Gacha games—that is to say, games inspired off of “gachapon” machines, featuring gambling mechanics and usually made by eastern developers—have, to my eyes, become more and more popular in recent years. Games like “Genshin Impact” and “Arknights” have been quietly raking in billions of dollars and amassing loyal fanbases, while many western AAA developers seem to be circling the drain, with studios wracked by controversy and huge flop after huge flop coming out. But gacha games aren’t without their controversies either, and I have seen many people attacking or deriding the genre itself, due to it involving gambling with real money. So I find myself compelled to ask: are gachas moral?

To begin to answer this question, we first have to define what a gacha is. For the purposes of this article, I will be defining gacha games as free to play, live service video games wherein characters are obtained via gambling, made by developers in Asia. I am well aware this is a narrow definition and does not necessarily encompass the entire genre; however, I am not here to address the edge cases and the games that are only kind of gachas. Rather, I want to speak of the genre and the mechanic as a whole.

Allow me to elaborate further for those unaware and/or for those who have never played a gacha. While the gameplay of these games can wildly vary from game to game, the core thing that makes it a gacha is that the player plays the game by controlling one of several pre-defined playable characters, as opposed to making their own. These characters are obtained by “pulling,” a term used to describe spending in-game currency to run a gambling machine that gives you a random character, with some characters being more rare than others. The in-game currency players can spend is almost always available to be earned through in-game activities, but crucially, can also be bought with real money. In most of these games, the buying of currency to be used for pulls is the main, if not the only way they monetize themselves—as these games are, as mentioned, free to play.

It is hard to understate just how successful gachas have been in the last few years. According to the BBC, “Genshin Impact,” perhaps the most successful and well-known gacha game, earned two billion dollars in its first year alone, just by purchases made on mobile devices—and the numbers have only gone up since. And to be clear, Genshin is playable on both PC and phones, meaning that number is unlikely to be an accurate representation of just how wildly profitable the game has been. So what’s the problem with all this? If people like these kinds of games, isn’t that a good thing?

One of the biggest problems with this model of game is the issue of gambling. While these games have become immensely popular over the years, I have heard many people argue that this is due to the addictive nature of their monetization schemes, as opposed to genuinely quality gameplay. To begin to dissect this, I think it is important to first look at how exactly slot-machine-like aspects of these games work.

Now, I have never been to a casino, so you will have to forgive me if I get some things wrong, but I think there are several key differences between gacha games and other forms of gambling—not things that necessarily make gachas better or worse, but things that we should acknowledge. Probably the biggest difference between gachas and other gambling games is the concept of a “pity” system. Unlike in other forms of gambling, gacha games won’t let you simply roll forever without ever getting what you want—rather, in most of these games, you will reach a “soft pity” after a certain number of pulls, whereupon each subsequent pull will cumulatively increase your chances of getting a high-rarity character. Eventually, this results in a “hard pity,” a number of pulls whereupon you are guaranteed to get a higher-rarity character. To give a couple of examples, Genshin Impact has a soft pity of 60 pulls and a hard pity of 90. Arknights has a soft pity of 50 pulls and a hard pity of 100. These are, as far as I have gathered, fairly standard numbers for the industry.

This is further built on, and made more morally complicated, by the banner system featured in most of these games. As these games add characters to themselves over time as a way of keeping people interested, they will naturally eventually reach a point where getting any single character is nearly impossible because of the dearth of characters already in the game. So how do they deal with this, especially considering that so much of their monetization and marketing is based around releasing individual new characters? They use a banner system. Essentially, instead of having a single slot machine that everything is contained in, they use a rotating set of slot machines that each have a much higher chance of rolling a single character. For example, Genshin Impact has almost all of its highest rarity characters be exclusive to special banners, with only seven characters as part of the “standard” banner. When pulling on a banner, the first highest rarity character has a 50% chance to be the featured one and a 50% chance to be one of the seven standard banner characters. If you fail to get the featured character the first time, your second chance is guaranteed to get you them, meaning at most you must make 180 pulls in Genshin Impact to get a specific character. Of course, not every gacha works this way.

The problem with this system is that the banners rotate in and out, promoting a sense of “FOMO,” or fear of missing out. This is a marketing tactic used by many places, not just gacha games, to get people to spend their money. I think this is so worth noting because outside the inherently addictive nature of gambling, this is the main “dirty” marketing tactic that gacha games seem to use.

While I wouldn’t quite consider it a dirty marketing trick, while we are on the topic of marketing and getting people to spend money, I think it’s also worth it to talk about oversexualization. Now, this is something that varies heavily from game to game, but it is absolutely true that gacha games as a whole have earned a reputation for oversexualizing their characters. Personally, I have no problem with this. Sex sells, and there is nothing immoral about a sexy character, especially a sexy fictional character. However, I understand not everyone shares this opinion.

What is decidedly not so morally gray, however, is the sexualization of children in some of these games. Now, to be perfectly clear, this is not all gacha games; it is not even most. And when I talk about children, I mean digital pictures meant to resemble children, not real people. However, it is undeniable that some gachas have acquired a reputation for creating very young characters and sexualizing them just as much as the older characters. “Azure Lane” is a great example of this practice. Now, to be clear—do I think this should be illegal? No. At the end of the day, they’re not real people; no one is being hurt and what we are talking about here is not pornography, but rather just provocative material. That being said, I do absolutely find this kind of thing gross and would not play the games that do it.

So now, with all this in mind, we come back around to the main question of this article—are gachas immoral? I wrote this article with the express purpose of presenting the ideas and arguments pertaining to this question in the most unbiased light I can (in most cases, although I am also not averse to sharing my opinion), and to be clear, I encourage each of you to assemble your own answer before you read any further. But in my eyes? No, I don’t think gachas are inherently immoral. However, I do believe them to be a vice—no different from alcohol, video games and gambling. Not a bad thing to indulge in, but something to be kept in check by our better natures. At the end of the day, for all the hubbub about how addictive gambling is and how problematic gachas have the potential to be, I see no difference between an adult deciding to go into a casino for some fun and an adult spending money on a gacha game. It’s their money, and if they are careful with it, I don’t even think they could be said to be wrong for doing so. A little indulgence is just part of being human, and at the end of the day, a gacha no more forces players to gamble than a bar forces attendees to drink.

As a final, closing note, I thought to address why, in my opinion, gachas are becoming so popular right now. Simply put—mainstream western AAA gaming is falling apart right now. Flop after flop have come out of major studios, with games like “Concord” and “Star Wars: Outlaws” being complete disasters that have barely sold any copies. What games don’t flop are often riddled with bugs and glitches, requiring months of patching just to get into a playable state and in some cases relying on extensive help from modders. And even beyond that, the entire industry is mired in controversy and politics right now, in the aftermath of what I’ve heard many people online call a second gamer-gate. In comparison to that? Gacha games, at least the more mainstream ones, are generally high quality, well-made products with very few bugs. What controversies do happen seem to be generated by a tiny fraction of the fanbase and are subsequently ignored by the vast majority of the community, including the companies themselves. Simply put, in the modern era, gacha games appear to have stepped up and taken up the spot left by a rapidly crumbling AAA industry—that of being a provider of consistently good, high-quality, high-budget games. And whether you like them or hate them, I don’t think they’re going away anytime soon.