On December 15th, 2023, the Honkai: Star Rail team livestreamed info about their next update. Near the end, they made an announcement that would rock the entire Hoyoverse: The upcoming limited edition banner character, Dr. Ratio, would be given to everyone for free.
I cannot explain how much players freaked out over this. So many people were praising the Star Rail team for being extremely generous, and that this was a sign that they truly cared about us. It even started a civil war with salty Genshin Impact fans, as Star Rail fans rubbed their good fortune in their faces and Genshin fans tried to defend Mihoyo's other, slightly more stingy cash cow.
As someone deep into Star Rail myself, I was happy about the news. But as a cranky old man that has been watching the rise of gacha games over the years, I started to reflect on how we got here. BACK IN MY DAY, you bought a video game and you got all the characters. But somehow over the past ten years, our brains have been slowly recalibrated to think getting one (1) new character for free is some kind of mind blowing gift leaving us forever indebted to the game company that gave it to us. It's both fascinating and a bit terrifying.
Everyone knows what a gacha game is these days but if you're not familiar with where the term comes from, it's based on the Gashapon (or Gachapon) capsule toy machines commonly found in Japan. Put in some yen and you get a random capsule with a toy in it, some toys are more rare than others. At some point someone had the brilliant idea to make a digital version of this, and thus the gacha game was born.
For the purpose of this discussion, I'm referring to "gacha games" as games where you randomly draw to get playable characters, or some other items that are required to make reasonable progress in the game. Even if you don't spend any money, the gacha is the single most important gameplay mechanic. It's not a perfect definition, but it's easy to apply. It's a little different than loot boxes which are older and have different origins, but that's a whole separate rabbit hole to go down.
The type of gacha games I'm referring to began to appear at the beginning of the mobile game boom. The iPhone and other smart phones made huge technological leaps going into the 2010's and people were thirsty for games they could play on their phones. The gacha concept worked great because it didn't require complex, high dexterity gameplay that is difficult to pull off on a touch screen. Just tack on some pretty pictures to a basic puzzle game, and you have a quick, cheap to make product with huge profit potential.
It's hard to say exactly what was the first gacha game as we know them today, but for me in the U.S. it was 2012's Puzzle & Dragons. The extremely popular Rage of Bahamut also came out in Japan around that time, establishing the formula of rolling gacha for cute and/or sexy anime characters. In the following years, mega hits like Granblue Fantasy and the early industry defining Fate/Grand Order refined the formula into something that looks very much like the games we see today.
Maybe I'm being naive, but I don't think anyone truly saw what would come next. Gacha games became phenomenally successful, largely because they are gambling. These games trigger the same chemicals in your brain as traditional gambling, and when targeted at an audience already known for dropping insane amounts of cash to collect their favorite waifus, it became dangerous. Record breaking amounts of money was made (and is still being made), but at great cost. For every story about Fate/Grand Order making a billion dollars, several would pop up about someone having a bad luck streak and burning their life savings to get the character they wanted. Most companies just saw the billion dollars part and the floodgates opened for every "free to play" game to copy this model in some capacity. Still, some changes would need to be made.
With bad press and the threat of gambling regulations looming, we saw some adjustments like requiring games to show the embarrisingly low drop rates for rare characters. Most notably though, we begin to see every game implement some kind of "pity" system that guarantees a rare character after a certain number of pulls. Capping the number of pulls gives you a safety net on spending and makes planning for which character you pull much easier.
This is where we start to see the collective expectations of players getting warped into weird places. Pity systems are universally considered to be a good thing. I agree, but only with this context: they are good in that they improve a bad system, but the system is still bad. It's easy to just see the part where you have a better way to get your favorite character and forget the part where gacha is still bad in general. This is going to be a recurring theme throughout the rest of this post.
An interesting side effect of pity systems, at least for me, is cancelling out the "gambling" thrill of gacha pulling. If I know I will definitely get a character after a certain amount of pulls, now it just becomes the task of accumulating the number of pulls required. It's fun if you get a character early, but other than that the surprise is gone. That doesn't mean the danger has been eliminated though. I think this has only amplified the biggest enemy of all present day video games - FOMO.
