If you’ve played any online games, you might likely have run into some form of loot boxes by now. These boxes allow you to receive random in-game items such as characters or skins at the cost of an in-game currency or money. By applying this concept to a game’s core, the gacha game genre was born. The genre derives its name from gachapon, the vending machine-dispensed capsule toys found in Japan. Similar to how gachapon machines work, gacha games typically have a variety of characters, weapons, or collectibles that you can pay to have a chance to obtain. The gacha game genre primarily consists of free-to-play mobile games. Examples of gacha games that I’ve played include Summoners War, AFK Arena, Idle Heroes, and so on. In particular, my experience with the recent cross-platform release Genshin Impact has shown me the darker true colors of the gacha system.
Genshin Impact is a free-to-play, action open-world RPG released by miHoYo on September 28, 2020. I’ve had a lot of fun thus far exploring the vivid environments/gameplay, and I can generally recommend checking the game out as a whole. Where Genshin gets its gacha label (and a lot of its issues) is in its system for acquiring new characters and weapons. Genshin utilizes a “wish system,” where you can spend in-game currency (Primogems) to roll for a random playable character or weapon. Each weapon/character has a rarity value (indicated by 3, 4, or 5 stars) that shows how powerful it is. The issue with Genshin and other gacha games is that the rates for obtaining rare items are incredibly low. The base rate for a 4-star item is 5.1%, while the base rate for a 5-star item is an outrageous 0.6%! Even considering Genshin’s mechanisms to mitigate ill fortune (ex: Making ten wishes at once guarantees you at least one 4-star or rarer/90 in a row without a 5-star guarantees you one), the possibility is high to spend a substantial amount without receiving any notable items. Making ten wishes costs roughly $27, while 90 wishes would cost you $240! After adding in the possibility of getting duplicate or unneeded items, it’s become clear to me that this system is incredibly expensive and rigged.
I could forgive the system if rare characters and weapons were not so vital to the game. It is impossible to navigate Genshin content on the internet without having content creators wave their rare and shiny characters/weapons in your face. However, this leads to another issue of gacha games: power creep. In making content updates, gacha games such as Genshin tend to add new playable characters to the game. To make these new characters appealing, they are made to be exceptionally strong, often to the point of putting players without these characters at an obvious disadvantage. At the same time, Genshin will offer “event wish banners,” offering wishes that have increased chances of obtaining these shiny new characters. Some of these overpowered characters are even exclusive to these banners, which disappear after the event period. Upon release, many Genshin content creators tend to spend massive amounts (we’re talking thousands of dollars here) of money to obtain these characters and show them off in videos and live streams. This advertisement perpetuates a toxic environment where viewers must spend large sums of money just for a chance to remain competitive in the game/avoid FOMO. This situation doesn’t even touch on other issues, such as minors who end up using their parents’ money to make these encouraged, impulsive purchases.
Gacha games like Genshin also tend to include subscription passes and battle passes, which provide a large amount of in-game currency spread over a period of time or loot rewards as players complete challenges. These passes are set at a low price to make them particularly appealing to the player. Due to the high value and guaranteed rewards of a pass, players are much more likely to buy them since they’re too busy comparing them to the RNG nature of gacha. A good value encourages purchases, even unnecessary ones.
Gacha mechanics also naturally take advantage of common fallacies. The gambler’s fallacy is the erroneous misbelief that because an event occurs less often in the past, it is more likely to in the future (or vice versa). Accordingly, many players have the misconception that they are more likely to get rare items in consecutive wishes after having poor luck, encouraging further spending. The sunk cost fallacy occurs when one continues engaging in behaviors solely due to the time/resources already dedicated to said behavior. I have yet to spend money on the game, yet I’ve still felt the “it would be a waste to stop after investing this much time/resources” effect that the game has. While already potent as separate fallacies, the combination of the two is dangerous, especially for gambling addicts or addictive personalities.
Regardless of all this, the last thing you can say that gacha games aren’t is successful: in the first month of Genshin’s release, the game grossed 250 million dollars, one of the highest amounts ever grossed for a mobile release. And while gacha systems may have slowly disappeared from a lot of games, they are likely still here to stick around for the time being. Considering the vast financial benefits they provide to game developers (and arguably the players as well), one has to wonder: to what extent this business model can be considered ethical? Should free-to-play games be allowed to keep this kind of strategy since they allow more people to access the game initially? Should gacha games and loot boxes be under stricter regulations, like gambling laws? The answers remain unclear. But for now, you can expect that people will keep wishing away, even if their wallets scream for them to stop.
New Media: Storytelling in Literature, Films, and Games 
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