The History of Gacha in Video Games
“Japan hasn’t been the same since Dragon Collection,” says Serkan Toto, a games industry consultant who’s been living in Tokyo since 2004. It was the late-Aughties, a time when mobile gaming was still in its awkward teenage years, and Konami was cooking up a radical, sublimely Machiavellian scheme. What if, instead of the watered-down triple-A adaptations currently occupying app stores, they built a game where the primeval instinct of hoarding — the same obsession that drives millions of people around the world to stockpile stamps, baseball cards, and Pop Dolls — served as a foundational tenet of game design? What if there was a dungeon crawler that de-emphasized combat and exploration, and instead focused solely on an acute serotonin drip of shiny loot? What if there were so many items in the game, that you could spend hundreds and hundreds of hours before accumulating enough of them to feel any sense of satisfaction? Maybe Dragon Collection was sinister, but it was absolutely crazy enough to work.
“Before developers were selling individual virtual items to users through DLC,” says Toto, “But [Dragon Collection] brought a little bit of luck, a little bit of gambling to the mix. It was the mobile game that popularized the concept.”
And so, in 2010, Dragon Collection was released onto the GREE social network — essentially a mobile-first Facebook for the Japanese market. Functionally, it’s a card battler; you slowly accumulate an army of colorful chibi sprites by grinding through quests and adventures with your friends — but every couple of paces you’ll be opening up a chest, and adding a randomly sorted artifact to your arsenal. Want some more chests at a faster rate? You’ll need to pay up. It sounds simple now, but Konami managed to scratch the completionist itch in us all by making the game free-to-play and available to you on your phone, which was still a radical concept long before the games-as-a-service revolution. It worked beautifully. Dragon Collection quickly became one of Konami’s money leaders, and the metrics and tactics of the overseas games market changed overnight.
The media was quick to assign a name to the phenomenon, as the game quickly swept through malls, school halls, and train stations. Collectively, they settled on “gacha,” or “gacha games” — a sardonic shortening of Gachapon; the vending-dispensed capsule toys that children buy for 100 Yen outside of convenience stores and arcades all over the country. After all, the endorphin rush summoned by those machines is quite similar to Dragon Collection — the faint hope that you’re about hit that one-in-a-thousand chance of pulling the figure you really want.
Lasting Impact
We’re still feeling the effects of Dragon Collection today. Konami showed the industry how much money there was to be made by letting people collect monsters on their phones, and other publishers immediately got to work. Toto compares that moment, after 2010 when the gacha feeding frenzy was on, with the development climate right now, where dozens of teams are putting together prospective Battle Royale modules to catch some of that Fortnite mania. “In mobile gaming everyone copies each other,” he says. “People started copying Dragon Collection’s card-battling mechanics, as well as its gacha mechanics. That concept spread like wildfire.”
Other studios quickly started to extrapolate on Dragon Collection’s core ideas, and gacha was suddenly a field with seemingly dozens of subgenres and micro-iterations. “Sugoroku Gacha” ditches the card game scheme in favor of a broader, infinite board game — where players move down a Candy Land track to earn better (and rarer) rewards. “Redraw Gacha” offers a kinder, gentler loot mechanic, which allows the player to reroll their spin in case they drew an item they already had, or didn’t want. “Step-up Gacha” increases the chance at a rare item the more rolls you make in a row, “Open/Closed Gacha” shows you the exact percentage chance you have at pulling a specific item, “Consecutive Gacha” gives you better odds if you buy a ton of rolls at once. The games themselves have also become progressively more mainstream, and stocked with more recognizable characters. Nintendo’s Fire Emblem Heroes is essentially built around a gacha system, albeit one dressed up with the high-fantasy ennui that personifies the series. Currently, one of the most popular gacha games in Japan is Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius, which, as you probably guessed, borrows its lore directly from Square Enix’s highly protected juggernaut.
Perhaps you’re surprised that Japanese games culture took to a gameplay design that emphasizes chance, blind luck, and in-app purchases. It’s especially curious in 2018, in the aftermath of EA’s Battlefront 2 lootbox scandal, where publishers seem more cagey than ever about the implementation of post-purchase monetization. This is something Toto has thought about a lot, and suggests that the answer is more simple than you might expect.