FOMO, fear of missing out, is a powerful manipulation tool used in almost every present day video game. Just look at all the Preorder bonuses and Battle Passes out there. Making certain characters, weapons, or other collectible items available for a limited time is, in my opinion, the most powerful way to get people to spend their time and money. I've fallen for this myself, and will continue to occasionally give in to it in the future.
Most gacha games have battle passes, but their unique brand of FOMO comes in the form of the limited banner. There is typically a "standard" banner with a pool of older, weaker characters that is always available to pull from, but if you want the hot, new character, you have a small window of time to pull them from the limited banner.
These banners can run anywhere from a few weeks to only a few days. If you don't get the character on the banner, it may be months or even years before you get another chance. The pity systems make it easy to plan which character you get, but none of the major gacha games give you enough free resources to get every limited character. Either you skip characters and miss out, or you pay up.
A factor I haven't mentioned yet is what "paying up" really means. You need to buy the premium currency used to make your gacha pulls. I've played all the major gacha games and typically buying pulls costs $2-3 per pull. So let's take the Hoyoverse games as an example: with their pity system, you will typically get a rare character around 75 pulls. There is a 50% chance this rare character will be the limited banner character, and if isn't then you are guaranteed to get it next time you pull a rare character. That means you may need to make 75-150 pulls at $2 per pull, or $150-$300 for a single character. Of course the game gives you currency for playing and it's always possible you'll get lucky and get a character early, but as I said before you'll never get enough free currency to pull every limited character. If you don't spend money, at best you might be able to get every other banner character.
To make matter worse, most games also encourage you to get multiple copies of a character to unlock higher level abilities and many also require rolling on different limited banners for signature weapons or items. I'm using the Hoyoverse games as an example because they're the biggest thing right now, but this is all common practice in gacha games. They all want you to feel like you're missing out, and that you won't be able to keep up with the game if you don't spend money.
After a decade of this and other FOMO exploiting business practices across the video game industry, a whole lot of people have just grown numb to it. For young adults who were children back in the original mobile game boom and are now playing Genshin Impact or Honkai: Star Rail, this is what most video games have been for them (I also blame Roblox, but that's another story for another time). You download a game for free on mom or dad's phone and play until a cool limited character or skin or something comes up, then you ask them to to pay up. If you're an adult now, you're the one that has to pay up. That's just how things work.
Of course each gacha game takes a slightly different approach to the formula, leading to discussion over the years on what games are the most generous. For example, I've personally been guilty of trying to frame Granblue Fantasy as generous for giving away a lot of free pulls and having an "amazing" drop rate as high 6% for the rarest characters. The problem is the same as what came up earlier: it's removing the context that the most generous gacha is still a bad game system. Yes, some games will look better than others by comparison, but they are all bad. Combine this with a new generation of kids that have grown up not knowing better, and now all of this feels normal.
And so we arrive back at December 15th, 2023. The Honkai: Star Rail team announces they are giving away Dr. Ratio, the next limited banner character, to everyone for free. You don't need to spend any of your extremely limited premium currency you got from playing the game. You don't need to spend the $150-300 to buy more of that currency. You don't need to engage with the pity system. You don't need to save up for a small three week window when you will be able to pull him, nor do you need to wait a year for him to run again. It seems like an amazing deal.
Maybe I wrote this post because deep down I feel guilty about my answer to that question. I guess I personally look at gacha games similar to traditional gambling, smoking cigarettes, whatever vice you want... I know the risks but it feels good and I want to grab any small bit of joy I can get in this cold, dark world. The only one I'm regularly playing at the moment is Honkai: Star Rail and I genuinely enjoy the gameplay, story, and characters in spite of the gacha elements. And yet, I feel bad about sharing my love for those things because I don't want to encourage someone to play who might not understand or can't manage the risks. It sucks, but that's just the way things work now.