Genshin Impact
I’ve been enjoying Genshin Impact for about a year or more now. It is truly an excellent game.
The game has a deep, smooth, innovative combat system, great UIUX, gorgeous graphics, vast content, rich lore, incredible music, amazing characters, breathtaking landscapes and touching stories. However, many gamers simply won’t even give it a chance because of its divisive gacha system.
Brief description of Genshin’s gacha system
Players use ingame currency which they can earn by playing the game or purchase by spending money to (mainly) acquire new characters to bring into their party and play as. However, there is a luck/gambling element to this, as the process involves chance. If a player is unlucky, they could spend up to 75% more ingame currency than a player with average luck to acquire one character. Math based on 61.5 average pulls for a 5 star with 50% chance of hitting the 50/50 versus 160 pulls for soft pity missing the 50/50.
Based on the rate that a player can earn ingame currency through playing the game and spending no money, a player can acquire about 1/3 to 1/2 of the rare-tier characters in the game. There are also common-tier characters, which are easily available even to players spending no money (free to play, or f2p, players).
Good gacha and bad gacha
I don’t think that gacha is inherently good or bad. It’s simply a method of monetization in gaming (which has been a problem for the gaming industry since forever). But I think gacha does have a bad reputation because it’s often employed in games which have other negative qualities.
Pay-to-win, pay-for-variety, pay-for-cosmetics
For example, many gacha games have some sort of PvP (player versus player) mode. The players who spend money purchasing ingame currency bully the f2p players, pushing out f2p players, shrinking the bulk of the player base while driving a spending arms race. The issue here is the pay-to-win system, where you can’t compete unless you pay money. That’s toxic. Genshin, by design, has no PvP mode. They don’t even have a competitive leaderboard for challenging content, so there’s no ingame support for competition whatsoever. You can complete the most challenging content in the game (and earn the ingame currency for it) without spending a cent, and some hardcore ascetics have even done so without even spending any free ingame currency from playing the game. That’s why I’d say that Genshin is pay-for-variety, which is not evil. The other successful, not evil monetization system is pay-for-cosmetics, employed successfully by giants like DotA 2 and Fortnite. Players are not forced to spend money to compete in and enjoy the game.
Limited gameplay in many gacha games
Another common negative trait of gacha games is their limited gameplay, with a focus of the game being on collecting the gacha items/characters themselves. An example of this is in auto-battlers, like Raid Shadow Legends, where almost all of the actual gameplay plays out automatically. But this doesn’t have to be the case. The gameplay in Genshin is top-of-the-line AAA quality, and combat is done in Action RPG style, where skill and knowledge are much more important factors than character statistics.
Promotion of locked content in gacha
I think there are four, essential parts which make up gacha. One is content locked behind ingame currency, two is the advertising/promotion of such content, three is chance and four is a high limit on spending. I haven’t talked about the advertising part yet, so I’ll say a little. All gacha games have some kind of promotional media for the locked content. The most common are ingame “banners” which show where players go to chance for the desired assets and video demos of the characters/items. Better games (like Genshin) don’t overtly present these advertisements to the player at every opportunity, whereas many games will brandish such promotional material to players on every login, at checkpoints and also just periodically.
Chance, the essence of gacha
The third piece of the gacha system is chance. Chance can induce happiness chemicals and behavioral reinforcement through variable payout schedules. Chance can also cause players to spend more than they initially planned due to sunk cost fallacy. It is the extra spice that boosts sales for games, that casinos and lotteries have been using forever. But I don’t think it’s evil in itself.
Gaming whales and their importance in the player base ecosystem
The fourth ingredient to gacha is a high effective limit on spending. Even though a player can spend ingame currency (or real money) to acquire a character, they can also pay up to 15 times that base amount, in order to power up that character. Most players don’t do this, but many, called whales in the vernacular, do. It could be a way to show their special attachment to that character, or they could just have too much money to spend. These whales often make up a large proportion of a gacha game’s income, allowing f2p players to ride on their coat-tails and enjoy the game for free.
This has several big benefits. For the gaming studio, this is a way to get richer customers to spend more. Compared to the traditional pay-to-own model, where you pay for the game once and play it forever, whales allow gaming studios to earn much more, and to keep earning money for continuously producing good content. Compared to the pay-for-cosmetics model, it’s easier to get thousands of dollars from a player since skins usually are not so individually expensive. The whales also pay for the costs of maintaining f2p players, allowing the game to have an organically large player base and to spread through word of mouth and through gaming friends and communities. For players, this is of course excellent for f2p players who get to enjoy a great game at absolutely no cost, allowing the game to be enjoyed by millions in poorer regions of the world.
The morality of gacha and casinos
Is gacha evil by cheating players of money by subjecting them to hard-sell sweaty salesperson tactics? I don’t think so, not any more than a salesperson is evil for selling any item that salesperson doesn’t think is the very best for the customer. If salespeople only sold what they thought was in the best interest of prospective customers, we would hardly have any salespeople in the world. The bulk of the burden and responsibility must lie with the consumer and their discernment. In the same way, players must be responsible for what they purchase.
Is gacha evil by cheating the uninformed who do not understand probabilities? I don’t think so either. A fool and his money are soon parted anyway. In this respect, gacha is surely less evil than the gambling industry, because fools can lose their life savings in a gambling den trying to win back their losses, but even an imbecile knows that they can’t get back any money that they put into a gacha game.
The upside of gacha
I think gacha is here to stay, and I’m all for it. It’s a successful monetization method for games, and allows great game development studios like Genshin’s Hoyoverse to continue to produce stellar content. Let’s just hope that players are discerning enough to protect their wallets from bad gacha games and bad purchases.