I have been thoroughly gacha-brained and RNG-pilled for a decade now, what some might call an unfortunate long-term symptom of being a rabid rhythm gamer who grew up with no nearby arcades and long, boring commutes to school that I relieved with mobile romps like Love Live! School Idol Festival.
Prior to this year, it’s genuinely difficult for me to recall gaps where I wasn’t neck deep in some free-to-play currency multiplicity. I jumped ship to dress-up game Love Nikki, and then to Bang Dream! Girls Band Party. But hey, at least these things were only contained to my phone. At least I’m not juggling them across my console and PC, too.
Except, oops, now it’s 2020. The world’s gone to shit, everything’s still on lockdown, and little-known Chinese developer miHoYo has just put its Breath of the Wild clone Genshin Impact on my newly-purchased PlayStation 5. Surely that thing won’t usher in a new age of gacha games, broadening their appeal to the masses and inviting a plethora of even more open world free-to-play action games riddled with real-money purchases, right? Right?
Unless you’ve been in a coma for the last five years, you’ll know that is, in fact, exactly what happened. Gacha games are bigger and more prevalent than ever. Many of them still remain on mobile, sure, but an increasingly large percentage have set up shop on more powerful hardware. And there’s something for everyone: dating sims, turn-based RPGs, dress-up games, shooters. All revolving around the same monetisation structure.
I have, for the last half-decade, more and more found myself bouncing from gacha to gacha. Genshin made way for Honkai: Star Rail, which was dropped in favour of Nikke, which survived a surprisingly long time in my rotation before being dumped for Infinity Nikki. All the while I dabbled in mobile-exclusive ventures like Project Sekai on the side. Oh, and a surprising bonus stint from horse girl gacha Umamusume: Pretty Derby.
Gacha a handful
But here’s the thing. I think that maybe, quite possibly, there are simply too many of them now. And I’m burned the hell out, y’all. This is the first year in a very long time where I’ve gone several months without being chained to my dailies in the same way I know I should brush my teeth twice a day and wash my hands after using the toilet. It was habitual, to a fault, and now I’ve broken free I’m not sure I can find an opening to dive back in.
And ultimately, I really do believe it boils down to the sheer volume of things coming out. That’s true of the industry at large, sure—Steam has seen a dizzying number of game releases in the last two years, more than it ever has—but for me, gacha has always existed in a space where I’ve been down to try them all at least once. Even the bad ones!
Verifiable gacha demon HoYoverse is known to have three named projects in development right now—Varsapura, Honkai: Nexus Anima, and Petit Planet—not to mention the countless unnamed ones it appears to currently have on the go in some capacity. That’s on top of the games it has out right now, too: Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, Zenless Zone Zero, Tears of Themis, and Honkai Impact 3rd.
That is simply too many! How HoYoverse isn’t dealing with a severe case of task paralysis is beyond me. And it’s not as if that’s the only gacha developer pumping stuff out right now. Arknights: Endfield is set to release in the new year, as is The Seven Deadly Sins: Origins. There’s a smattering of undated stuff in the works, too, like Silver Palace, Ananta, and Mongil: Star Dive.
Let’s not forget these things are constantly shifting and changing, too. Bi-weekly character banners, monthly patches, new story, new mechanics, new everything. Always something to do, and if I dare take a break from it all then I may very well miss it. Sometimes it’s not the game itself driving me to play, but the fear that if I hit the brakes I won’t be able to get things chugging along again.
It’s not just choice paralysis and intense FOMO that has me pulling away from a corner of gaming that has kept me in its grips. It’s the gnawing feeling that sort of saturation can’t sustain itself for much longer. Live service games go through a revolving door of release into end of service all the time, but a number of them aren’t even making it to 12 months outta the gate.
I don’t know if I have it in me to get back into such habitual behaviour for something that might vanish before my very eyes, any money spent gone along with it. It’s going to take a real special gacha game to reel me back in at this point, and honestly? I want that to happen.
Because even when I found myself racing through tasks one minute before server reset in the middle of a social gathering, or falling asleep with the game open on my phone because I remembered right before my bedtime that I’d forgotten to spend my energy, the little sicko part of my brain enjoyed that.
Despite the bad rep gacha games get, I’m an absolute sucker for their anime character-driven ways. Just a few less of ’em would be much appreciated for my poor, overstimulated brain.
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