“I ask my Japanese friends that play mobile games, ‘Why do you embrace gacha? Why do you spend so much on gacha?’ And my friends just say, ‘Japanese people love gambling. We are more open about gambling.’ Japan is one of the biggest gambling markets in the world,” he says. “You don’t go out and brag about gambling, but the stigma is there, but it’s much more muted. I mean, just look at how much money the pachinko industry is making alone!”
The Heart of Japanese Gaming Culture
That’s true. Anyone who’s been to Tokyo knows what it’s like to witness the massive, blaring-loud gaming halls on every street corner, ready and waiting to relieve you of your money. However, that social acceptance hasn’t always gelled well with the government, and that came home to roost in 2012 for the burgeoning gacha industry. Around that time, two years after Dragon Collection shook the country, developers started pushing out a new gacha format called “Complete Gacha,” or “Kompu Gacha.” In those models, players needed to assemble rare items after first acquiring a suite of more common ingredients from their rolls. You can imagine how this usually played out; the first few pieces would come tantalizingly quickly, which made chasing down the final few artifacts increasingly difficult. It’s the same fevered frustration Magic players are familiar with when they tear through endless booster packs on the hunt for one specific legendary. Only, this was on your phone, and you couldn’t go to eBay to secure the piece from the secondary market.
“It’s funny to think that Japan has already been through a tumultuous round of loot-box jurisdiction, especially considering how courts in the U.S. and Europe are just now gearing up for a debate over the legal limits of virtual capital.”
Complete Gacha games caught the ire of the Yomiuri Shimbun, a right-leaning Japanese newspaper, who accused studios of selling a cutesy gambling simulator to kids. Their reporting caused enough controversy to merit an investigation by the country’s Consumer Affairs bureau, who ruled that gacha prizes needed to be treated with the same rules that apply to baseball cards and other collectibles. Suddenly, Japan’s still-nascent mobile games industry was under extreme public scrutiny, and causing moral panic.
“Complete Gacha was so ruthless that it caused [the government] to put its foot down,” says Toto. “It was a huge shock to the entire industry. It brought mobile games to the mainstream as something bad. Once a topic is in the mass media in Japan in a negative light, it’s tough to get back.”
That being said, Complete Gacha rules were never officially made illegal. Instead, Gacha developers attempted to self-regulate — promoting fairer, less predatory rulesets, and hopefully getting the government off their back. Mobile companies in Japan went as far as banding together under a committee called the Japan Social Games Association, that specifically worked to purge noncompliant business practices from the industry. (That committee didn’t last, though, and was disbanded in 2015.)
“In Japan, developers tell me, ‘If we removed lootboxes there would be a revolt!’ If a new game doesn’t have gacha, people think it’s cheap.”
All of this self-regulation managed to work. Today, Toto explains that no major publishers in Japan use a Complete Gacha system anymore, and that the industry has flourished in the six years since the government got involved. “If you look at the top-10 highest grossing games here, all of them are gacha,” he says. It’s funny to think that Japan has already been through a tumultuous round of loot-box jurisdiction, especially considering how courts in the U.S. and Europe are just now gearing up for a debate over the legal limits of virtual capital. Maybe we should take precedent that cooler heads will prevail.
“After the Complete Gacha shock, Japanese game developers didn’t stop introducing gacha monetization models, they instead came up with other ways to do it,” continues Toto.
At this point, gacha is part of the DNA of Japanese otaku culture. Strangely enough, Toto notices a dearth of hype or interest in any mobile game that doesn’t include some sort of randomized monetization structure. “In Japan, developers tell me, ‘If we removed lootboxes there would be a revolt!’ If a new game doesn’t have gacha, people think it’s cheap. They don’t want to spend money on it,” he explains. There’s an old adage about the games industry that East Asia is always a couple years ahead of the rest of the world, at least as far as gameplay ideas go. That might sound reductive, but then you think of Dark Souls, or Breath of the Wild, or PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, and all the American and European companies currently trying to chase those legacies. So who knows? Maybe, a few seasons from now, the loot box debate will be settled in the West, and we’ll be begging developers to add them back in. After all, if there’s one thing undeniable about gacha, it’s that it sure does feel good.
Luke Winkie is a Brooklyn, NY-based entertainment writer. His work has appeared on A.V Club, Sports Illustrated, Kotaku, Playboy, Mel, PC Gamer, Vice, Glixel, and Rolling Stone.
