I recently wrote about [[ARPGs and the People who Love them too Much]]. In that post I mentioned that it reminded me of how gacha players have a similar relationship with the games they play. I figured I’d write about that too, since it’s been on my mind. The gacha player is even more of an enigma to me than the ARPG player. This is because I hate gacha games with a fiery passion. To call them “games” is in and of itself a misnomer. They are brightly colored gambling machines that spit out anime girls instead of money — so worse than a gambling machine, because at least those give you something of value. They are skinner boxes wearing the skin of a game like a horror monster. That comes down to their mechanics as well: ***every***[^1] gacha game is anti-[[Goopy Goblin Gamer Brain]], because the “mechanics” only ever exist to serve as a reason to spin the wheel some more. I don’t feel bad speaking this harshly, because gacha games hate me too. If they didn’t, they — and by extension the companies that make them — wouldn’t ty to hook me with a gambling addiction. Any artistic merit in a gacha game is diminished, if not outright lost, by virtue of servicing a disgusting gambling machine. All of this is to say that I find the gacha communities that build up around the games they play to be quite baffling. I mentioned “push and pull” in the title of this post because gacha games do have to pay a bit of a price to get the revenue they desire so strongly: satisfying its community. Unless you're **Fate/Stay** or one of **Mihoyo**’s abominations, you don’t get to hit the infinite money glitch. Instead you have to balance on a tightrope to make the siphoning of your players’ wallets less obvious. Hang out in any gacha community and you’ll see that as the case. Gacha players want as much of their game as possible to be free to play to justify spending money as a treat. They want forgiving pull rates, no 50/50s[^2], good free characters, and no powercreep. On top of that, “whales” — the people who spend the *most* on the game — must be appeased as well. One wrong step, and your gacha’s revenue could drop by double-digit percentages. It’s a delicate ecosystem. Make your game too greedy, and no one will want to pull on the slots. But make it too generous, and your players won’t feel a reason to spend, so your game becomes a **Dragalia Lost** or **Tribe Nine**. But that’s a bit of an oxymoron though, isn’t it? A gacha game can never be “too greedy.” That’s the whole point of the “genre.” But gacha players must feel like they are being properly catered to, regardless of where they are on the spending totem pole. The dynamics aren’t any different from a casino, with the key difference being that if your company missteps even slightly, you might have to [dodge an assassination attempt](https://www.thegamer.com/mihoyo-china-assassination-attempt/). I’m gonna be honest — I don’t really know what to do about this. It’s a genie that seemingly can’t get taken out of the bottle. So I guess I’ll just leave y’all with an anecdote. Once upon a time someone in my friend group was big on **Genshin Impact**, to the point that they maxed out a character every patch. Maxing out a character costs around $1,391, assuming you’re unlucky. I used to envy this person. How could they have so much disposable income? Could I get some of it? Now though? I just feel sad for them. I’m sure that sadness would not be well received by them, or anyone else who plays gacha games. But I’ll feel it anyways. Drop your phone game for **Diablo IV** or something: you may hate it, and it might be trading one addiction for another. But I’d rather you have the one that doesn’t make you go bankrupt. [^1]: Yes, *every*, even your favorite. I don’t care. [^2]: Tl;dr: if you spend X pulls on a banner and hit they pity rate — where the game just gives you the character / weapon / skin you want — a 50/50 rate means that you might not get that guaranteed item and keep paying to go again.