Games

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.

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.

I saw so many people in another instance relating this to shaming people for avocado toast rather than these games exploiting gambling addiction.

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.

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

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.

someone help me understand what gacha is and what it means to these folks in simple terms?

I’ve always wondered - what is the difference between a gacha game and ANY game with microtransactions? What is it that puts gacha games in a class by themselves?

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.

You guys spend money on games?

This is exactly the reason why I won't play gacha games. First everyone complains about loot boxes and microtransactions and then a game-genre where that's the core of the game takes off.

Just goes to show that the people that (rightly) complain about microtransactions cheapening gaming experiences were always in the minority and most will just keep spending like headless chickens.

Most people I know aren't or don't see themselves as gambling addicts. They're "proud" about how much they spent.

Played Puzzle and dragons for like 3 years when mobile games where booming and spend like total of 300€ to it.

Honestly it was pretty good and did not feel nearly as predatory as many other mobile gatcha games I've played after that.

But it did kinda red pill me on F2P games, gatcha, fomo, peer pressure and many other manipulative methods these games use. The fact that Gungho ended up closing the servers down in Europe making people lose their accounts also showcased pretty well how temporary these games are.

Now if I'll ever again play games with gatcha I'll do no gatcha "challenge" run. It's pretty good for gauging whether the game is actually any good and how fast you'll hit the paywall.

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.