.
And thank you for demonstrating how we got here and why the root issue will never be addressed.
“Whoa now. The game I like does none of that” is the same reason gacha is fine if it is genshin
They’re different issues. The fact that people can and do financially ruin themselves over gacha is a lot more serious, and trying to conflate that with something like Balatro ultimately muddies the message.
Its the same idea. It is taking concepts that are known to prey on those with addictive tendencies and turning that into a game.
That is why I referenced games like Diablo and WoW. They were more about making people spend time but… time is money.
And THAT is the problem. Knowingly taking advantage of the kind of stuff that rubs dopamine emitters real nice. Because a lot of us can dip in and out of a gacha and not get ruined. And others will fail out of college because they NEED that drop
It’s not. These are not the same thing. No one has bankrupted themselves playing Balatro.
Money is not everything. That is why I keep pointing out the time argument (and you keep ignoring it…). Gaming cafes tend to take advantage along those lines but also just look up horror stories like that couple that was so engrossed with WoW (?) they let their baby die.
At the end of the day: Warning labels and acknowledgement of what we are exposing ourselves to goes a long way. Rather than just saying “I like X so X can’t be bad” until it gets to the point that people insist it needs to be illegal because they cannot help themselves.
I like X so X can’t be bad
I didn’t say that. What I said was “these are not the same thing, and drawing a false equivalence between them muddies the message.”
True, and I say this as a fan of Balatro…
…but the core of Balatro is literally in its random presentation. The blinds are random, the jokers are random, the store is random, the planets are random, the tarot cards are random, it’s all random. World of Warcraft didn’t need you to pay money to get epic loot either, but I still had friends ruin their lives over chasing epic loot in WoW. I haven’t had any friends ruin their lives over Balatro yet, but I also don’t think it’s impossible for that to happen. Obviously Balatro isn’t “gambling” in the sense of taking a risk with actual real money, but otherwise it still fits the definition of a skinner box.
Because at their core, when a massive amount of the gameplay revolves around random chance, it’s very easy to get addicted to it.
Well what do you want the solution to be? I think it’s easy to say that games should be transparent about what you’re paying for, my stance is that gacha should be outright illegal because of that. But I don’t think it makes sense to go after any and all kinds of randomness in games.
I’m not the one who made the original post so I’m not asking for a solution for this.
I’m pointing out how hard it is to lay down a line in the sand and say “this one is bad and this one is good” because sadly, but very arguably, the core game mechanics are addictive themselves.
I remember the couple in
ChinaSouth Korea whose baby died because they were playing too much WoW.It’s been 20 years I got the country wrong: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2005/06/547/
Some people just cannot control themselves when it comes to a skinner box.
I don’t know what the solution is because I’d rather not see Diablo/WoW/Borderlands/Balatro get banned.
I just think it is important to discuss the reality of their skinner box operational procedures.
Gacha is the line in the sand I’m willing to draw. Don’t put randomness in the price tag.
The core of lots of games revolve around random chance, and plenty of those exhibit no addictive behavior whatsoever. I’d certainly like to hear a research psychologist’s take on it though.
The problem is the new wave of gacha games are really selling you on characters and Hoyoverse isn’t even hiding it anymore: The more money you pour into Zenless Zone Zero, the less clothes the Proxy wear in the unlockables. And they have characters for every sexual preference on Earth at this point.
I remember being pissed when I got shitty cards from a YuGiOh booster pack when I was a kid, never bought new packs again. Only got stuff if I knew its value first. The fact that kids these days are actually falling prey to these systems shows how much more advanced and predatory they are.
Without being a gacha game, World of WarCraft is guilty of a lot of the same stuff. You probably know people who flunked out of college due to the addiction, or have heard of parents who neglected their child over that game. It preys on a lot of the same impulses that Diablo and Diablo II seemed to have found by accident, before they were monetized by subscription fees and then microtransactions. And you can see a lot of the same in games like Destiny.
Haven’t played WoW in awhile, but do they now have ‘you can spend unlimited money’ mechanics? Previously it was just stuff like mounts and character transfers and stuff. I know you can also sell tokens for gold, but I thought gold kind of becomes irrelevant at some point. The best gear is bind on drop right? Theoretically I guess you can pay gold for boost runs, which probably counts as an endless money sink.
I kind of have a mental separation in my head between games with unlimited money sinks (like games with energy mechanics) where you can spend and spend and spend and it never stops, vs games that have a finite of things to buy.
