The way these studies are phrased feels gross and seem to only serve to perpetuate these problems by shifting the blame of systemic issues on the individuals suffering from them instead of the powerful people benefiting from wealth inequality that cause this kind of desperation.
The US is guilty of this too with our “Financial Literacy” propaganda.
Almost as if capitalism was specifically designed to shuffle all wealth from the bottom to the top in a neverending ratchet of human degradation and exploitation
I knew this was a fucked up industry when I heard they were successfully diversifying into women-centric gatcha games where the game is also centered on gooning over various character designs but the gatcha pulls correspond to specific romance scenes and interactions.
Japanese companies really have minmaxed exploiting every demographic. They have this garbage for the young people and pachinko parlors for old people and rural folks.
The widespread deregulation of gambling in the US is heading that way too.
Funny thing is I know more women playing these games than I know dudes. Which of course does not reflect player statistics. I know that. But it‘s probably more popular with women than you would think based on character designs. I think it has a lot to do with cutesy Japanese pop culture that‘s appealing to a lot of people. There‘s a reason many Chinese and Korean games are copying it recently.
I had an argument with a guy who was in a shared friend’s discord server about this. He was adamant that, if somebody spent too much money on a game, then it was all their fault. Despite me going over several (clearly manipulative) tactics, all he said was that people who fell for these must be stupid and that they deserved it
Yeah later on he was kicked because of other (Similarly dickish) reasons
It is as much their fault as it is any addict’s fault, which is to say, partially but not entirely
I mean, he’s not wrong. it is something within their power to control, and only they can stop the cycle.
addiction is a hell of a drug though.
companies that prey on the vulnerabilities of humans like that should be regulated no different than drug, alcohol, or firearm companies.
And if we were all smart people we would have far less laws. Sometimes laws protect us from ourselves. Anyone who has experience with addiction knows how hard it is to just stop. Instead of blaming people for their inability to stop we should emphatize and understand that this needs an intervention. If these predatory practices were illegal those people wouldn’t need to stop themselves because they wouldn’t be put in that situation in the first place.
Regulation of predatory practice. Taxation on the games to pay for rehab and support services for people that experience negative effects from it. It’s really easy to do, but every single gambling operation gets the big bucks from the heavily addicted. The whales are the entire business.
I agree they’re partially at fault, but to deny the part the company played by creating artificial FOMO, sales, and gates is barbaric to say the least
It needs more regulation, I agree. Particularly for premium currencies (which thankfully the EU seems to be doing something about)
Yeah American is a victim blaming culture
I mean…
The unfortunate reality is that both parties, the customer and the game company, are culpable and both share blame
Oh hey its the victim blamer. Mods deleted our discussion.
These gacha companies pay ridiculous amounts of money for psych profile info specifically to target vulnerable individuals, yet individuals don’t have that same kind of access or understanding
This is NOT a both sides thing.
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Unfortunately people needs to eat, to pay rent, etc.
When your only choice is to work for a shady company, you can’t be chooser.
Headline doesn’t match what’s in the report. It’s not just gacha; the question in the survey is inclusive of other games that offer in-game purchases (課金 in Japanese). So we’re talking about skins and boosts in MMOs, MOBAs, and shooters, hints in games like Candy Crush, etc.
The report posted here last week showed just how much MTX spending there is on PC, of which gacha is still a small part. I suspect there is a higher rate of gacha spending in Japan than there is globally (outside of China, perhaps), but I’d be surprised if gacha even made up half of the spending SMBC is reporting on here.
but I’d be surprised if gacha even made up half of the spending SMBC is reporting on here.
I wouldn‘t. Gacha is vastly more popular in Japan than PC gaming and it‘s not even close. It would seriously surprise me if mobile Gacha didn‘t make up the majority of spending in microtransactions.
I’m so glad that I looked up some cheat codes for Turok 64 back in the day. It had two powerful weapons that were meant to be used sparingly after finding a rare inatance, in one case, or searching the entire game for pieces, after which you only got 3 shots with it. I used those two weapons until I got bored of them.
Then I tried to play the game again without the cheats and realized it was ruined for me. Why would I care to spend time searching for each piece of that weapon, knowing it only has 3 shots, when I was already bored with it?
And then later on, after I had been raiding in WoW, very focused on getting my loot upgrades, I noticed the loop of raiding to get better gear to get better at raiding to get better gear and realized it only had a point if I enjoyed the raiding, otherwise the gear didn’t matter, regardless of what stats or graphics it had.
Those two things together have made it easy to never spend any money on game progression. It’s basically spending money to either get bored of the game quicker by trivializing the powerful things (monetized cheat codes or powerups), or to avoid playing the game in the first place (getting the gear without the raid, when the whole point of the gear is to help with the raid).
And yeah, often the game isn’t worth going through the loop, but they design the early stages to give fast progression to build up an expectation but tune it so that it’s a slog grind if you don’t buy anything, hoping for a few bucks from people as they learn this, or a lot of bucks from those who set strong habits and never do learn.
And when progression is pinned to an exponential curve while upgrades are non-exponential but tuned to be ahead of the curve when you first get them, it doesn’t matter how much money you spend, eventually you’ll always be back at a curve that looks more vertical than anything else and you’ll need to spend money or wait a crazy amount of time.
You guys spend money on games?
someone help me understand what gacha is and what it means to these folks in simple terms?
