Seriously, what is the appeal of gacha games?

I've been around for a few years and seen all sorts of games and genres pop up. Over the past decade or so, however, one particular "genre" caught my eye, one whose appeal I never really understood. And that is, drum roll, gacha.

From Limbus Company to Fate: Grand Order to the currently massively popular Umamusume, there have been more than a few gacha games on the market these past few years. Even games that you wouldn't consider gachas from a trailer or some images turn out to be precisely that: Genshin Impact, Zenless Zone Zero, and so on. The core aspect of such a game is that there are currencies to be spent in-game, most of them purchased for real money and used in "pulls," i.e., virtual slot machines that may or may not give you something worthwhile.

And your whole success, if there even is such a thing in these games, depends on having the best of the best characters, heroes, or whatever else it is that's being "pulled." So, what's the appeal?

Do people just like gambling?

Collecting horse-women is the name of the game in Umamusume. Yeah, that's a real sentence. Image by Destructoid

This can very well be considered a rhetorical question. It goes without saying that many people in the world adore gambling, some even a little too much. It's one of the most popular and most devastating vices to have. The anticipation of each round of cards, slot machine roll, or roulette ball gives a tremendous high, one that people are keen to get addicted to really quickly.

Gacha games are more or less the same, at least in terms of design. You put some money in (real or fictional, but mostly real) and anticipate a good pull. If the pull is good, then by God it'd be a crying shame to stop there; if it's bad, you gotta keep trying, it's gonna give you something eventually. This mentality is likely what drives people to return to these types of games, or so it's my assumption, as I never really saw the appeal.

What little gameplay there is to these games usually revolves around either a traditional turn-based 2D JRPG or some low-quality action-RPG. Those like ZZZ and Genshin Impact do actually have a bit more to them, but I guess they're more liked by fans of MMO JRPGs on PC and Console rather than your bog-standard mobile gacha fan. The point, however, still stands.

What even is the point?

Like, there are so many of these games today that I really can't understand what's going on. Image via ArchZara's Opportunity

After all, if you like gambling, why not play a good game like Counter-Strike 2 and lose your money on skins? Hell, if you pull a good one from a case, you can even sell it, something you certainly cannot do in a gacha game. Both the gameplay and the gambling are subpar compared to other stuff out there.

It's gotten so bad that even Riot Games implemented a gacha system in League of Legends, where you spend hundreds of dollars just to get that one unique limited-edition skin that you cannot even do anything with. On occasion, they were just variations of existing skins, meaning there was next to zero value to these "unique" types. But people kept pouring their money into the addictive gacha system, if only for the love of the game (and I'm not saying League of Legends).

So, what even is the point of gacha games? Simply: there is none. Both of its "aspects" are worse than anything else you could be doing or spending your money on.

Free-to-play games are countless in this day and age, and if that's your excuse, then just go to Steam and sort by F2P—you're bound to find something interesting.

And if it's the gambling, the best solution is to quit altogether. Or just, you know, try and make money off it rather than spending it on virtual anime horse girls (do you even see how weird that sounds?)

The post Seriously, what is the appeal of gacha games? appeared first on Destructoid.

Stay tuned thanks for visiting