Can someone explain to me exactly what gacha games are and how they work?
I'm finding a lot of conflicting information on the internet, and most people just dismiss them as scams instead of elaborating on why.
Can someone explain to me exactly what gacha games are and how they work?
Gacha = Gambling
You pay real money or fake monopoly money to have a chance to get something
Yeah but how?
How do you gamble?
You open a box and get some random characters of varying rarities. Only mentally ill losers play these games though.
And you can't get those items without paying?
You pay with time if you want it "free." Though time is far more valuable
Correct. The games typically feed you a paltry amount of currency for playing the game itself, and being free to start these games typically attract a lot of people with no jobs. This means they have a ton of time, but no money, so they play these games religiously to squeeze as much free currency out of them as they can get. They then gamble this currency away on the gacha.
Chances are you are baiting this exact response, waiting to reply that "well, if you can play for free then it's not gambling!" But the free currency is always limited, so you're always gambling something finite.
in most gacha games, if you treat it like an actual job and do every possible mundane chore, and do not miss a single day - you can guarantee a limited character in, idk, say 6 months (varies a lot). but, that character is limited, as in you can never guarantee that character will be available, until they decide to run a "banner" which contains the character in the draw pool.
also in most games, the best approach is to be a "dolphin", a light spender. there's usually like a subscription, feeding you a small amount of premium currency. but again, you actually have to log in every day to claim it, or it's just gone.
then you might have special tickets like spend ~20 bucks to get a certain limited, its like that in GranBlue Fantasy, but they are limited promos too.
the absolute worst way is just straight up buying draws. this is purely for whales that want every single character as soon as the banner pops up. its terrible value and literally only worth if you go all the way and pay enough to get the guarantee.
everyone else in between - is purely gambling. the games prey on dumbfricks who think they might just get lucky on the gacha pull, instead of saving for 100%.
yes
they give very small amounts of the special currency that can get you one of the higher rarity items for about 6 months of the time you spend on the "game"
not worth it
trust me
just stick to regular games
It depends on the game.
Genshin, granblue, limbus for example are very 'generous' and you can play them completely for free fairly easily, although the also offer what basically amounts to subscription fee in a different packaging: limbus and genshin have a battle pass for like 12 bucks for 3 months and some "pay 5 bucks and get a bunch of currency buy you have to log in every day for a month to get it" kinds of shit, and granblue periodically offers $20 tickets that let you pick a character manually from a selected pool instead of relying on rng.
All of these (and most gachas in general nowadays) also have pity systems that guarantee an item or character if you roll enough times, in granblue for example if you roll 300 times during a single banner (period during which specific characters are available or on rate-ups) you can pick anyone from a list of featured characters, which is how most non-moronic people roll in these games: they save currency until they have pity and then are guaranteed to get what they want.
Then there's turbotrash like raid (probably the worst one), dislyte, lots of licensed gachas which are just complete cash grabs. In those games, if you want to play for free or spend a reasonable amount of money you can go frick yourself, they exist purely for whales and kids with access to their parents' credit cards.
Bottom line is, gacha is just a monetization system, and just like for any "f2p" system, there are decent implementations of it and there are cancerous ones.
what about star rail
same as genshin
honestly the more popular a gacha is the less generous it is, app store shovelware games throw free stuff around because they're desperate for players
same as genshin in the sense of generous?
idk why people would want to spend money on those kind of games
and i doubt the gameplay is paywalled
>idk why people would want to spend money on those kind of games
Because they are addicted and/or have an addictive personality.
Most gacha games are completely fine played as f2p.
Some of their activities may be gated behind 5 start pulls, but still.
I remember one of my friends playing Genshin just to explore the map, and he uninstalled after 80 hours of just dicking around the map.
>Most gacha games are completely fine played as f2p.
No way, man. Most gacha games are insane mobile-only trash nobody ever heard of that will bombard you with cash-shop shit from second 1 and become completely unplayable without paying past first story segment.