It can still be way over priced, but there’s a maximum amount of money you can throw at the game. Even Diablo 4, with a relatively huge and highly priced number of cosmetic items has effectively a maximum price (though every new cosmetic increases that price). Vs Diablo Immortal allowing you to spend 10s of thousands of dollars and still need to keep spending. I think unlimited money mechanics should be outlawed or at least fully classified as gambling and regulated accordingly.
I think keeping you addicted so as to continue to paying a monthly subscription is bad on its own, and I don’t think it needs to be qualified by how much you spend overall if they’re still knowingly capitalizing on that addiction in an unregulated environment. But also, while I don’t know the answer to your question for a fact, I would imagine that they do have ways to spend unlimited money in that game if you’re so inclined.
I agree with you, to an extent. I would say it’s a lot more complicated than that with World of Warcraft, which is an MMO, and does not revolve on gambling except in the aspect of random number generated loot. This is probably the majority of looter shooters out there today as well and a large number of other games. Pure chance in just the loot and rewards. Personally, World of Warcraft did not affect me adversely, because I have very strong self-control, and was able to develop very strict limitations for my own personal life which was important in college.
But I think there’s something you’re definitely missing. Sure, while World of Warcraft can be blamed by some people flunking out of college or high school due to its addictive and fun nature, Have you considered the fact that the world we live in is simply so boring that they don’t want to pay attention to those things? Over a 20-year time span since I have graduated, high school and college has not evolved. It’s the same boring ass mess that it was when I went to school. Unnecessary classes, study only for the test and never use that information ever again, very rarely are their projects and when there are, they are silly group projects in which two out of the four members of your group are lazy and don’t want to do a damn thing. You also are faced with constant demoralizing facts thrown at you from the media and the outside world that your college degree won’t help you get a job, you won’t see any student loan relief, the wealthy elites are in positions of power and rising faster in companies than you ever will be… Reality is so disappointing. So I can understand why these people have trouble paying attention in school and want to turn to stuff like World of Warcraft, theme park MMO that has so much fun and enjoyment in it
But when we’re talking about a gacha, This feels so much more insidious. Every aspect of the entire game, not just the loot, is gambling, and you’re gambling with real money. Not your time. In World of Warcraft you don’t get a drop, oh well, try again next time. You still paid $15 for that entire month, so you can try as many times as you want on as many characters as you want. But when you pay 50 bucks for Genshin impact and you get nothing, you know what that money goes towards? Absolutely nothing. You lose that money forever. Now you are mentally afflicted with that, and you’re already considering whether or not you should pay another 50 bucks to try and get it again with the gamblers fallacy in the back of your mind that if I pay another $50 I’m already $50 in, so I have a much better chance of getting it now. It’s sickening
This reads like “the only moral Skinner box is my Skinner box.”
Also sounds like you haven’t played in a while. The addition of real currency to gold trading creates an even more direct pipeline from one’s wallet to in-game gear dice rolls. Guilds selling raid gear is even more common now, and with crafting orders, a whale can spend to reroll secondary stats on crafted gear.
With the way Warcraft is throwing currencies at players now, it’s clear Blizzard has taken more than a few cues from how gacha and other live-service outfits are doing things these days. Plenty of opportunities for ruinous, addictive behavior.
Also sounds like you haven’t played in a while.
No, I’m a current member of World of Warcraft.
The addition of real currency to gold trading creates an even more direct pipeline from one’s wallet to in-game gear dice rolls. Guilds selling raid gear is even more common now, and with crafting orders, a whale can spend to reroll secondary stats on crafted gear.
It has literally always been like this. Where have you been? People were selling power leveling runs through stockades back when the game first started. They were selling BOE gear for gold, and that gold was obtained with a credit card through gold selling websites. The introduction of wow tokens just changed the recipient of the money from Gold farmers to Blizzard entertainment. I assure you that most people who are active players of the game are not buying tons of gear with gold that has been obtained through their credit card, and even if they were, it doesn’t affect you at all. The guilds that sell runs through challenging content, they have always been doing that, since the very beginning. I remember back in burning crusade people spamming chat that they would carry you through black temple near the end of the expansion. So there’s not like some new shift towards that. It’s always happens like that. The only thing that has shifted is that now, more than ever, you can play the game on your own and get your own gear. The introduction of solo delves has made it possible to gear up your character completely on your own without any additional help from others
With the way Warcraft is throwing currencies at players now, it’s clear Blizzard has taken more than a few cues from how gacha and other live-service outfits are doing things these days. Plenty of opportunities for ruinous, addictive behavior.
