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.
Don’t gamble please for the love of fuck, all gambling is mathematically designed to never pay off for the one gambling
I generally agree, but poker is an exception where, if skilled enough, you can actually make money.
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
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’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.
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.
Also it should be required to display prices in local currency. I spent 2.99usd on that fox card game. Ended up costing me 5 bucks canadian
Quite a few years ago now I went to my nan’s house for Christmas.
My cousin, I think he was about 13, had got a £50 Steam voucher for some games. Him and my other cousin who was a couple of year older went to Steam, swapped the voucher for something, and then took that to a gambling site. I don’t know if they’re still a thing. It was something to do with Counter Strike drops I think. Heavily advertised by YouTubers who ran them, with a bunch of videos showing them winning. The sort of thing they’d be sent to prison for in any right thinking society.
They took that £50, put it in, and clicked. The younger one went “what now?” and the older one just went “oh, nothing. It’s gone.” A couple of games worth of money, gone. For nothing.
He looked like he was about to cry, and only didn’t because he was going through that acting tough phase.
He’s an accountant now, and plays crown green bowling. I like to think that was a relatively cheap lesson in why not to fuck around with gambling.
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
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.
The way that the drops are is literally the same approach as a slot machine but with more steps to take up your time with boring shit and require more of your life to be dedicated to it so that there is less risk of you getting distracted by things like hobbies or games with finite stories with quality writing. A one-armed bandit might snag a handful of whales that spend all of their time feeding the machine. The Wrath of the Lich Bandit gets a much larger percentage of its users in front of it for a larger amount of their time, increasing the ratio of addicts/whales caught. Add in expansions, real money auctions, etc and you’ve got something much more fucked up than anything on a Vegas casino floor.
At least make all gacha games R18, no kids should be exposed to this stuff.
You’re like 5 years late on this realization. Unfortunately not much is changing.
It seems the EU is moving on this issue with their usual tectonic speed.
Let’s hope they also hit with their usual tectonic force.
Compared to the US, the EU is lightning fast. California probably beats them sometimes, though.
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?
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
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.
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.
The interesting thing is that although I’ve almost never spent money on a gacha system and haven’t played much gacha systems recently, my brain subconsciously craved for more but in a safer way.
That’s why I created the JavaScript weighted playlist for myself: A random selection of songs from my music library where some songs play (much) more than others. Getting a super rare song is akin to getting a top tier drop. Additionally, the playback rate is randomized to a normal distribution, giving the tiny chance that a rare song can play with a wild playback rate. And if that wasn’t enough, some Geometry Dash related songs can randomly skip to the next song, simulating watching someone try to beat some demon level.
I’ve created a skinner box for my brain that sometimes causes me to waste hours just clicking on the “next song” button to see what shows up next. My wallet was not harmed in the process (although it might soon be because I want it to work on a portable device, but that money would go to some niche open source hardware thing rather than a greedy gacha publisher).
This is extremely interesting and in general kind of touches on a point that I heard that’s kind of funny… People are just bored, and all of Good and bad things that we do in this world are a result of that boredom. Gambling, our hobbies, picking up another job. If it cures your boredom there’s nothing wrong with it
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
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.
Gambling is heavily regulated in most countries, often including requiring the odds of winning being clearly listed and regulating the profit margin that The House can take (usually limited to less than 10%)
Many casinos and developers of addictive games will hire psychologists and other experts on human condition to help them find ways to make the game more addictive and make it easier to seperate players from their money. These “dark patterns” both make gaming worse and make it more dangerous for anyone unfortunate enough to develop an addiction.
In short, I welcome regulation on the worst aspects of the game industry to keep the worst aspects from become too financially successful to not implement (see the $60 AA and AAA games that launched with lootboxes and predatory micro-transactions like this one about 10 years ago before some countries announced they were investigating regulating such practices)
I don’t give a shit other than proper labels. The rest is nanny state bullshit.
Do you think seatbelts should be banned because you’re a careful driver? Do you think use-by dates should be removed because you’ve never got sick? Do you think stupid people should suffer because you’re more clever than them? Are you an empathy-lacking sociopath?
I do empathize but your mental health isn’t my responsibility. If you don’t wear a seatbelt I didn’t give a fuck. But let’s take your strawman a bit further, video games have been shown to cause agressiness and anti social behavior. Do you support banning them all? What is, in your opinion, where the state should step in to protect people from themselves.
