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.
Assuming “we” is the US, write your state and federal representatives, not Lemmy. People might agree with you, but you’re preaching to the choir.
How about both? Writing your elected reps is definitely smart, but will be much more effective if there are numerous people calling for the same. I appreciate OP sharing their views, and catloaf sharing a specific action step all of us can do it we are concerned about this matter.
I worked for a few years as a gambling addiction counselor, and these types of games definitely prime people for addiction to gambling. Also, it’s worth noting that the demographic with the highest rates of gambling addiction are young men, aged 18-24.
Anyone that’s been to a casino can attest that major video game companies also make slot machines. The industry are aware of what they’re doing.
It’s time for developers and legislators to take responsibility and start protecting the players, especially the younger ones, from these predatory practices.
They’re making fucking bank with these practices. It will have to be stopped by government regulation. Self-regulation of industries has literally never fucking worked once in history. Look at Boeing, which has had the FAA basically glad-handing it for 50 years and it’s falling apart at the seams (sometimes literally).
It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.
-Upton Sinclair
I mean, look how fast the ENTIRE industry shifted to battle passes (and still gacha) and away from “loot boxes” the very moment the first country said they’d consider regulation.
Even the ESRB, another example of gaming industry self-regulation, hasn’t stopped gaming companies marketing M-rated games to kids or really slowed down sales or access to such games to underage players at all. If anything, they use the M rating as a direct marketing tool to kids: “your parents wouldn’t want you to play this so you totally should”.
EDIT: autocorrect is dumb
Ah yes, the ESRB, the group built to avoid actual regulation.
I mean, I get it, to an extent, the MPAA was and is absolute dogshit and filled with weird right-wing Christians who don’t like things that show women’s sexual pleasure and a lot of other weird censorial decisions.
Like how Hillary Clinton wanted to ban GTA because of the Hot Coffee mod, when the actual “Hot Coffee” minigame wasn’t available in an easily accessible way.
So, to that extent, I can understand why they built that system to avoid idiot fucking puritans taking over the ratings sytem, but I generally agree, it’s become more of a taboo thing just like the “PARENTAL WARNING EXPLICIT LYRICS” just made people want that version more. (That really worked out, huh, Tipper Gore?)
Without actual enforcement, it becomes something cool for kids to get.
The AO rating is still the kiss-of-death for game content in North America, enforced by retailers. Even still, the ESRB only came about because the political climate at the time was very much “clean up your shit or we’ll do it for you.”
Countries like Belgium and the Netherlands have already banned loot boxes and gacha systems
Did they really? I certainly know that the lootboxes aren’t allowed here (rip my TF2 weapon paints), but I still could spend 10 euros on Genshin Impact, even if I had to use MasterCard.
I have zero interest in paying for lootboxes or other gambling crap paid with real money in games.
But games like Lost Ark were banned in The Netherlands and it took me a while to figure out why it didn’t show in my Steam store.
I wish there were other means instead of just outright banning games from stores (like Diablo Immortal for mobile also isn’t available in The Netherlands). It didn’t take me much to get around the ban and install Lost Ark anyway, so I figured if I can do that, then what’s stopping people with gambling problems from doing the same as well.
Also it seems wildly inconsistent when games are and aren’t allowed for us to download. Why should I be limited to the regulated games accessible because of other people’s gambling addictions? Feels like half the Steam library could be Thanos-snapped if it were just for lootboxes and transactions being present in games.
As someone who plays a gacha game (Genshin Impact) I 100% agree. This shit should be kept the hell out of the hands of kids until their brain has at least matured to the point we’d let them go actual gambling.
That said, there’s certainly a spread of abusiveness in the games: some are very reasonable and could be played with no money or very little money because they’re generous with premium currencies and others are doing a sexy little dance while they steal your wallet.
Regulation around how much you can spend in a month would be reasonable, no kids would be reasonable, requiring clear and published probabilities and what those probabilities mean in terms of how many pulls would be a good start.