Is it true though that most older, more popular gacha games are not as cancerous since they managed to sustain a playerbase for a long time.
i guess it depends what you're playing for?
if you just want to play the game sure but if you want to collect characters you really have to pay somewhere (in genshin/star rail)
in azur lane or limbus you can do both f2p if you grind for it
this
hoyo games will never be generous
they are extremely stingy, even give the most shit rewards for their anniversaries because to them, these events mean nothing
there are more scam projects lined up for future release that will make millions of $$$ per month and they will put back about a million back into the game
if you want to play a gacha, at least pick something that isnt hoyoslop
Haven't played it personally, but I've been told it's trivial to complete all available content without ever spending a cent.
look here
anything else is shill cope
Depends on the game but its basically a lootbox
Its a reference to a mechanism called "gachapon" in Japan where you would put in a coin and receive a random prize from a physical machine.
Gacha games are games where the primary monetization is done through paying for a random prize in the same way, but for virtual goods (usually cute anime girls).
Some popular examples of gacha games include: Hearthstone, FIFA, XenoBlade Chronicles 2, etc.
have my you and kys pls
Thanks
No I'm not going to bait, I was curious because some of those games have free currency and are very generous with their progression.
But I guess people with no patience but a lot of money are very eager to waste thousands for anime .jpgs.
Yeah pretty much.
I'd argue that Genshin Impact is the most "generous" since you you don't NEED 5 star characters to actually plaything the main game. There's no PVP. But gachas are by principle encouraging you to spend
Gachas typically prey on two kinds of people: those with a ton of time but no money, and those with a ton of money with a power complex. They're designed to keep the people not spending occupied to provide cannon fodder to the whales that spend hundreds to get their favorites in the gacha and top the leaderboards. String enough plebs along that the whales seem that much more accomplished at the top, while also giving the free players the illusion that they too can reach those heights if they just try hard enough and have some good luck in the gacha. Typically speaking this rarely if ever happens because to max out your units you need to get them in the gacha multiple times and a free player will never have the resources to do that. In other words, it's all gameified capitalism.
>it's all gameified capitalism
Gachagays are capitalist apologists. "Lucklet" is the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" argument. They accuse others of being communist-adjacents that want everything "for free."
You would be surprised the type of people that dumps money into gacha. Some don't have any money to spare and yet they waste it away. Also most big spenders don't really care about the game and have no idea how to play it, they just collect characters.
The thing is, I can enjoy whatever keychain or toy comes out of a gashapon dispenser but it's impossible to enjoy a 2 star pull in a gacha game. It's not the same.
Depends on the game doesnt it?
Usually id say whats more important is that you dont get useless duplicate rolls (sometimes theyre good depending on the game), which would be bad in both cases.
You don't enjoy having a keychain or a stupid toy you put on your shelf. You look like a moron when you pull out your keys or when people see your desk with some ugly gacha toy.
At least with a gacha game you can keep it a secret and talk about it to with people who also like the game. It's more of a social game.
Gacha is a monetization style not a game genre. When you hear people say "gacha games" they're mostly illiterate ESLs.
The actual games vary. For example Yu-Gi-Oh is a gacha but it's obviously a card game with it's own mechanics. Compare it to Genshin which is also a gacha but it's open world RPG.
they're money extractors that give you jpgs of anime girls in exchange for $500 (if you're lucky)
basic bare bones games
almost exclusively mobile
business model is largely FOMO, giving limited events to roll slot machines for characters
What is the most generous game with gacha monetization, then?
Genshin? Star Rail?
Hell if I know, I only play a few of them and have never spent a single cent
Genshin is extremely stingy for free players
>is stingy
>is generous
Genshingays are brain damaged, it's sad to see.
genshingays are brain damaged dude, being forced to save for 4 months to MAYBE get a character in its weakest form is Stockholm syndrome tier
Just get lucky brah.
never forget scaramoche-gay, the man who saved for 2 years, only to barely get what he wanted.
just hoyoBlack folk lying
you cant do most content in the game with free characters
>you cant do most content in the game with free characters
Why are you lying like this?
There are literally no pulls, f2p character challenges completing all the chapters in one sitting.
I don't understand, what do you gain from lying like this?