I fully agree with this and they have been ignoring player feedback about it for a while now, it’s completely bullshit how many stupid currencies we have and it almost feels like they are AI generating the game design at this point. Like they are going to chat GPT and asking, “what’s a good way to create an addictive loop of currencies for players?” Because some of them are in your bags, some of them are in the currency pane, some of them are bind on character, bind on account, some of them can be traded and some can’t. It’s utter insanity. Truly ass game design. This is the first time they finally made a shift back to using a single currency for PVE though, the flight stones and valor stones. Kind of like marks of valor back in wrath.
Come on. We both know that legitimizing the RMT system increased the number of gold buyers and normalized the process. Not only does it now capture the players who were both a) squeamish about paying unproven third parties and b) had no recourse if they did get scammed, it’s also a far more convenient process. We know the gold-for-gear (and other services) market exploded in size because Blizzard was finally forced to make systemic changes to fight/redirect services spam. Service sellers are everywhere, and there was a point they were constantly in your whispers, your mailbox, your chat, your group finder. It’s nothing like it was 15-20 years ago.
No, gold buyers are not most players (and no, I don’t care that some players are doing it). Most gacha players aren’t whales, either. My point is that yes, your game is also chasing the whales right now and will continue to design systems to do so.
We both know that legitimizing the RMT system increased the number of gold buyers and normalized the process
Really? Where is your data to back that up? Games like old school RuneScape and World of Warcraft still have people who buy gold and get banned for it all the time. You’re also conveniently disregarding lots of the benefits of this system. People can now earn currency fully in game to pay for their subscription. Completely for free, and other players are making a choice the purchase the tokens. There’s virtually no pressure in game whatsoever in World of Warcraft that prompts you to purchase them. There’s no pop-ups, no advertisements for tokens at all. This is the least predatory form of microtransaction I have ever seen. Compare this to Destiny, in which you are constantly given currency for free to use in the eververse, and repeatedly going there back and forth being flashed with bullshit items that you’ll never have enough currency to afford.
Good luck figuring out how to avoid labeling every game ever made as a “skinner box”. It’s basically a jaded person’s definition of what video games are at their core.
This reads like “the only moral Skinner box is my Skinner box.”
It is, MMO players have been doing this to gacha games for years now, it’s just pot calling the kettle black.
I agree with you, to an extent. I would say it’s a lot more complicated than that with World of Warcraft, which is an MMO, and does not revolve on gambling except in the aspect of random number generated loot.
The way that the drops are is literally the same approach as a slot machine but with more steps to take up your time with boring shit and require more of your life to be dedicated to it so that there is less risk of you getting distracted by things like hobbies or games with finite stories with quality writing. A one-armed bandit might snag a handful of whales that spend all of their time feeding the machine. The Wrath of the Lich Bandit gets a much larger percentage of its users in front of it for a larger amount of their time, increasing the ratio of addicts/whales caught. Add in expansions, real money auctions, etc and you’ve got something much more fucked up than anything on a Vegas casino floor.
You could throw most of this same argument back at gachas. They’re just gambling because the world sucks, or something…
No, my understanding is that the reason people get addicted to this stuff is that we evolved to gather finite resources when they’re available, even if it’s rare, so we’re prey to systems like this that can control that rarity. WoW absolutely did this, just without putting a price on each interaction.
Without being a gacha game, World of WarCraft is guilty of a lot of the same stuff.
I’m not a fan of trying to poison the well on this discussion by trying to bring in a lot of secondary issues and try to broaden the issue to the point of uselessness.
The biggest issue with gambling is the ability to lose your money.
Sure, you can waste time with World of Warcraft. But I can also waste time playing too much Baldur’s Gate 3, or Civilization, or by binging shows on Netflix.
But none of those allow me to spend thousands or tens of thousands by gambling on mechanics within the media itself.
How about we focus on that issue first?
Because I’d say the addiction is the issue. The biggest issue with gambling is the addiction. If you’re not addicted, you’re not spending time or money beyond your means. So I’d rather not broaden it to how much money it sucks out of you when the addiction is the issue. It all relies on the same principles that we know to be worth legal regulation when it’s acknowledged as gambling. I don’t know anyone who got addicted to Netflix, but they’ll “binge” shows because we no longer live in the era where we can only watch shows according to a broadcast schedule; plus sometimes, you just want some background noise while you’re doing something else, including a show you’ve seen a million times.
Is roblox a gacha game? My little 7 year old nephew wants to play but I’m not sure if it’s appropriate (as the gaming liason in the family)
Roblox is not a game, it is a game platform where users make games. Roblox games, especially ones that are mildly popular at 500-5k active players usually have reasonable monetization and no gacha. Some have lootboxes.
