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.
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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
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.
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.
Report that shit to the EU or your government. At least in Europe they care…
China has announced a ban on Gacha game mechanics (and lootboxes, predatory discounts, and gambling) which should hopefully ripple out to Europe and the US soon.
A lot of these mechanics were adapted from the Chinese gaming market and I think the same will likely happen in the reverse.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
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.
Without spending money, a lot of these games simply become boring and deeply repetitive over time.
The system for farming “free” in game currency feels more like a chore than entertainment. The benefits of each upgrade is more marginal while the adversaries progress rapidly.
There’s a “git good” angle to this kind of game, as it drifts from an FF-on-easy-mode to Dark-Souls-on-Legendary. But if I want that experience, why not just buy a copy of a Souls game?
Certainly Eldin Ring is worth a few hundred hours, has a much richer experience, and won’t immolate my wallet inside a month.
Also it should be required to display prices in local currency. I spent 2.99usd on that fox card game. Ended up costing me 5 bucks canadian
It’s time for developers and legislators to take responsibility and start protecting the players, especially the younger ones, from these predatory practices.
They’re making fucking bank with these practices. It will have to be stopped by government regulation. Self-regulation of industries has literally never fucking worked once in history. Look at Boeing, which has had the FAA basically glad-handing it for 50 years and it’s falling apart at the seams (sometimes literally).
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
-Upton Sinclair
I mean, look how fast the ENTIRE industry shifted to battle passes (and still gacha) and away from “loot boxes” the very moment the first country said they’d consider regulation.
At least with battle passes its all laid out and its more a case of putting the play time in.
Even the ESRB, another example of gaming industry self-regulation, hasn’t stopped gaming companies marketing M-rated games to kids or really slowed down sales or access to such games to underage players at all. If anything, they use the M rating as a direct marketing tool to kids: “your parents wouldn’t want you to play this so you totally should”.
EDIT: autocorrect is dumb
Ah yes, the ESRB, the group built to avoid actual regulation.
I mean, I get it, to an extent, the MPAA was and is absolute dogshit and filled with weird right-wing Christians who don’t like things that show women’s sexual pleasure and a lot of other weird censorial decisions.
Like how Hillary Clinton wanted to ban GTA because of the Hot Coffee mod, when the actual “Hot Coffee” minigame wasn’t available in an easily accessible way.
So, to that extent, I can understand why they built that system to avoid idiot fucking puritans taking over the ratings sytem, but I generally agree, it’s become more of a taboo thing just like the “PARENTAL WARNING EXPLICIT LYRICS” just made people want that version more. (That really worked out, huh, Tipper Gore?)
Without actual enforcement, it becomes something cool for kids to get.
The AO rating is still the kiss-of-death for game content in North America, enforced by retailers. Even still, the ESRB only came about because the political climate at the time was very much “clean up your shit or we’ll do it for you.”
Then they come up with the rating system whose only enforcement is on the AO rating, and don’t bother to actually clean up their shit. As the post above yours mentioned, the problem is lack of enforcement anywhere outside the AO rating or even anyone involved actually caring. Devs and marketing teams push for M if they want to actually sell a game to kids above 7 years old, retailers will sell anything to anyone lest they lose out on the money, and parents who ask about it will just ask the kid who wants to buy the game and will lie about what the rating means. We can crab about movie ratings all we want, but at least most studios and theaters actually enforce the MPAA’s rating and parents know what movie ratings mean. Game ratings are basically like TV ratings, so irrelevant you wonder why they even bother.
I don’t know where you’re hearing retailers don’t enforce ratings. Yes, it happens uncommonly, but the FTC previously found ratings compliance was higher among video game retailers than at the box office, and not much has changed in the culture since then. I’ve worked at multiple retailers that sold video games, and the training for video games enforcement was always taken just as seriously as with alcohol sales.
Being the largest entertainment industry in the world now, video game publishers are serious about this stuff. Developers also still take steps to avoid a Hot Coffee situation from occurring again.
I wouldn’t say self-regulation has “literally never worked once in history”, but yes, not often. I would point to the ESRB as an example of self-regulation working in the games industry and being a positive for both the industry itself avoiding government regulation and for players. There are other examples too, but yes, they would be rare wins in general.
Working? They just put a small print about lootboxes, they don’t even raise the game’s rating to AO for having this literal gambling with money, they are useless.
ESRB’s been around for over 20 years before lootboxes, my guy.
The only reason those industry boards exist is due to an implicit or explicit threat of government regulation.
Yes, as I mentioned in my comment.
The ESRB didn’t require any developers to abandon their business model though. It was created so that the industry could continue doing what it was doing.
It was also created long long before developers had these predatory business models, where it basically shielded the industry from having goverment oversight on violence in games back in the 90s and such.
Anyone saying it works is lieing. Even if they have examples. Most of the time when companies self regulate it is to maintain control and avoid regulation. It’s a delaying tactic that allows them to exploit the mechanisms longer and minisme the impact that proper accountability would bring.
If self regulation was feasible we would never even be discussing it. It wouldn’t be a concept we would have to think about. It would just be the way things work and have always worked.
Don’t gamble please for the love of fuck, all gambling is mathematically designed to never pay off for the one gambling
Excuse me but I heard that the real problem with gamblers is that 99% of them quit before winning big.
You are 100% sure to win if you play long enough.
It’s a lot easier to design when the only payout are pixels on a screen.
I generally agree, but poker is an exception where, if skilled enough, you can actually make money.
The problem is that everybody sitting around that table thinks they’re skilled enough.
Plenty of times I agree. However, no other game in the casino is one so heavily reliant on skill, and if you are skilled in it, it can pay off.
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.
World of Warcraft and Diablo are gacha.
The original versions of the game wouldn’t allow you to simply spend real money for in game benefits.
That’s since changed, as in game marketplaces have given users the ability to buy up their level, their gear, and their various grindable ranks.
But this is a relatively new iteration of the franchise. They also don’t use the “stars” power curve, wherein characters need to spend exponentially more in game currency to achieve linear power scale.
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.
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).
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.