>there are clips of paid streamers doing 36 star abyssals with the starting characters
yeah. and do they just go into abyssal and do it? with my p2w characters i steam roll abyssal, its an easy and relaxing bit of funfor me to see big numbers and get big rewards. Now i can also do this with my shitty f2p characters just like le epic streamer that showcases a similar speed. But as I play the fricking game and am not a dumb zoomie that just watches streams, I know that in order to do that bullshit I have to autistically retry each room of each floor, over and over until i get perfect rng. andthen i have to go back and rearrange my teams to max out the stars on each floor, sacrificing each subsequent run. Then i spendd hours editing my footage to make it look like its super ez because dumb homosexuals eat that shit up. thanks for the subscription parasocial friend! make sure you like and share and hit the bell and show my clips in the general it reallyt helps grow my channel and make money but it does nothing for you but you feel good doing it right because its practically like youre here with me 😀
>from world chapters to abyss
I accept your concession.
None of them really
Being generous isnt how you make money in these games
Define generous first of all. At what scope or tier?
Also some gachas have private servers that let you unlock everything for free genshin for example has dozens.
Genshin's private servers aren't developed enough to actually do anything besides run around in the first zone and spam gacha pulls
You haven't kept up. They have been using Mihoyos own leaked server client like Ragnarok Online private servers did with Gravitys leak. You can run the latest version of the game and do everything same as retail version. The only drawback is you obviously it's a private server and you can't play with millions of morons in co-op.
got a link? I've only been paying attention to Grasscutter.
Grasscutter has dozens of forks that use the server leak most are on discord because GitHub will DMCA it. Do you have discord? If you don't then don't bother. If you do then post your names so I can send you invs
>GitHub will DMCA it
>
https://github.com/Grasscutters/Grasscutter
is it just the public servers post on the Grasscutter Discord? I thought Grasscutter didn't have quests implemented yet.
>You can run the latest version of the game and do everything same as retail version.
proof?
Gundam Battle Operation 2
they're all specifically designed at a DNA level to not be generous
that's why the genre is more defined by monetization than gameplay
lol no
hoyo games are the biggest scams in the gacha market
they are not only extremely stingy, but they also put most of their profits into other scam projects instead of being generous with content at least
genshit has been stagnated since day 1 despite making over $5 billion
same with shit rail, but it is even worse
If we're going by how much of the cast can you obtain without paying as the measure of its generosity, probably something like Azur Lane, since you can realistically obtain the entire cast without paying, or at least you could back when i played it.
Last Origin as well, if it even counts. In LO, you dont even roll the gacha to begin with though. You receive units for doing the basic gameplay loop of combat stages, and rolling the gacha is pretty discouraged since it uses the same resources but less efficiently.
what's azur lane like? what's the theme and plot? i might be interested
insert money, receive anime girls, same as always
pacific theater but all the ships are cute girls
Youre the admiral of a fleet of WW2 era warships anthropomorphized as anime girls.
>game is free to play
>usually hardly even a game, can be beaten with minimal effort
>people spend hundreds/thousands of dollars anyway
its insane, but at the same time, I see people walking by water fountains with poland spring bottles in their hands everyday. people really just love throwing their money away as quickly and stupidly as possible
The point of a gacha is to squeeze money out of people with addictive personalities. You typically have to roll for characters with a currency that is scarce but available for free. The prospect of just paying for moinds of this currency is always dangled in fron of you. The most powerful characters have a sometimes less than one percent chance of dropping. Getting just one copy of a character isn't enough to bring out its full potential, you generally need up to ten. The game lets you clear content up to a point, but rapidly puts up walls to prevent progression without waiting, sometimes indefinitely, or paying. There are generally also mechanics that make you feel weak such as PVP that matches you with people who have put thousands of dollars into the game so they wipe the floor with you. Gachas also use heavy amounts of FOMO to keep you on the edge of paying.
baseball/pokemon cards for zoomers
Most gachas are F2P with zero anti cheat on mobile so just hack in your free rolls and if you get banned make a new account
None of you have ever played a single gacha game.
Holy frick he amount of absolutely moronic and dumbass opinions in this thread.
Hmm... I think i'm gonna have some stewed goat today.
>None of you have ever played a single gacha game.
That's a good thing.
It's true.
You're all talking about gacha games are those evil scamming mind controlling games where no one has fun but the top 1% whales.
When the reality is completely different.
It's always tough watching a gambling addict try to justify and downplay his addiction like this. I pray you get the help you need soon, my friend.
