kodicraft

Glimmer of darkness

I press buttons until the light matrix shows colors I like. Currently working mostly with Elixir and Rust on various personal projects.

I'm the bitch who complains that the ending of Interstellar involves extremely inefficient transmission of information

http://keyserver.ubuntu.com:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x69d9eed60b242822
https://github.com/KodiCraft.keys



Osmose
@Osmose

I never really understood why trading card / collection games are so much more socially acceptable / ethical than gacha when you can actually play gacha games for free and they have pity guarantees. Yes, you can resell cards to make back money if you're lucky but I dunno that that really makes much of a difference, and also that makes trading cards effectively NFTs with a much smaller environmental impact.

(Relatively, of course. Gacha is not good but I don't get why it is so particularly bad vs other bad things.)


caro
@caro

trading cards are physical objects you can own, and if the people making them shut down, they'll even gain value. with most modern gachas, if the game shuts down, that's it. your collection doesn't just depreciate, it VAPORIZES.

there's also the different public perceptions of them- pokemon cards, for example, are widely known for commanding high resale prices sometimes, so there's a present defense for one's investment in the scene, and they're an all-ages franchise that has a baseline level of respect. meanwhile, gacha games tend to be sexually provocative as a marketing maneuver, which The Public will look down upon bc of course they will.


Osmose
@Osmose

I think where I'm getting stuck is that gaining value / being able to resell them simply means that, if you're lucky and have valuable cards, you may get some of your money back, and I don't understand why that is so much better when it's based on luck. It's like saying "well, a random selection of people who dropped a ton of money into this may be made whole so it's okay that the rest are still SOL".

Put another way, resale markets for collectibles are essentially distributing the impact among more customers: The Pokemon Company makes $5 million no matter what, and resale after that is simply shifting around where that $5 million was extracted from.


kodicraft
@kodicraft

Well the point is that the $5 million ends up extracted from people who are certain to get what they wanted, a gacha game making $5 million dollars extracted most of that money selling stuff that people didn't want to people who are forced to keep it. For trading card games, the lootbox aspect is more of a way to get these assets on the market with some artificial scarcity.
I'm not really here to defend either, they're both very much gambling, but I think it's useful to consider that at the end of the day trading card collectors own their trading cards because they want to own them while gacha players own their characters or whatever because they happened to get them while trying to get something else. (This is not entirely accurate, many collectors won't bother selling their shit cards because like lmao processing fees but I've seen sellers get rid of them by giving them away as bonus cards with a purchase, ultimately it's up to them to decide how to get rid of cards they don't want)


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in reply to @kodicraft's post:

That's part of why I brought up pity though—because of the digital aspect of gacha pulls, you can be guaranteed that you get the character you want within a certain amount of pulls. Most gacha also have a use for trash pulls anyway, usually consuming it to level up higher tier equipment.