In the first Gachapwned column here on MassivelyOP, I outlined the history of the term “gacha” while establishing the rules that have to be in place for something to be considered a gacha system. But the purpose of this column is not simply to establish what the predatory mechanics are; it’s also to really dive into them, and that means explaining what makes them predatory. Predation is definitely their base-level design, but it also expands to other elements such as how gacha titles trick you into paying more.

A gacha title requires you to be paying money in order to get a certain number of randomized pulls that could get you the character you want or could contain worthless garbage. This is a statement of fact. However, this isn’t the only part of the setup that is predatory. A lot of what makes it predatory is by tricking the audience into thinking it’s less predatory than it actually is – primarily by fooling players into correctly evaluating a more likely draw of a desired item, but with a purposefully obfuscated value prospect.

First of all, we need to go into a bit more detail on how gacha systems are generally arranged. Games usually have two different categories of items that you are pulling on. The exact objects in question can vary; in Granblue Fantasy, for example, you are pulling for both weapons and summons, with weapons unlocking characters associated with them. Honkai Star Rail has you pulling for characters and light cones, with the latter functionally serving as weapons for characters.

In all cases, however, there are certain rewards that are more likely, usually referred to colloquially as “banners” because, well, the characters/weapons/whatever are prominently featured on banners inviting you to draw now. This means that the characters in question are more likely to show up in the overall pool. They’re not assured by any means, but they are statistically more likely, and more often than not they play into the game’s pity mechanic.

Pity mechanics, occasionally called “sparks” due to Granblue Fantasy having a particularly permissive system in this regard, are not universal but are included to remove the guesswork from the game… eventually. After you have performed a certain number of pulls, you are certain to get something that you want. In Honkai Star Rail, for example, your chance of getting a 5-star pull increases significantly once you have passed 70 total pulls, and it reaches a 100% chance on your 90th pull. That 5-star character or cone has a 50% chance of being the one on the banner, and if you get something not on the banner the first time, you are assured that your next 5-star will be the banner choice.

At a glance, this seems to be a mechanism to assure that you cannot wind up being too inconvenienced. But in reality, this contributes to the predatory nature of the game because it is once again a mechanism meant to get you to spend money.

Think about it for a moment. You know, for example, that you will need to hit a certain number of pulls to be absolutely certain of getting a character you want. If you find yourself with what amounts to an unbounded limit, you’re actually more likely to stop early because basic statistics might say that if you have a 10% shot per pull, 20 pulls should assure you get what you want, but your shot on the 20th pull is still 10%. But with a pity mechanic, you know that just 10 more pulls is going to get you the character you want. You know that. It’s not really gambling. You’re just wrapping up what you already want to do. You’re already invested in this. You’re so close.

It’s compounded further by the fact that these banners are available for a limited period of time. There’s not always a fear of missing out, but there is a sense that you don’t know when your next chance will come. Maybe it’s worth it to just spend a little money now. After all, what if the character you want doesn’t come back around for months on end?

Pity mechanics also go hand-in-hand with the fact that in most of these games, there is actually a pretty clear and steady supply of pulls that you can get completely for free. I mention this second because if you aren’t already thinking about how pity mechanics encourage you to spend more money, it can seem as if “I get enough free currency to pull 120 times anyway without dropping a cent” is generous.

But think about the math I just shared. If I clear every challenge in a given banner cycle in Star Rail, let’s say I can get 120 pulls easily, and that banner runs for a month. Cool! So my odds are pretty good of getting what I want within that banner run. Pretty good. But they’re not absolute. Maybe this month my luck is just bad, and… well… all right, fine, it’s just 20 more pulls. It’s not like I had to pay the price for all 140 pulls, right? I’m still coming out ahead!

Gotcha.

This goes hand-in-hand with the games frequently allowing you to spend money badly. In Granblue Fantasy, there are two kinds of special draw bundles you can purchase intermittently, one of which lets you get a higher chance of picking a selected character, the other of which lets you directly pick one from a list of eligible characters. The former is, obviously, a bad deal. You do not want to spend money on it. So you might think that having it there is a mistake.

But it’s an intentional mistake. It’s a mistake that allows players to say “ah, I outsmarted you, I only pay for the direct purchase!” so that you have functionally tricked yourself into paying $30 because you think it’s smarter. And it is smarter in the abstract, but it preys upon our natural tendency to think that we’re outsmarting someone and getting a good deal.

One of the most common statements about gambling is that the house always wins. People sometimes misunderstand the statement to mean that the odds are stacked in the house’s favor, but that’s not actually true. The house always wins not because you cannot win; the house always wins because the game is set up so that the house is always going to win. If a $1 slot machine has a jackpot payout of $100,000, the odds of that jackpot coming up is close to the odds of one in a million at best.

The house always wins because the house is not gambling. The house is getting you to gamble. And if you happen to be the person to hit it big, the house has made very sure that that big prize has been paid for several times over by the many, many people who have not hit it big. The trick isn’t getting you to play the long odds; the trick is getting you to accept that both you and the house are playing by the same rules.

With these first two columns, we’ve pretty clearly established what the trap is meant to do and how it’s meant to get you to pay. There’s more to discuss there, definitely, but for our next installment I want to turn to something else. Specifically, I want to start explaining what even makes these games interesting in the first place. We understand the basics of the hook, but now we need to understand the bait that makes the hook appealing at all.

• 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.