>if i pretend you're addicted and mentally ill, then i automatically win the argument
You clueless morons have no idea how generous the top AAA gacha games are.
They're all banking on the whales to buy everything they throw at the game.
And it's literally what happens.
But good ol' timmy having fun and exploring Teyvat ain't gonna spend a dime on this shit.
You don't need bis pulls, you fricking idiot.
you have to understand these morons have wasted years of their time on shit "games"
its understandable why they go so hard justifying sunk cost and time
I played DFFOO and FEH for about a year each and I regret ever wasting time on them.
unregulated online casinos with a thin layer of vidya ontop. if you like to gamble and do not value your time, ie you do not understand the concept of oppertunity costs, then you will love gacha. But if you understand that your fake currency, such as primogems, have real life value, and you understand the 5 primogems they reward you in an event is like 5 cents, and that you just did literal work for third world slave wages, just so you can roll for a character or weapon, and thus you just spent 1000$ in a fricking videogame for a character that is 5% better than what you already had, and you could have built an entirely new pc or bought hundreds of games, then REEEEEEEE REEEEEEEEEEEE REEEEEEEEEEEE REEEEEEEEEEEE
>log in to gacha
>railroid tutorial for 45 minutes
>get dumped into main menu
>25 different buttons
>"play game" button buried among daily roll, weekly roll, cash shop, challenge mode, four currencies etc etc
>the actual "game" literally plays itself
>blatant lies and made up bullshit
he's not entirely wrong, i just started blue archive this week and if i didnt ask a lot of questions in the thread, i'd have no fricking clue what i should be doing
they are low effort scams that keep their players hooked up with a mediocre amount of special currency for logging in and "playing" the game per day
this.special currency is then used to buy the rolls, which you can use to then put in the slot machine in hopes you get the character, or whatever else there is in the slot machine, that you want
they trick players with some freebies during the launch and very quickly cut that supply off
Azur Lane is pretty generous for a gacha. The monetization is limited to skins and slots to hold more characters. You can generally get enough free currency to keep up with the latter.
Most importantly is that you can complete just about all the content with any character load-out so long as you equip them well and level them up. Though that's also where your time sink comes in.
>Most importantly is that you can complete just about all the content with any character load-out so long as you equip them well and level them up
that's what literally every gacha addict says about literally every gacha game, and it's always false or with *if you play the game 8 hours a day every day for 6 months straight
Gacha games have a gacha system, which lets you exchange an in game currency to get a random reward. Often you can pay real money for this currency. Gacha games also tend to have energy systems and dailly/weekly tasks that give good rewards slowly over time to incentivize user retention. Non gacha games can have gacha systems in them too.
You know these things? Ever seen them at a supermarket? Put the coin in, turn the knob, get a little SpongeBob figurine or something? In Japan, it's called Gachapon, and the Japanese went nuts for it because they went nuts for vending machines in general. Gacha games are that, in electronic form. Only instead of SpongeBob or one of his aquatic friends, it's a kawaii uguu tbh ne anime girl in skimpy clothing. You put money in until you get the one you want.
ai tier post
The frick are you on about?
Hi DALL-E!
I wish we got gacha as good as the japanese get gacha.
At best you might find one that gives out mario keychains, the rest is just trash.
you pay extra money for things you can't get in normal games (like sexy women)
Gacha is the last bastion against feminism in vidya, since gacha games are the only mainstream games that are allowed to have sexy female characters, yes you need to pay extra to get them, but that's an investment into more sexy waifus to collect, and the games are free so you have no right to b***h about them being "exploitative"
and the gacha refers to the fact that simply acquiring the character isn't the end, you need to spend extra to power the character up for them to be viable at end-game, hence the "gotcha"
So what you're saying is that you'll give money to anyone who shoves a pair of breasts in your face.
Wanna go to the strip club together? I've never seen a man lose all of his money in five seconds before.
Why do you care what anyone here does with their money?
Do you walk into a casino and try to chastise those people too?
dont reply to a strawman, dude
( . Y . )
Here's some breasts. Gimme money.
You seem like a very miserable person.
At least I'm not easy to manipulate.
They don’t let juveniles in.
