Are Gacha Games Like Banks?
Gacha games and banks aren’t that dissimilar — this article hopes to analyze such a metaphor. But before, let’s take a walk through otaku socioeconomics, as a culture shaped by marketing in a consumption society (at least in a post-war Japan, though the Meiji period actually saw the phenomenon of Western-style fashion…) within capitalism. We have Pokémon, so it was all worth it. After that, we’ll study up the Monkey Gate that Cygames caused and how the game led to a sort of legislation through guidelines, on artificial scarcity in gacha games.
The otaku culture can be considered to result from consumption society. But this can seem counterintuitive in some instances, such as the cultural appropriation of intellectual property with everything doujin(-shi if we focus on printed works, but Internet only gave more fuel to amateurs and hobbyists). And yet, one simply needs to think about Pokémon as a commercial success story.
Game Freak started out as a fanzine by Satoshi Tajiri and friends (including Ken Sugimori, official designer of Pokémon) in 1982. In 1996 — Game Freak was then a seasoned game studio — , Pokémon Red and Green are published in Japan. The Pocket Monsters Special manga series is published in 1997, same year as when the anime first aired. Pokémon Yellow is released on September 12, 1998 in Japan, a game that changes a few elements from Red and Blue (and Green): like in the anime, Pikachu follows you, and the Team Rocket duo of antagonists serves to follow a world-building coherency.
Pokémon can thus illustrate how media publication can lead to enter an industry, as well as how media mix can cement the place of products on a market: as soon as Pokémon made a commercial success, Game Freak’s priority was to establish it through a manga, an anime, and to develop the games to as to market those products. This hasn’t really changed in later games, as legendary Pokémon are often the stars of movies dedicated to them, with events “hard-coded” within the games themselves: a glitch in Pearl and Diamond lets you go to where Arceus, Shaymin or Darkrai are awaiting on your cartridge.
“The first is the marketing context. Taking as its object the capitalist system, this is the attitude of evaluating everything as a commodity and the masses as consumers who can be manipulated. This is the departure point of the contemporary practice of unequivocally defining people on the web as ‘users’. Why was it that only the business dimension called the ‘media mix’ expanded in Japanese otaku culture from the 1980s? To state it in an extreme way, the ideology of ‘otaku’ culture in Japan since the 1980s is ‘marketing’. There is a tendency to compensate for the emptiness of that reality by intentionally connecting ‘otaku’ culture with ‘tradition’ (dentou).”
In Debating Otaku in Contemporary Japan (2015), a book edited by Patrick W. Galbraith, Thiam Huat Kam, Björn-Ole Kamm and Christopher Gerteis, the concept of what otaku means is analyzed through various angles. And the foreword, written by Otsuka Eiji, deals with the trends of subculture in the recent history of Japan. He clearly associates the “media mix” to “marketing” in a “capitalist system”. Besides, it can be noted that this idea of “connecting ‘otaku’ culture with ‘tradition’” reminds of how anime may have been an element of the creation of a national identity — this goes far beyond the scope of this article, and I’m unsure about the sources.
After dealing with the link between the notions of marketing, otaku culture, consumption society and capitalism — for it takes much funding and rationalism to sell so much on so big a scale, knowing that to localize your works you need to use the legal framework of intellectual property of other countries as well as your own… — , we are ready to learn more about how a gacha game is similar to a bank.
But what is a bank? Of course, most people know what money and currency is like, as well as loans and debt. But it takes a bit more knowledge in economics to know that money’s value resides in trust, within the entire monetary framework. And that banks are hierarchized: a central bank. A central bank, according to Oxford Languages, is: “a national bank that provides financial and banking services for its country’s government and commercial banking system, as well as implementing the government’s monetary policy and issuing currency.”.
And thus, the “government” can have a “monetary policy”. For example, printing money. Or, when a bank loans money that has virtual value printed in money and recorded in bank money: this process of the creation of artificial value, is called ex nihilo. From nothingness. Of course, banks have strict regulations, which means they can’t do whatever pleases them, going around and creating value, lest the system should crumble like in 2008…
Thus, we know that a “bank” can provide “services” such as “issuing currency”, and enforce a “monetary policy”. A gacha game, which is generally speaking a game with a monetization system that features randomness in a lottery, is abstractly similar to such a bank. Indeed, the “services” include a lottery that can be addictive in itself, and “issuing currency”, in the form of items, characters or other things the game might feature such as costumes and the likes.
