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.
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.
Without being a gacha game, World of WarCraft is guilty of a lot of the same stuff. You probably know people who flunked out of college due to the addiction, or have heard of parents who neglected their child over that game. It preys on a lot of the same impulses that Diablo and Diablo II seemed to have found by accident, before they were monetized by subscription fees and then microtransactions. And you can see a lot of the same in games like Destiny.
I agree with you, to an extent. I would say it’s a lot more complicated than that with World of Warcraft, which is an MMO, and does not revolve on gambling except in the aspect of random number generated loot. This is probably the majority of looter shooters out there today as well and a large number of other games. Pure chance in just the loot and rewards. Personally, World of Warcraft did not affect me adversely, because I have very strong self-control, and was able to develop very strict limitations for my own personal life which was important in college.
But I think there’s something you’re definitely missing. Sure, while World of Warcraft can be blamed by some people flunking out of college or high school due to its addictive and fun nature, Have you considered the fact that the world we live in is simply so boring that they don’t want to pay attention to those things? Over a 20-year time span since I have graduated, high school and college has not evolved. It’s the same boring ass mess that it was when I went to school. Unnecessary classes, study only for the test and never use that information ever again, very rarely are their projects and when there are, they are silly group projects in which two out of the four members of your group are lazy and don’t want to do a damn thing. You also are faced with constant demoralizing facts thrown at you from the media and the outside world that your college degree won’t help you get a job, you won’t see any student loan relief, the wealthy elites are in positions of power and rising faster in companies than you ever will be… Reality is so disappointing. So I can understand why these people have trouble paying attention in school and want to turn to stuff like World of Warcraft, theme park MMO that has so much fun and enjoyment in it
But when we’re talking about a gacha, This feels so much more insidious. Every aspect of the entire game, not just the loot, is gambling, and you’re gambling with real money. Not your time. In World of Warcraft you don’t get a drop, oh well, try again next time. You still paid $15 for that entire month, so you can try as many times as you want on as many characters as you want. But when you pay 50 bucks for Genshin impact and you get nothing, you know what that money goes towards? Absolutely nothing. You lose that money forever. Now you are mentally afflicted with that, and you’re already considering whether or not you should pay another 50 bucks to try and get it again with the gamblers fallacy in the back of your mind that if I pay another $50 I’m already $50 in, so I have a much better chance of getting it now. It’s sickening
You could throw most of this same argument back at gachas. They’re just gambling because the world sucks, or something…
No, my understanding is that the reason people get addicted to this stuff is that we evolved to gather finite resources when they’re available, even if it’s rare, so we’re prey to systems like this that can control that rarity. WoW absolutely did this, just without putting a price on each interaction.
Without being a gacha game, World of WarCraft is guilty of a lot of the same stuff.
I’m not a fan of trying to poison the well on this discussion by trying to bring in a lot of secondary issues and try to broaden the issue to the point of uselessness.
The biggest issue with gambling is the ability to lose your money.
Sure, you can waste time with World of Warcraft. But I can also waste time playing too much Baldur’s Gate 3, or Civilization, or by binging shows on Netflix.
But none of those allow me to spend thousands or tens of thousands by gambling on mechanics within the media itself.
How about we focus on that issue first?
Because I’d say the addiction is the issue. The biggest issue with gambling is the addiction. If you’re not addicted, you’re not spending time or money beyond your means. So I’d rather not broaden it to how much money it sucks out of you when the addiction is the issue. It all relies on the same principles that we know to be worth legal regulation when it’s acknowledged as gambling. I don’t know anyone who got addicted to Netflix, but they’ll “binge” shows because we no longer live in the era where we can only watch shows according to a broadcast schedule; plus sometimes, you just want some background noise while you’re doing something else, including a show you’ve seen a million times.
I was a young idiot making minimum wage and I spent 500 dollars in a gacha game over a three month period. It’s been years and I still wake up at night, remember this and feel the strongest remorse.
I spent $800 on Fallout: Shelter
Fuck, my condolences.
I’m sorry, it really sounds like it turned into an addiction for you. Very happy that you got away from it. Be careful with addictive substances or activities in your life, some people have a predisposition for it.
Thank you! I very much have that predisposition. I’ve noticed that I have addictive behavior towards sugar and caffeine as well (I’m fine as long as I don’t have any, but if I have some I’ll continue to crave more at shorter and shorter intervals until I go to sleep and it resets), and recently celebrated my third month nicotine free after about four years total smoking and then vaping.
Addictive proclivities are a personal defect normally. But when you exist in a context where there are people whose job it is to get you hooked on things, they become a handicap.
But the industry said you whales were rich gamers that had too much money and didn’t know what to do with it! /s
Damn, I’ve never thought of myself as a whale before but I guess for a while there I was. I wonder how many of the people we see in these games with all the premium characters and skins are like me, struggling. I always thought of them as having more money than sense but maybe they (we) lack both.
Sure, but, technically, without Gacha games I would t have discovered my ex wife sexting another dude. Because she was attempting to hide the money she spent in credit cards I didn’t have access to, then wanted me to pay.
Which led me to digging around, discovering the unaltered statement, then she got drunk and the phone was open in her hand playing some stupid virtual bingo and a snap popped up and wouldnt you know it
True
I started playing one of the Gacha games a few months back now, Watcher of Realms, I think the only reason I started was because it showed jiggling boobies in a trailer. The name is goofy and the story is almost non-existant, the gameplay isn’t terribly deep, but has some nuances to it, it’s like a tower defense RPG game. It’s kind of dumb as a game because it records your playthroughs of scenarios that you can then use later on to “Auto-fight” for you as you frequently have to grind for different shit. So you basically set the game on auto-pilot and stop playing the game. I’ve been playing for something like 6 months now, but I’ve been committed from the start to never pay a single dime for it and I’ve stuck with that the entire time. Granted, I’ve put way too much time into the game and, if time is money, I’ve wasted a bunch that way, but I’ve never actually paid for anything in currency. Cheap skate 4 life. I honestly don’t know why I keep playing, knowing what the game is setup for, but I still log in day after day.
I can definitely see how it encourages players to spend money, there’s so many mini-currencies within the game that obfuscate what you need to do to earn this or that hero or get whatever thing you’re trying for, but ultimately the incentive is to buy shit to get further along. In this game though, the rates are so goddamn ridiculous that you’d have to be an impatient jackass to pay the rates they want for simple things that don’t even give any guarantees of better performance in the game. On the one hand, I thing games like this are evil for trying to take advantage of people, but on the other, if you’re that stupid and that rich that you have money to burn on a game like this… maybe throwing your money away on digital stuff isn’t the worse thing you could be wasting your money on (like real world drugs or donating to Trump or something stupid like that). But yes, for kids who haven’t mentally developed yet, there probably should be some sort of protections for them, since they’ll pay for dumb shit at the drop of a hat.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You’re like 5 years late on this realization. Unfortunately not much is changing.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Same, World of Tanks is the first game that comes to my mind when people mention pay2win mechanics. I am quite happy that I don’t play that game anymore.
Report that shit to the EU or your government. At least in Europe they care…
I’m so tired of this shit. I don’t care if people can’t handle their shit. Their problem, not mine. If I want to gamble I can gamble. I don’t care if some shitty parent is letting their kids gamble. Nanny state bullshit.