>investment
my god, when i see a gacha gay talking about these "investments", it literally kills my brain cells. PLEASE stop trying to rationalize your gambling, just accept you like mindless gambling and have no better things to do
best games these days are gacha tbh. Only place to get classic RPGs rather than westernized slop.
>Zoomies will never know what real gaming was like
skinnerboxes of diluted videogames designed to extort money from morons
Essentially, Gacha games turn your real life money into a game currency.
The "high" you get out of them consists of figuring out how to get the thing you want without spending more than you're ok with, or spending nothing at all.
Of course this most likely does not work out and people get fooled into spending more.
All in all, the gameplay experience is usually not very good and the costs are exorbitant (Genshin Impact wants $130 to guarantee a limited character, which goes away until a later rerun when the banner is over. Some characters are useless without dupes of the same, so the cost goes above $300 easily.)
The artificial rarity created by the fact that it's so expensive gives the characters/weapons a veneer of "value" and rarity, which is how people get fooled into spending.
In other words, it's not cool because it's cool, it's cool because it's hard to get, like an old World of Warcraft mount.
tells you all you need to know:
As many anons here stated, one of the notable issues with gacha at least in comparison to games in the modern day is that most gacha games wall off a significant deal of their content behind their timed gambling system. From my understanding the reason that they end up shilling it so much is due to how it's easily accessible due to most of them being free to start on phones which almost everyone has.
You have to realize that the people who play these games benefit from pulling new players into the scam. The people that play gacha games are more like employees or religious zealots and it would be your mistake to treat them as fellow gamers. They will tell you a game is fun and generous but what they really want is for you to play the game so the player count and funding stays up and their game stays alive. It's like those religious groups that advertise with "Free pizza and games night" then later end up saying "btw join our cult"
Gacha games are aimed towards salarymen with literally nothing in their life besides work, they do pulls on the train on the way to their bug cube and on the way home before they get back to their empty one room apartment. They get 1 iota of fulfillment when they look at their generic AI generated big boob waifu jpg, and for a lot of them it is literally a flimsy string stopping them from throwing themselves off a bridge and killing themselves.
If you're a western man and you play gacha imagine how awful your life has to be when you think about the target audience and you being similar enough of them to share a common interest in gachaslop
The only Pay To Win gachas I've played are Fire Emblem Heroes and Epic Seven.
Fire Emblem Heroes started out simple, but quickly became a mess of insane powercreep as skill and stat bloat kept getting stronger and stronger. Show a day 1 player who quit after one year the game today and they would go insane. Current characters have skills and weapons with text so long that you have to scroll the text on your mobile device just to read it all. The rates look to be generious (6% per SSR) but keep in mind you need 11 copies to max a character out and additional ones if you want to feed their premium skills to other units.
Epic Seven has a very competitive PvP system that even has its own separate gacha to roll for characters that are specifically meant for PvP. The 4* and 5* character quality is massive. There's a lot of garbage in the pool and certain content requires specific characters and their respective elemental type.
Both games are old gachas and almost everyone released afterwards learned that the best way to retain players is to balance free to play and encourage whales to spend money. Then you have Fate Grand Order which is the gacha anomaly because the Japanese are complete morons that spend millions on Fate merchandise because they're brainwashed.
>Fate
Why is that game so fricking stingy? You can't get anything to fricking drop.
Been playing gacha games for almost 10 years by this point. Dailies for 3 gachas currently take like 20 min total throughout the day.
>Action Taimanin, 3 years
>Masters EX, about a year
>Nikke, 1 month
Yes they encourage you to spend, that's their whole method of making money. As a grown ass man I do some minor dolphining, like if there are currency sales or a nice costume. But I also collect Pokemon cards so I am constantly bombarded by the temptation to spend on random ass shit, so I am quite used to holding myself back per my budget.
They have their own style of fun if you like being limited in what you have to clear things. But content will always be gated until you reach the endgame of the gacha, which can take months of dailies. Then you're being bombarded with the temptation to spend the whole time, which is fine if you can hold yourself back.
The 3 games I'm playing right now are very generous with the time needed to do dailies so I don't mind the routine. Slow progression is fun in its own way and they're easy to play while doing other things.