The first two installments of the Gachapwned column were all about the ways in which the gacha business model is predatory, and more specifically how it is a predatory model specifically set up to get you to invest even more in its predatory monetization. This is not up for discussion; it’s a fact. But the question then becomes that if this is generally available information, why would people get invested in it? Why do people start playing these games if they are aware of all of these facts going in?

I’ve repeatedly made references to vices like gambling or drinking here, and those references are not made arbitrarily. It is an indisputable fact that drinking too much can have deleterious effects on your health even without diving into things like massive potential impacts on your social life. Given all of that, why would anyone ever want to have a beer? And the reason is pretty obvious: Above and beyond the taste, it’s often nice to at least feel a little more relaxed and a little calmer just by having a beverage. That’s the whole selling point of drinking.

So what’s the selling point of gacha?

For some games, the selling point is either very little or nothing. There are gacha games that are just bad and hope to milk some money out of people along the way. This is just a reality of existence, no different from the assortment of conventional single-player games that are just bad. But at least in theory, gacha games do have a selling point. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that they have three distinct selling points, a trident to ensnare you in the actual game itself.

The first prong is writing and character appeal. The second prong is enjoyable gameplay that isn’t particularly demanding. And the third prong is the constant stream of novelty.

We’re going to examine each of these in turn, starting with writing and character appeal. That’s the one that might give an awful lot of people pause because you might be thinking of a large number of bad gacha games or just mobile games in general. If you have tried playing Granblue Fantasy, you know the writing of those opening quests is… well, “generic” is too kind. It’s pretty terrible! Am I about to argue that it’s good?

And the answer is… yes. Eventually. Or it can be. And it doesn’t need to be sometimes.

To continue using GBF as an example, I would definitely argue that the plot eventually does get good. In fact, a lot of parts of the story – and the events in particular – eventually become unusually good. Last year’s anniversary event included an interesting digression with one of the antagonists arguing that he hated one of the protagonist’s allies because said ally came in and helped his nation when it was weak. That sounds good, but it made him realize that ultimately, those with power still get to determine what happens to everyone. The slightest whim of those with power determines the fate of those without, and that means the strong need to be eliminated precisely because of that imbalance. This is fairly nuanced introspection for a game about anime characters and digital slot machines.

But I would not argue that every single gacha game has good writing for its plot. Lots don’t. But they don’t actually need to, because their plots are ultimately meant as vehicles for players to go to places and do things with people. Some of them are people you like, some of them are people you don’t, and all of them are meant to make you think of them playing off one another.

If you think about it for a second, this makes perfect sense. Most gacha games are, fundamentally, built on selling you characters. (Well, a chance at characters.) It is directly beneficial to that business model to give you as many characters as possible just so that you get invested in them. Honkai Star Rail, for example, has its entire Penacony storyline that players have long agreed is overloaded and goes into way too many plot cul-de-sacs and makes its central stakes nearly impenetrable.

Did players hate it, though? No, it was hugely popular because it gave them tons of characters to get invested in. Firefly, Robin, Sunday, Aventurine, Acheron, Black Swan, and Boothill all show up in the story primarily to be there and make you care about them, even though many of them have to be awkwardly wedged in for the story to make any sense. Some people are going to see a gambling-themed executive or a woman whose katana holds destruction itself while sheathed or the soft forecasting dreamweaver or cyborg cowboy and they’re going to immediately see their new favorite party member.

That’s a selling point. It’s something that comic books have understood for years. If you have your favorites and want to put them in a team together and take them on adventures, gacha games are basically built to be about that exclusively.

You have probably already guessed this, but this is why there are gacha games that survive despite having at-best mediocre writing and not even strong character writing because the characters come from elsewhere. There’s no need for Fire Emblem Heroes to rope you into the characters because you already know who these characters are. You already have your favorites, and now you can have all of them and make them do stuff together.

And while I am focusing on the in-game writing here, again, this is something that leads you to a whole lot of space for fan works. Fan enthusiasm does a lot for investment. It’s one thing if you find a character’s personality memorable in Genshin Impact, but quite another if you also have fanfics shipping her with her girlfriend, and fan art showing her off in a variety of styles, and fan mods to put her outfit in other games, and so on and so forth.

Yes, some of that fan work is of a more prurient nature. Are you really surprised? Overwatch did not invent the idea of having a character you really like and focus on; it just tried to do so in a specific game style without requiring gacha. And you notice how that game relied on different skins that were in lockboxes, right?

All of this is probably not surprising. The idea that fans play these games because they like the characters is obvious. But I think what some people miss is that liking the characters is not an outgrowth of the game but part of the explicit goal in its design. These games have recognized that character writing needs to be on-point and these characters need to be likable and memorable. Long-running games like GBF have hundreds of characters, all of whom have their own stories and details. Star Rail has your recruited characters text you in-universe. Arknights specifically makes you into a mentor figure for the characters.

You see these characters or hear about them, and you’re inclined to download the game and start trying it out. And that’s one of the prongs catching you right there.

Of course, the whole point was that it’s not one prong but all three, so next week we’re moving on to the next one. It’d be easy to say that the gameplay of these titles tends to be simplistic, and that is somewhat true, but it’s also somewhat wrong… and the simplicity is usually part of what makes the gameplay fun in the first place.

• Gachapwned: How gacha MMOs attract players with narrative (even players who know better) • Gachapwned: How gacha mechanics use pity and free content to encourage spending money • Gachapwned: Examining the nature of gacha mechanics as a concept Many MMORPG gamers recoil from the term “gacha” – and for good reasons – but the subgenre is still raking in money from players, and it’s worth a deep-dive. In Gachapwned, MOP senior reporter Eliot Lefebvre tackles the highs and lows of the infamous gacha game genre and how it affects the MMO industry.