Almost 19% of Japanese people in their 20s have spent so much money on gacha they struggled with covering living expenses, survey reveals - AUTOMATON WEST
Almost 19% of Japanese people in their 20s have spent so much money on gacha they struggled with covering living expenses, survey reveals - AUTOMATON WEST
Results of a survey regarding the spending habits of young gamers in Japan have been revealed - here's how they spend their money on games.
I saw so many people in another instance relating this to shaming people for avocado toast rather than these games exploiting gambling addiction.
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
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 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.
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
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.
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
Yeah American is a victim blaming culture
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.
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)
It is as much their fault as it is any addict's fault, which is to say, partially but not entirely
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.
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?
Gacha and lootboxes (similar in concept) tend to be the worst of predatory microtransactions because they exploit gambling addictions.
"Classic" microtansactions, like freaking Oblivion horse armor, skins, etc, are bad, but you buy them once and you know exactly what you're getting.
With gacha and lootboxes you buy a lottery ticket hoping to get something good. They use rush-inducing casino-style tricks to get you hooked. They obfuscate your real odds and how much you're spending as much as they can.
I believe the difference is that gacha introduces an element of chance, so you spend an in game currency to buy a spin of a wheel where you may get different rewards. Microtransactions could be something like "spend $5 and get this new skin", it's a guarantee. Gacha will be like "spend $1 for a 10% chance at this legendary skin, spend $5 for a 70% chance, etc etc"
The concept of Gacha predates lootboxes and started as physical real-world vending machines with surprise balls containing little toys or stickers, mainly aimed at kids
They noticed that the mystery drove sales and pretty much overwhelmed 'normal' toy vending machines in a few short years
While the concepts are similar, they had different origins.
gacha have element of chance, but usually speaking, gacha especially in asian games tend to also be tied to some form of power and is not purely cosmetic.
ao its not just purely, i want this character/costume/weapon because it looks cool, but theyres stats attached to it.
western game loot boxes generally sit more often as coametic, so the desire to pay isnt as bad (but can still be bad) but of course this doesnt apply to all western games either. an example of gacha based power is ultimate teams for sports games, which its gacha has players stats tied to them for team building.
gacha and loot boxes are fundamentally the same, but connotatively, gacha usually implies power and lootbox implies cosmetics, but technically not incorrect to use it either way.
if you want a dumb comparison, gacha is seen like trading card games, where power of the card also has value.
lootbox is sorta like sports cards where its collective in nature and really is about rarity/how the card looks
Generally but not always.
Microtransactions = I want the blue shirt, I can buy the blue shirt. The blue shirt can be cosmetic or have power boost.
Loot boxes = I want the blue shirt, I can buy a lottery ticket to maybe get the blue shirt. The blue shirt is just cosmetic. Maybe there is a way to get the blue shirt if I don't get one in X boxes.
Gacha = I want the blue shirt, I can buy a lottery ticket to maybe get the blue shirt. The blue shirt has power boosts. Quite often, if I don't get the blue shirt in a X tickets, I get a guaranteed blue shirt. Also a bit more often the blue shirt needs to be leveled up, using more blue shirts and/or other stuff you get from the lottery.
This is generally how it works, they are exceptions too it of course.
But that is why gacha is its own category, the lottery is required to progress the game and you need a lot of it. There is also usually multiple lotteries with different and the same prices at different % some you can play without spending money, some you need to spend money and some you can play onec in a while without spending money, but the good stuff and higher % are basically always looked in the two latter ones.
The way it is usually used and how upgrading stuff works, is very different between what country makes the game. I don't remember exactly but the three big different ones are, Japan, China and South Korea.
The easiest different to simply explain is usually if you need more blue shirt to upgrade or if you just need more shirts or if you need shirt coins that drop from the game to level up, the shirt or if the shirt can't be leveld up and you need a new shirt instead.
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.
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.
I play a gacha game and have spent $0 on it. But I can imagine that sort of psychological insulation is not quite so common.
Personally I don't play any game with microtransactions.
I'm only interested in games I can purchase outright and then own*. If there's large scale DLC that's fine, great even, but if there's some in-game way to spend money that isn't restricted to a DLC button/section, then I'm not interested.
I want to play games, not be inundated by constant sales opportunities.
*I'm aware I don't "own" most game due to the stupidity of licensing, and while I don't love that, I can acknowledge it's still a different and better thing that games that constantly push microtransactions
There isn‘t much of a contradiction there, I think. People complaining about it are mostly from an entirely different culture than where Gacha slop is developed and most popular. The former being the western world and the latter being South East Asia and players who have a deep fascination for it.
