Shame is never gonna change anything about gacha games while they still meet needs that almost no other games do all at once:
- Possible to be played for free (via whales subsidizing the costs)
- Provides a feeling of progression and growth over time, even if it is a shallow one
- Meets a bare-minimum (the bar is quite low) level of writing quality and augments it by letting you spend many small moments of time with characters to get you attached1.
- Provides predictable gameplay that you can enjoy when you're burnt out from work or stress without having to learn a new game or system, and can be enjoyed in small chunks when necessary.
- Has easy ways of generating human interactions with things like sharing lucky or unlucky draws—not every interaction needs to be deep and meaningful to be satisfying.
Regulation or collective labor action might change things, but just criticizing the monetization model, true though it may be that it's harmful to a lot of folks, is a fruitless endeavor without addressing the fact that gacha does fill a useful gap for many folks, even if it does so in an ultimately unsustainable way.
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Something about getting maybe an hour or two of time with a character many times over a year vs a single game with dozens of hours of time with a character tricks the brain into feeling more attached to the character we get to regularly check in with. Consider your attachment to a character in a book or movie vs a character in a TV show or webcomic.