I wouldn’t call Roblox itself a gacha game. That category is the ones where you are trying to collect all the heroes in the game and level them up with rare loot. AFAIK they generally, if not always, involve loot crates that you have to purchase.
Roblox has its own problems. As spelled out by People Make Games in these two videos.
https://youtu.be/_gXlauRB1EQ?si=ngjtGwhA5JH5FcEL
https://youtu.be/vTMF6xEiAaY?si=u1z_LYfOYrOMlUDd
Roblox claims to teach kids how to make their own games. At this point from what I’ve heard, I would suggest Unity Engine before Roblox, and I wouldn’t recommend Unity after their pricing debacle.
Watch the videos, and have a serious discussion with his parents about it before you get him that game platform.
Don’t know if there are gacha mechanics but Roblox has been widely criticized for basically using child labor. The majority of content is user created. Don’t know how exactly it’s monetized but i can’t imagine it’s good.
I’m quite sad that most games for smartphones are either gatcha-hell, or add-ridden messes.
What good options are there? I tried OpenTTD for Android, but the UI is really not optimized for such a small screen.
there’s still good games on the app store, you just gotta pay. Stardew is good on phone
Here are games I like that are just mobile ports without ads or micro transactions:
Slay the spire
Monster train
Mindustry
Mini metro
Honorable mention to Vampire Survivors which is mostly a simple port, but it does incentivize you to watch ads for extra lives.
I was a young idiot making minimum wage and I spent 500 dollars in a gacha game over a three month period. It’s been years and I still wake up at night, remember this and feel the strongest remorse.
I spent $800 on Fallout: Shelter
Fuck, my condolences.
You escaped addiction (hopefully) without too many long-term consequences, hopefully that remorse will help you avoid similar situations in the future :)
If it helps me to avoid something even worse later on, maybe it was even worth the 500 bucks! Hopefully I’ll never have to find out.
I’m sorry, it really sounds like it turned into an addiction for you. Very happy that you got away from it. Be careful with addictive substances or activities in your life, some people have a predisposition for it.
Thank you! I very much have that predisposition. I’ve noticed that I have addictive behavior towards sugar and caffeine as well (I’m fine as long as I don’t have any, but if I have some I’ll continue to crave more at shorter and shorter intervals until I go to sleep and it resets), and recently celebrated my third month nicotine free after about four years total smoking and then vaping.
Addictive proclivities are a personal defect normally. But when you exist in a context where there are people whose job it is to get you hooked on things, they become a handicap.
But the industry said you whales were rich gamers that had too much money and didn’t know what to do with it! /s
Damn, I’ve never thought of myself as a whale before but I guess for a while there I was. I wonder how many of the people we see in these games with all the premium characters and skins are like me, struggling. I always thought of them as having more money than sense but maybe they (we) lack both.
I don’t allow myself to play any mobile games anymore. Spent like $300 on one of those idle games. Not worth it. I refuse to play any free to play titles at all, no matter the platform these days.
I once spent $10 on a mobile game. You can get a special item by purchasing gems or by winning coins for which you have to grind for a year. After getting the item, i felt so disgusted that I gave up mobile gaming and shifted to PC.
I watched a documentary on Darksyde Phil. He managed to spend 44000 on a Wrestling gambling game per month.
I think the bright side is that you learned something even tho it was a 500 dollar lesson.
I used to work with a guy who was super cheap. Like i sometimes payed for his coffee or whatever, because i always did that with friends and co workers, and sometimes they would pay too. He never did that. One day we talked about video games and spending habits. He said he doesn’t play video games, but he played clash of clans. I didn’t really know what clash of clans is, aside from seeing some screenshots and seeing memes. He said that he spend 500-800 dollars a month on the game. It kinda blew me away, because i knew that whales often spend a bunch of cash on games, i just was a bit shocked about the amount and that it was HIM. He looked at me and said, oh that’s nothing, you should see what my girlfriend spends on candy crush.
We had to convince my brother in law (13yo) to not spend his birthday money of £85 on Genshin impact skins. Kids are fucked by advertising man
It’s the same formula in damned near every game now. Pay2Win has made even the most chill JRPG a wall of ads and notifications to spend more money.
Same, World of Tanks is the first game that comes to my mind when people mention pay2win mechanics. I am quite happy that I don’t play that game anymore.
I’m no stranger to people paying for skins and all, but when i first heard that kids want vbucks as a Christmas gift my stomach kinda turned.
Report that shit to the EU or your government. At least in Europe they care…
The interesting thing is that although I’ve almost never spent money on a gacha system and haven’t played much gacha systems recently, my brain subconsciously craved for more but in a safer way.