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)
You guys spend money on games?
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.
Honestly it was pretty good
Yeah, I have never seen anyone talking about benefits of gacha model online. People only ever talk about it like it's pure evil in its most refined form. Yet to hear anyone say how this model allows developers to fund basically F2P "Breath of the Wild" tier games with 100x more content.
Some of the F2P games are great especially if you cant afford new games. In some you can just ignore all cosmetics and focus on getting good. Hell make using default skins your identity and some gamers may get extra salty if they get their ass handed to them by someone using "noob skins".
As for gatcha games it depends largely where the paywall is. If its in the late/endgame then you may very well get tens if not hundreds of hours of enjoyment before you get there. Some of them also shower you with premium currency early on to get you hooked so you might eventually end up with pretty good team to clear most of the content without spendi g a dime.
To be fair there's a range between $1,99 up to $150. The arcade hall from the 90's with token exchange wasn't much different.
I played a gatcha game with a friend when we didn't know what gacha was and we where trying to build our teams by just playing the game and there where always massive difficulty walls that couldn't be passed. So we both ended up spending around $500 CAD on that game and farming with our phones open on the game 24/7. We stopped after we understood how predatory the model was.
Stopped playing Puzzle and dragons after clearing tower of gods for umpteenth time to "efficiently" consume my stamina so it would not get wasted.
Had this "wtf I am doing with my life moment" as I was no longer having fun and clearing the dungeon over and over was simply booring time waster.
Started ignoring daily login bonuses and only played when there was new content. Soon after that stopped playing all together.
1000 people is statistically shit.
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...
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 is why we really need a system where people can spend their whole paycheck and still be fine.
I do believe people should have the right to spent their money however the f they want, but this becomes extremely problematic if you don't at least regulate their spending behavior, either directly or indirectly.
So okay, now you have a society full of hopeless addicts, but at least nobody has to starve. Sound kinda... dystopian if you ask me
I really don't think everyone is not an addict because of lack of opportunity. If anything I would say many addicts arise from an attempt to escape a reality that does not meet their needs.
Anyone into Genshin here? When do you think the urge to spend a lot starts? I'm AR19 now, I rolled 2 characters from 20 basic wishes (Noelle and Collei), and I think I have enough crystals and primos for maybe 10-20 wishes more which is likely to yield yet another 2 characters (or more if I'm lucky). At this point, I still have no clue when I should start wanting to spend real money. There seems to be so much content to earn primos and everything else I need organically.
This entire comment feels like brain rot to me
brain
RPG enjoyers have talked like this since before computer games existed. I think D&D terminology for all their kinds of dice rolls and internal math would sound similar, but even more gibberish.
I‘m just spending 5 bucks for Welkins, swiping is for when you really want a character and have nothing left. But even then you drop one Mario Kart World and that should get you what you want. I have no idea what the point in whaling is, there‘s nothing hard in the game that needs it, there‘s nothing that even needs constellations. Maxing out a character just makes their numbers bigger (which isn‘t needed, see above) and doesn‘t change anything about their gameplay. I really don‘t get it.
But since you‘ve just started, you‘ll notice that eventually you won‘t be swimming in resources anymore. Still, you should be able to get a character every other patch even if you‘re unlucky. I guess the biggest opening people give for swiping is banking on „winning“ the 50-50, and then they don‘t win (duh) and then they’re frustrated and force it. As for why they’re swiping a grand and upwards into C6, I have no idea.
I can only speak for ZZZ, WuWa, and Genshin though. I‘m not in the picture with any of the others.
I haven't played Genshin in a couple of years but it's definitely one of the better ones from what I've seen. I played through f2p until I had a sense of the game and was confident in the content and monetization model. After that I did spend whatever it was, five bucks(?), for the "battle pass" but honestly as long as you have the time to grind then Genshin is fairly non-invasive. That grind is why I quit though, the end game was a slog.
In my experience, the urge only begins once you've completed the entire openworld and run out of content other than the endgame dungeons (spiral abyss, imaginarium theater). You have a long way to go before that point.
I did play a lot a couple years ago completely f2p and in the late game the artifact farming gets really bad, to the point that you farm for weeks for one character. It's not necessary to clear the story (at least in the past) but in the late abyss is mandatory and it kills any will to try off-meta/more fun builds. Still a lot of fun if you play casually.
I only really ever got the urge to spend when I lost a 50/50 for a favorite limited banner character. I stopped playing and hopped to another game instead though, eheh
Well I had no flippin clue