From our other sites
The story
A thread mocking people who say “No gacha for me, I only play buy-to-play games” as “old farts” backfired — replies piled up criticizing gacha’s gambling-like mechanics and manipulative monetization, turning into a wave of backlash against gacha itself. Supporters of buy-to-play games chimed in with comments like “these games are designed to become less fun” and “Japanese people are the biggest gambling addicts in the world,” making it clear this isn’t just a simple generational divide.
What people said
It's an old system that erodes actual gameplay — that's exactly why people avoid it.
Sports betting > gacha > pachinko
You'll go broke either way, just stay away from all of it.
If anything, it's the people who used to play gacha games the most who are now the most burned out on gacha.
A single character isn't worth tens of thousands of yen.
Once you cool off on it, you never feel like paying again.
Well, go ahead and keep grinding those gacha pulls then lol
Sounds like you don't even know where the word comes from.
It's popular on everything except Switch, right?
I only play gacha games!
That's basically an illness at this point.
Pulling early gives you the biggest rush.
You just can't get that from a buy-to-play game. ("pity break-through" = when a pull slips past the guaranteed pity mechanic)
That's gambling with no real payoff.
The fact you can do it 24/7, 365 days a year makes it even worse.
Unless you've got money and time to burn, it's a total waste — seriously, you should quit.
Japanese-made ones especially are pointless.
Western gacha has actually gotten more reasonable than back in the (effectively) subscription-MMO era.
There's no real ending, and you're forced into pointless daily login stuff.
It feels less like playing the game and more like being played by it.
Games you can't play with a controller are rough.
Because fewer and fewer people can afford to blow money like that anymore.
There's no way that approach is going to win over more customers.
Games with microtransactions are designed around the assumption that you'll pay, so they're built to be less fun by nature.
People who can afford full-price games generally don't waste their time on something boring on purpose.
Whether you understand that or not is the real difference.
Why so insecure about it?
Apparently they're the ones being made to spin a 900-yen room-temperature lemon squash gacha, though.
Compared to Pokémon, everything else looks downright generous, basically a charity operation.
No pity cap → pity cap (with break-through) → pity cap (no break-through).
Genshin's the real sinner for popularizing the break-through pity system.
Though honestly, whoever set the original gacha prices in the first place are the true war criminals here.
That's only true for Chinese games — Japanese-made ones are still garbage.
Getting constantly hit up for money while being forced to slog through a story that never ends just feels like torture to me.
I like playing games on my phone, but I can't do gacha-style mobile games.
Granblue Fantasy still hasn't ended after 10 years, right?
Personally I'd like the story to wrap up before it hits double digits in years.
Pot calling the kettle black.
It's just the difference between a hostess club and a pachislot parlor.
Background and Key Points
The word gacha comes from gachapon, the coin-operated capsule-toy machines that have sold random collectible figures in Japan since the 1960s; mobile developers borrowed the mechanic wholesale, so “gacha games” means titles monetized through randomized paid pulls rather than a genre in itself. Japan’s Consumer Affairs Agency only ever banned one specific variant, “kompu gacha” (complete gacha, where players had to assemble a full set to win a rare item), in 2012 after public outcry — ordinary single- and multi-pull gacha, including pity systems, remained legal and is now the default monetization model for nearly all Japanese mobile titles and even console-adjacent spinoffs like Pokémon TCG Pocket. Pachinko, raised in the thread as a comparison point, occupies a separate legal category: Japanese law does not classify it as gambling because payouts are exchanged for prizes rather than cash directly at the parlor.
The thread’s real fault line wasn’t young-vs-old, despite the “old fart” bait in the title — posters explicitly argued that the heaviest former gacha spenders are now the ones most soured on it, meaning burnout from experience, not generational taste, was the dividing line. A second, quieter disagreement ran underneath: whether the problem is gacha itself or Japanese-developed gacha specifically, with some insisting Chinese and Western titles have gotten comparatively more generous.
What outside readers likely miss is that “buy-to-play” doesn’t mean gacha-free in practice — the thread itself flagged FF14 and Monster Hunter Wilds, both premium titles, for layering in gacha-adjacent live-service monetization, undercutting the clean binary the original post assumed.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread「“No gacha for me!!! I only play buy-to-play games!!!” ← Anyone still saying this is an old fart…」.
Leave a Reply