Games with casino style gambling to unlock characters or skins or whatever. Often times you’ll have like 1/100 chance to unlock a character you want when opening a “box”.
Hugly mobile popular games run like this with new more powerful characters releasing monthly
Another comment explained what it is but to explain where the name comes from, you remember those capsule machines where you had to collect all the toys? Those were called gachapon machines, often shortened to just gacha (i might be slightly wrong on a little bit of the words, but they are the capsule machines)
I wouldn’t mind microtransactions, gacha games and gacha mechanics if there were sane upper limits to spend.
I was trying to learn how different gacha games work and monetization in f2p games in general, especially obes for smartphones.
I was surprised about how similar all the methods across games are. Some were a lot worse than others though.
I think the monetization method is sometimes viewed as acceptable by some, because the games often have a lot of content and can be a lot of fun to play. The thing I really dislike is that it’s unfairly monetized. Some people pay the majority of the income, they are also known as whales. There are of course some people that spend small sums, but the whales is where it is at.
After Arcade games went out of fashion we had a nice long period in which players paid about the same for a game, and got the same experience.
Now vulnerable people are paying more than they can afford to finance the game for everyone, and still everone gets a limited experience.
Some of the games I enjoyed the most had terrible gacha mechanics. One of them had items and mounts with 1/500 chance per pull. Of course it is designed so that it appears as 1/10, but it is really 1/500. To justify this they had the PITY system. Yes, thats the actual name of it. The pity system makes it so that after buying 500 pulls ypu are guaranteed the mount.
The price for 500 pulls? 500$
After the free pulls you could play to get, about 480$.
So I actually can’t get the entire game for even 500$…
That was just one of many such instances. I could probably spend more than 10 000$ and still not unlock absolutely everything.
Was it purely cosmetic? Nope. It gave an advantage too.
Legislation that effectively adds an upper limit to unlock the entire game with a sensible maximum monthly cost for new content, is needed in my opinion.
vulnerable people are paying more than they can afford to finance the game for everyone
Well said. I think a lot of things in the world work like this, unfortunately. Like, some people have to work long hours or hard jobs because they didn’t choose a career path that would allow them to work less and earn more. I mean, it sounds very different, but it’s also kinda similar in a way. There are people suffering for the benefit of other people. Saying they could choose another job is the same as saying vulnerable people could choose to not be vulnerable.
Legislation that effectively adds an upper limit to unlock the entire game with a sensible maximum monthly cost for new content, is needed in my opinion.
Agree, this is a great idea.
This doesn’t surprise me. If I hear stories of some of my teenager son’s classmates it sounds realistic. The other day one of his mates spent 20k in an arcade on claw machines in a single afternoon. He “won” like 4-5 massive plush dolls, and had to hide them at our place to avoid parental wrath. Can buy them for 2000jpy incl shipping on aliexpress.
Some of his friends spent their entire allowance and more on fortnite every month. Parental failure imo. Parents should teach their kids the value of things…
Let me guess
- Anime tiddies
- Short skirts
- Long socks
- Ultra brain-stimulating UI
- Ultra brain-stimulating sound effects
- 9001 virtual currencies to mask the actual cost of everything
- Mystery RNGs everywhere
- Muh behavioral psychology
- More manipulative shit
Parents need to do their fucking jobs.
These gaming companies (parasites) need to lose all their IP protections.
There‘s a bitter irony in demanding parents doing their jobs because that‘s exactly why they don‘t have time for parenting. The cost of living is too damn high.
Well I had no flippin clue
1000 people is statistically shit.
I saw so many people in another instance relating this to shaming people for avocado toast rather than these games exploiting gambling addiction.
It’s definitely a psychological issue where these games are designed to slowly bleed their players without them noticing. The most I’ve ever spent on a gacha was $40 over 6 years and I regret that so much. It takes a wakeup call and education to stop people from being suckered in.
I felt I was taking crazypills. In what world does this headline and article not scream "These games are ruining lives because of extremely manipulative marketing tactics.
I assume the people who took this article as a personal attack are part of the 19%, but doesn’t want to realise they have a very serious problem.
I think there’s probably a hasty assumption that either this article is (it’s not) or that it could be used for (it probably will) judgment type musings about how young people are irresponsible and are the cause of their own struggles, similar to the avocado toast commentary.
The article itself is just the result of a survey that happened to focus on young people, and I agree it’s more appropriate to think of it related to a relatively new form of gambling/manipulation that’s causing problems
Gacha is addictive as hell if you grew up with Pokemon and Final Fantasy both huge in Japan. I play a few as well for boredom and yes the weird atmosphere of whales (account with thousands invested) being awkwardly silent but have a following of pretenders.
I have spent thousands in gacha, though I’m more a ‘dolphin’ than a whale
Was #1 on server 10 and 11 in Memento Mori for a while, ran the top guilds there (NORTH and TRUE NORTH). It was really fun till one of our shift guild leaders usurped the guild and kicked half of the team on the night of our biggest Mass Combat push, losing us most of our territory. So I quit and got very, VERY bitter
That was 2 years ago and the only gacha I’ve played since is Pokemon Pocket tho as f2p this time (it is very generous)
If you want to know anything about dolphin/whale action in Memento Mori, Blue Archive or Reverse 1999 I’ll answer any questions