That’s why I created the JavaScript weighted playlist for myself: A random selection of songs from my music library where some songs play (much) more than others. Getting a super rare song is akin to getting a top tier drop. Additionally, the playback rate is randomized to a normal distribution, giving the tiny chance that a rare song can play with a wild playback rate. And if that wasn’t enough, some Geometry Dash related songs can randomly skip to the next song, simulating watching someone try to beat some demon level.
I’ve created a skinner box for my brain that sometimes causes me to waste hours just clicking on the “next song” button to see what shows up next. My wallet was not harmed in the process (although it might soon be because I want it to work on a portable device, but that money would go to some niche open source hardware thing rather than a greedy gacha publisher).
This is extremely interesting and in general kind of touches on a point that I heard that’s kind of funny… People are just bored, and all of Good and bad things that we do in this world are a result of that boredom. Gambling, our hobbies, picking up another job. If it cures your boredom there’s nothing wrong with it
At least make all gacha games R18, no kids should be exposed to this stuff.
Curious to see what that would do to the industry as a whole. But this is not entirely our of line with what countries like Korea, China, and Japan have already been fiddling with.
Quite a few years ago now I went to my nan’s house for Christmas.
My cousin, I think he was about 13, had got a £50 Steam voucher for some games. Him and my other cousin who was a couple of year older went to Steam, swapped the voucher for something, and then took that to a gambling site. I don’t know if they’re still a thing. It was something to do with Counter Strike drops I think. Heavily advertised by YouTubers who ran them, with a bunch of videos showing them winning. The sort of thing they’d be sent to prison for in any right thinking society.
They took that £50, put it in, and clicked. The younger one went “what now?” and the older one just went “oh, nothing. It’s gone.” A couple of games worth of money, gone. For nothing.
He looked like he was about to cry, and only didn’t because he was going through that acting tough phase.
He’s an accountant now, and plays crown green bowling. I like to think that was a relatively cheap lesson in why not to fuck around with gambling.
Seems about right. CSGO skin gambling was all the rage 10 years ago.
That’s so devastating. I feel awful when kids are let down like that.
At least that lesson cost mere £50 and not thousands of pounds if he won and wanted to chase that dopamine hit of winning.
It sucks, but in a world we’ve chosen to litter with landmines, it’s a relatively harmless experience.
I would be more worried about the kid winning and internalizing the feeling of instant gratification.
Government should set up a site where companies using loot boxes have to open a tax box to know what tax they’ll pay that month, to keep things exiting, with the option to buy more tax boxes for a few million per box.
That’s hilarious. Unfortunately that is what is happening already. Large corporations are buying ridiculously low taxes by spending a few million up front.
You’re like 5 years late on this realization. Unfortunately not much is changing.
It seems the EU is moving on this issue with their usual tectonic speed.
Let’s hope they also hit with their usual tectonic force.
Compared to the US, the EU is lightning fast. California probably beats them sometimes, though.
Cali is a hit or miss, the Cali privacy reg has been so watered down compared to the GDPR it feels like the ad industry got it in to prevent future harsher regulations.
It’s a small measure, but I’d really like to see a law where gacha games need to publicly advertise their odds and allow independent verification.
The biggest effect it would have is, the odds would need to be static. Many gacha systems have been accused of putting a hand on the wheel, assuring someone “so close to their needed item” must keep going through a series of failures.
I don’t really know a lot about gatcha games, the only one i played was some DBZ game, because i wanted to get back into DBZ, and shiny things. I never payed money for it, because honestly i didn’t really see the point, aside from it being an obvious waste of money, and at the end of the day, i never felt like i missed out of anything, because of maybe luck or just grinding or not caring enough.
anyway, i’m pretty sure they said what the odds are of pulling a specific card, and that it’s like in the 1% or 0.5% or whatever. But i don’t think that helps at all, because people who gamble like to game, no matter the odds.
This is already a thing in most gacha games due to laws that already exist in certain countries.
The way the gacha works is very public knowledge for every popular one, and can be verified by the players.
the only gacha i play is limbus company ^(glory to project moon)^ so i dont know if this is true for other gachas but yeah, in limbus you’re always just one click away from seeing the % chances of getting a specific identity/ego, although this is done in compliance with some korean laws about online gambling (its the first thing you read when you open the probabilities menu)
publicly advertise their odds and allow independent verification.
The biggest effect it would have is, the odds would need to be static
i mean, genshin kinda does this?? ingame on the wish screen they tell you about their pity system, where 75-100 ‘wishes’ is a guarenteed top-tier drop
