Everyone has heard of a gacha game before. It starts as an average game, but evolves into revolving around gambling. Gacha is derived from the phrase “Gotcha” because most gacha games try to implement gambling to be addicting. Many games have adopted this formula, which seems to remain a growing phenomenon. Let’s take a look at some of the numerous games that implement this formula.
No gacha games came to the USA for a while, but the first notable one that people may know is Fire Emblem Heroes. This was one of the first gacha games that were advertised and had actual gameplay. This set the groundwork for some gacha principles. First of all, being a free-to-play game increases the chance for people to try and spend money on it. The second principle it introduced was releasing the game incomplete and updating it with new content over time. These are some of the basic principles of gacha games nowadays.
The next big one was Honkai Impact 3rd. It was produced by a very important company called miHoYo, later rebranded in the United States as HoYoverse. This game introduced another principle that most gachas use, anime-stylized graphics. This would be the principle utilized by many subsequent games. This also introduced the idea of allowing multiple units for a team which encourages people to gamble to make their, “dream team.”
After the release of Honkai Impact 3rd many games just built on top of the foundation that Honkai Impact 3rd and Fire Emblem Heroes made. However, in 2020 the pandemic started and that is when gacha games blew up. The biggest one was Genshin Impact. This was once again made by miHoYo and is the most popular gacha game to this day. This game introduced many new mechanics, but mostly built upon Honkai’s gameplay. This game also revolutionized the pity system which would guarantee you to receive a rare character after a certain number of pulls.
Once Genshin Impact made it’s debut, many other franchises attempted and succeeded with gacha games. Games like Hatsune Miku: Colorful Stage were new genres to implement gacha mechanics. Cookie Run Kingdom was another game that combined this gacha mechanic with Clash of Clans gameplay. A few new principles were introduced with these modern games. Collaborations became very frequent to include characters, these would add new characters to the gacha. Another mechanic that would be added and popularized by Genshin is the idea of banners. This means you can exclusively do gacha pulls for a character for a limited time. this was done to make players panic when the character they want is on the banner and make them spend money.
We can’t finish the discussion of gacha games without talking about Roblox. For those unaware, Roblox is a game community where it is made easy to make games. Therefore, it has a lot of scammy games, but none compare to gacha games. Many Roblox experiences use assets that are barely not copyrightable from things such as anime and put them into a gacha system. Even worse is that these games usually are tower defense which means there is no gameplay. If there is one market that gacha ruined, it would have to be Roblox.
Overall, it is hard to tell if gacha mechanics are ruining gaming as a whole. Currently, it seems like gacha games are growing to be actual games. Experiences like Genshin Impact are getting a lot of content, and many games are still coming out. Recently, Honkai: Star Rail was released and is a spinoff of Honkai Impact 3rd. Many games with gacha mechanics are still prospering, meanwhile, some are starting to die off. After looking at it though it does not seem like gacha is affecting the quality of other games. However, this does not mean all should go to a gacha format. Gachas can be enjoyable as long as the developers don’t force the gacha.
