SweetieGames

Last year, I had to take a step back from some of my gaming favourites. I’m a long time player of Genshin Impact, Ensemble Stars and various mobile otome titles, but I found myself frustrated by the amount of in-game currency needed to get things I actually wanted. New cards, new characters, new scenarios and more were extremely unlikely (or sometimes unable) to grace my account unless I paid real money. While watching a YouTube video, the sponsor segment plugged a new “Free to Start” game; a term I had never heard before. They’re not even hiding the fact that you need to pay. Can you still have a good experience in a F2P without paying anymore?

Of course, I know the true goal behind any game is to make money. You can get a taste of what a F2P game has to offer for free, but the good stuff is locked behind a paywall, or requires you to beat the 1% odds of pulling it in a gacha. I’m not against putting some real money down towards in-game currency, but my limit is when I’ve spent the amount I would have spent on buying a game. I’ve found that more recent gacha and F2P games make it difficult to keep to such a spend limit. Do you want more scenes with your favourite character? Do you want to play as a character who previously didn’t exist but is now really useful for exploration? Do you want to keep up with other fans of your faves who have expansive collections of their cards? You’ve got to take out your wallet. Some F2P should probably take up the “Free to Start” title I mentioned earlier, because they make it very difficult to keep going without paying for boosts, items or in-game currency. I’ve dropped multiple mobile otome titles for this reason.

But there’s definitely some improvements over the years to gacha game mechanics. My first gacha game was the now defunct Love Live! School Idol Festival, which I downloaded back in 2016. I remember this gacha system being brutal. The chances of pulling the highest rarity cards was super low, and for the longest time you had to pull that card twice in order to “idolise” it and get the card you actually wanted. The game later introduced stickers which you could spend to speed up the process, but didn’t change the fact that drop rates for Ultra Rare cards was not great. Whaling was super common among SIF content creators and players, with some people dropping thousands on the game to secure the cards they wanted.

In 2020, I started playing Genshin Impact, as a lot of my friends were playing it during lockdowns. I loved being able to explore in an open world when we were all shut indoors, but my heart sank when I saw it had a gacha system. I had gotten used to the gacha and paid elements of Shall We Date?, Enstars and Love Live that I thought I would drop the game pretty quickly; I knew these games wanted far more than what I would willingly pay. I had already dropped SIF by this point and my good luck in Enstars was keeping me going. But Genshin was different, and introduced a system that I’ve now seen replicated across multiple gacha. The pity system.

The pity system isn’t new, but definitely changed how I play gacha based games. If you pull enough times without getting a high rarity character, the game will slowly increase your chances until it’s guaranteed. As a broke university student, this worked great for me; I could grind in game currency easily and time my pulls for when I’d be guaranteed the character I wanted. This makes the game great for free to play users!

The pity system has made waves over the F2P market, but there definitely still needs to be further discussion about the effect of in-game purchases on players and their mental health. Gacha has always been a wolf in sheep’s clothing, encouraging players with its pretty visuals before pushing them to part with their hard-earned cash for the sake of their favourite characters. It is a form of gambling that has a unique twist of pulling on your heartstrings. By making you attached to a certain character, you spend far more money on the game in order to complete a collection or use them as your main. I still love my Enstars and Genshin favourites, but I took a step back as I couldn’t keep up with events and gacha anymore. Fan culture is also partially to blame, with some players spreading the rhetoric that people who don’t spend or complete their collection are not real fans, or don’t love their faves enough. It’s definitely harmful.

If you are a casual player looking to have fun with friends, there’s some great F2P titles out there today that can still allow you to have the best characters without paying. However, there is still work to do in order to make gacha safe and enjoyable for everyone who can participate in it.