I can assure you most gacha players cannot tell you how many pulls you’d need to make for a 0.5% chance pull.
Also maybe outline estimated costs for winning wouldn’t be awful, but that’s maybe not feasible since there’s a lot of variability?
Gacha can be moderately acceptable if the math is fully documented and enforced. If you know it will take <= 180 pulls to get Raiden Shogun, and each pull costs $3, then it’s just a $540 DLC with extra steps and the tease thst it might be cheaper if you’re lucky or have banked pulls.
But transparency is key-- the developer should be expected to offer a calculator or lookup table for any RNG item, especially if it’s some combination of multiple drop mechanics or hsrd-to-convert currencies that dissuades back-of-the-envelope estimates.
Even in Vegas, the slot machines are required to disclose their payout rate.
There’s also significant differences in the gacha appeal factor. If there are no leaderboards or PvP, and the game mechanics can be completed with F2P only, that is inherently less pressure to spend then on a game where you regularly get your ass handed to you by a someone with a Black Amex and all seven-star limited banner units.
Agreed on P2P gacha games. Those are just gross as fuck, since as you said, they’re explicitly pay-to-win.
Genshin does, for the most part, provide very clear percentages and how the math works out, so you can actually do that but they’re certainly a rarity. I will say, though, that while they do provide that information it’s also in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a ‘beware of the leopard’ sign.
You can find it if you know where it is, but your average user isn’t going to know the magic things you should click on to get from the wish screen to the page on the website where they outline specific odds and pull rates, which eh, not a fan of making that so obscure.
Also: not a fan of the sell you a currency you have to convert to another currency to convert to a 3rd thing that then can be used for gambling thing. There shouldn’t be more than one level of obscuring between your money and the final item you need - Genshin goes from Crystals to Primogems to Wishes, and that’s almost entirely to be sure to confuse people how much that wish actually cost, since you’ve got a lot of math to do to get back to what you orginally paid for the Crystals.
Even if you do find the cabinet in the lavatory, the probability calculations for a simple use case are ridiculously complicated. It does reek a bit of “minimum compliance required by law.”
On the plus side, Hoyo (at least in Star Rail) doesn’t bombard the player in-game with pop-ups or the like. A zero-spend player that just wants to poke around in the story or the game world isn’t going to be harassed. Instead, it’s earnest marketing, by way of letting the player use characters on trial, featuring them in the story, or high-quality video productions published outside the game. They make as much money as they do because their production values on that stuff are among the best in the business.
As far as running a digital goods casino (where you don’t own the goods), I’ve seen far worse. I still don’t think we’re doing as much as we should to protect those with addictions to gambling or FOMO from these products, however.
It’s not a rarity, all eastern games show a percentage because their local jurisdiction (often china and japan) require it by LAW, they didn’t do it for the goodness of their hearts.
Knowing the odds doesn’t stop children from developing a gambling habit.
We were on the way to banning gambling a couple decades ago, it was illegal online and it was hard for new casinos to open up. Sports betting was illegal.
Now we’ve got FanDuel and gacha and loot boxes and crypto casinos and shitcoin shoveling influencers all this awful shit. And if you look around, the biggest shitbag bullies are the ones who are promoting it, because they know they’ll get their bag and their fans will never turn on them.
You know, because they might win next time.
These people are child predators, just not (always) the sexual kind. Fucking ban it all.
It’s funny that you mentioned Genshin because it’s probably one of the most predatory of all. Star rail isn’t really that bad, has much more generous pity. The new game that Hoyo just put out, however, zenless, is fucking terrifyingly predatory. They removed the pity reset or modified it entirely to make it even more disheartening and impossible for a regular players because they weren’t spending enough. In Genshin, your pity will not reset If you get a lower rank character, for the higher rank that you’re trying to get. In zenless, If you get a higher rank character, it will entirely reset your pity on everything. Lower rank and higher rank. This is designed so that if you’re trying to get a lower rank character specifically, to make it even more impossible. Add to that the fact that you get some sort of pity currency that can be used in several ways, all of them that look like some store or shop for you to spend money on. It’s crazy, these games are more elaborate than an actual casino where you just pull lever and spin something. Star rail even has slot machines in the divergent universe! It gives you three free spins, you can get negative effects, very rarely you’ll actually get something from the slot machine. That affects your entire gameplay experience for the rest of the divergent universe encounter.