A core difference might be that the artificial value of bank money differs from mere game data because bank money functions as liquidity in the entire economical system. However, some gacha games may feature trading as a part of the game, thus making the “currency” an asset that can further an individual’s goals. And in Genshin Impact, if a certain very, very rare character and its build are strong in the PvP metagame, a hacker might steal and sell the account to another user. However, the gacha there produces liquidity while being subjected to some extraneous banking system, since transactions are extraneous to the game as a market.
This is where I want to introduce Granblue Fantasy, a gacha RPG that became infamous back in 2016 for its gacha practices in an event that went down as Monkey Gate. Cygames created an event where a rare character (SSR) was introduced, and a streamer wound up spending over $6,000 to get Andira. Other players also whaled on the game and found her to be rare to drop. Basically, the playerbase complained, and Cygames refunded people in in-game currency. And finally, like a Reddit thread by user kirandra puts it:
“The Japan Online Games Association (JOGA) also got involved, and launched an investigation into the incident. It was eventually dropped without consequence, however, they published a list of guidelines that Japanese gacha games were recommended to follow, which included rules such as having clear and precise gacha rates and setting spending caps ingame.
Other games, too, eventually began to follow in GBF’s lead, publicizing their rates and some of them adding the failsafe. Nowadays, games that don’t do both of those tend to die off quickly, which is a huge incentive for gacha games to follow those trends.”
The exclusive character had its rate going up, but the rate wasn’t similar to comparable characters on a surface-level. And so, many people proceeded to buy gacha drops, before asking for refunds. The Japan Online Games Association, taking action on the name of the industry while counting companies as members, introduced a potential deontology or guidelines for companies and their products.
If we analyze it with our gacha-as-bank metaphor, the gacha currency (the character Andira, with a feminine appearance, which matters when considering the commodification of feminity) and its effective value — not the artificial value — disconnected, thus leading to ineffective economics. Ensued a natural distrust in this currency, with consumers asking for refunds. Here the crisis has been handled somewhat correctly, but perhaps that some other companies in this situation would have been led to bankruptcy.
To learn lessons from this economical ‘crisis’, the “guidelines” of the Japan Online Games Association served to shape the industry. This sort of legislation, by peers rather than by a coercitive legislator —though the government eventually intervened, since the incident was even discussed on TV — , gains legitimacy due to the “huge incentive” of quick capitalistic demise for gacha games. Having “clear and precise gacha rates”, and a “failsafe” are both things that you can kind of find in Touhou LostWord, the best gacha to ever exist.
Now, why would the comparison between banks and gacha games ever be relevant? One has to acknowledge that a good way to gain money is to follow its flow — the same works for value instead of money, which is how the analogy works out. And banks are at the center of transactions in our modern global order, especially if you follow closely the decisions of central banks. As a citizen of the European Union, I notice that sovereignty is a fundamental issue, and that the monetary policy of the euro is led by the European Central Bank rather than by governments, which is a source of dissent between key members.
A gacha game, by issuing currency and leading its monetary policy (for example via the adjustment of rates, or events featuring exclusive event characters), is akin to a bank in that it creates value — artificial and able to serve as liquidity (at least within the context of the gamer’s experience) — in a monopolistic fashion. And when you occupy a monopolistic place, you essentially control the market, able to configurate it to bring your maximum profit. Which is obviously amoral, but should be fine so long as you provide a correct service that consumers desire for.
The concurrency between gacha games is rude, which is why even occupying a monopolistic place on a market (which is natural if the currency is your intellectual property) isn’t perfect. Which is why gacha games keep on innovating to keep their uniqueness, whether it be through lore (Girls’ Frontline), the universe of a successful franchise (Magia Record, though the North American servers closed down), etc.
The goal of this article has already been reached, so now it’s just some analytical extra. I mentioned that gacha games already operated within banking systems on a worldwide basis. A central bank’s monetary policy can be influenced by a few things, like exports, imports and inflation. And for gacha games to capitalize the longest on a current set of dropping rates that the playerbase accepts de facto, those gacha games would benefit from the banking systems to be fighting against inflation.
Which can even have geopolitical effects. According to an analysis by Sensor Tower, Genshin Impact is a franchise that “made $3 billion in revenue on mobile alone since its release, averaging about $1 billion every six months in spending”. Considering it’s a Chinese company and this is nowhere near a small sum, probably that exchange rates could change between Western consumers and East-Asian companies, if we considered some sort of aggregated flow from all gacha players to gacha companies… Indeed, it might strengthen the yuan or something, that which caused the economic conflict between China and the United States in recent years.