In terms of kids versus adults, I would say that the distinction between them became much less clear after COVID, since some kids didn’t even get to finish high school in person. They went right into the adult world and started doing online learning. It was as if two entire years of their childhood was stripped from them and those learning experiences taken from them. Plus, hitting the age of 18 doesn’t magically make you wiser, or less susceptible to a bunch of things that can completely destroy your life. Like, that’s not how it works. It’s not like you turn 18 and magically you go “oh okay now I’m an adult, now I can mess up my life entirely, people are allowed to prey on me now since I’m no longer a kid anymore!” Young people are still so inexperienced in life and don’t understand that every decision that they make teaches them how the rest of their life is going to go. You spend 3 years playing these gachas, Now you’re much more likely to play another one that comes out like wuthering waves. Completely reset the cycle and start gambling again on something brand new.
From a completely humanitarian perspective, I think there should be strict limitations on what kind of predatory tactics you can include in these games for that reason alone. If you have such heavy monetization gambling, shouldn’t be considered a game anymore. Should literally have the word gambling in it. Just because these companies desire infinite amounts of money does not mean they should be able to muck up society and mess people up psychologically in my opinion
Oh I wasn’t meaning to say it wasn’t predatory, merely that it’s honest about what it is. A LOT of other gacha/lootbox games are far more obscure about what’s going on and how you’re getting screwed and Genshin at least has it all clearly outlined and easily (ish) understood.
Also, I was mentally using 21 as the gambling age since I’m an American and we don’t really trust those shifty 18-year-olds with anything other than being shot at in a war.
I take your point, though, but at some point, you have to shrug and call someone a full-fledged adult, and let them shit up their own life.
But call it gambling, regulate it under the same legal requirements as you would any other form of gambling, and keep the kids out.
You are very confused, the pity is only for the S rank characters, getting an A rank does not reset it, and every game resets your pity when you get a S rank, they being the new one from the banner or someone that’s been in the game for a while, but the second time you hit pity will be the banner S rank, just like genshin and star rail.
Are you sure about that? This is a huge amount of information. I put all the facts into Claude and asked it who was correct, you or me. It told me I’m correct based on the facts provided to it. So even a multi million dollar language learning model came to the same conclusion I did.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ZZZ_Official/s/9zjV0zSVkC
Getting 5-star resets your 4-star pity, which is different from GI/HSR system
I see other comments being guilty of poor reading comprehension lol.
OP is correct that in GI and HSR the 4* pity works differently than in ZZZ (and WuWa for that matter)
- in GI and HSR, getting a 5* does not reset 4* pity. It may delay it if 4* hard pity happens to coincide with a 5* pull, but you will then be guaranteed a 4* at pity 11.
- in WuWa and ZZZ, getting a 5* resets 4* pity. You could go 19 consecutive pulls without a 4*/A-rank as long as there’s a 5* in between.
It is objectively correct that
- the former is better for the players than the latter (more 4*s, duh)
- using the same concise wording for both is misleading, even when the detailed explanation shows the difference, and especially when it’s the same company using the same wording to mean two different things.
Unfortunately it is also objectively correct that the ZZZ/WuWa implementation is closer to a strict interpretation of the terms, and thus absolutely a feature and not a bug. This sucks but there is a 0% chance of it getting “fixed” because it works exactly as intended.
Look at the mobile game industry if cancer could manifest as a software this industry is spreading it like oil and gas.
