Design Theory: Gachapon
Good evening everyone. Allow me to introduce myself: My name is Tiger Louck, and I’ll be covering videogame industry and design related topics during my time here. I should have some pretty interesting stuff lined up here, so let’s begin.
What’s the point of the majority of games? Fun. What’s the other point of games? To make a developer money. You wanna know what’s Fun and Makes People Money? Gambling. But of course, in a similar fashion to cigarettes and alcohol, the dangers of gambling are well-documented and the industry is heavily regulated. But gambling is only considered gambling if you put real money in and get real money out, at least legally speaking. But speaking in terms of actual design, the Gachapon system, which recently appeared in a litany of high-profile games accross the industry, is absolutely gambling. If you’re not familiar with the system, or haven’t given it much thought when you’ve encountered it, this will come as a surprise, so allow me clue you in on this dumpster fire of an industry trend.
Gambling is, as I mentioned, supposedly fun. Fun as a concept is more nuanced than most people will ever think about, which in most cases is fine, there’s better things to waste your time on, but there’s a good number of cases where uncertainty in the one’s personal understanding of fun can be exploited. Gambling is one of these, because gambling isn’t actually that fun. How interesting is it, really, to determine success or failure using a device which gives you a random, evenly distributed number between one and six? What about using the contents of a deck? The fall of a ball into a spinning wheel? Exempting sleight of hand and card counting (which casinos will throw you out for, anyway) there is literally no way to control these outcomes. Success or failure does not reflect upon the player in any way: failure is not your fault, but neither is victory, so both feel hollow.
And yet people play.
Part of the reason why is pretty reasonable stuff: casinos have atmosphere, and people, and lots of fun entertainers and alcohol. All perfectly reasonable things to find fun. Gambling always tries to be a party, or, in less commercial contexts, a hangout at bare minimum. But there’s other psychological phenomena at work here; have you ever been asked to kiss or blow on a pair of dice? Why is it traditional to shake them around in your cupped hands before throwing them on the table? Humans are aggressive pattern finders, and it is at this juncture that this finally bites us in the ass. Victory is not expected in gambling, but it is possible, so when it happens, the player becomes very happy, and tries to find out what caused the victory in the first place. If this were spear hunting, there’d be enough information in the course of the event that the hunter would be able to construct an accurate-enough picture of why the hunt was successful, and that picture would be mostly truthful to the reality of the situation. But that information was never present in gambling, since the bare act of throwing dice is simply not complicated enough to have things with understandable cause and effect. Because the player can’t reliably attain success, the natural instinct is to experiment, and the moment a thing you do coincides with a successful outcome of the dice (or cards, or marble on that stupid spinning thing) the player latches onto that event. A man at a craps table asks the woman at his left to kiss the dice, like he sees people do in the movies all the time, and it just so happens that the cascade of unknown variables says “YOU WIN” this time, and so he does it again and again and again, every loss ignored because he only cares about the victories, and the victories say the kiss works.
“Yeah, I had some losses this time, but there’s hope, because I know my method works, so I’m gonna come back.” He says, walking out of the casino with empty pockets
Then the operant conditioning starts to kick in. He keeps going to the casino because going to the casino is where the success, and the rewards, and the happiness is. His bank account says one thing but he’s more inclined to trust his brain, which is saying another, and by god he swears by his methods. They call this fun, but I have my doubts
So what, then, is Gachapon, and why is it gambling?
The roots of the phenomenon are old, at least compared to most videogame trends. It started in japan, in the 90s at the latest, and rapidly spread throughout the world. It’s those small vending machines that you put quarters into and get a small capsule with a toy or figurine in it. The name is also spelled Gashapon, and it’s actually a romanization of a japanese onomatopoeia for the sound of the crank and plop of the mechanism and capsule. The idea was that players would try to collect every figurine in the collection, and as they neared a complete collection, they’d get duplicates instead of what they wanted, prompting them to purchase again, or resort to trading if they could.
The gambling psychology at play here has to do with the unexpected victory when the player is at the point where they get lots of duplicates. Players don’t remember getting duplicates, but they do expect them, so when they do get a capsule that they actually wanted, they get just enough motivation to continue, and forget the fact that they’re getting duplicates. The naive user feels justified in their purchase, as they’re basing their judgement on how they feel, as opposed to the math of the situation, which says they just spent ten dollars to get a small plastic figurine.
It turns out this system works really well in videogame monetization. It’s already been present for years in games like World of Warcraft and rogue/roguelike RPGs in the way the loot that drops from enemies is randomized, forcing players to redo boss fights to get the gear they want, but it was unexamined as a mechanic; accepted, but not scrutinized. Until recently, the most effective use of this system was by the very same World of Warcraft, which had a business model based around getting a player invested and then stretching the amount of time it takes them to do things (thus standardizing the exponential experience curve in RPGs in favor of a linear one).
It was an effective way of forcing the reuse of content. Then Team Fortress 2 went free to play.
If I remember correctly, the game’s revenue something like quadrupled near-instantly. The core of the monetisation wasn’t something anyone else was considering monetizable: appearances. Turns out people will pay real money to look good in a virtual environ, who knew? In terms of gachapon systems, TF2 is actually the least straightforward and, frankly, a bad example of the system when you compare it to something like Overwatch, because while TF2 introduced the system, Overwatch didn’t so much perfect it as they did corporatize it (see the next article for more on that).
Overwatch has a wide variety of ways to customize the look of its many heros. All told, there are skins, emotes, voice lines, sprays, victory poses, and highlight intros, plus player icons independant of the character being played. Putting aside the issues i have with not letting players make their own player icon and spray, the system has a large possibility space for personal expression. All of these cosmetics are acquired through a randomized “loot box” system. Instead of creating duplicates when trying to fill a set, the overwatch gachapon system floods the pool of available items with items the player is likely to not want, like boring sprays and generic voice lines. The “bad outcome” is different than normal Gachapon, but the effect and principle is the same. The only thing it’s possible to buy on the Overwatch store is the lootboxes. While the boxes do give players in-game currency which can be used to buy skins, this money is doled out in very small amounts, and so if a player wants a lot of items, or a very valuable one, the best they can expect is to get it via the boxes. This, combined with the usual sales and events, means that a player attempting to get an item worth a dollar or so on its own may spend $40 on loot boxes attempting to improve their chance of getting it, and then rationalize the expenditure through all the other items they got (which even discounting the truly undesired items will be a fair few). In this way a player will spend more money attempting to get an item than they would have if the item was simply available to purchase directly.
The moment players realize what’s happening, the system becomes deeply depressing, and pretty soon most players are gonna realize they aren’t gambling men, and don’t enjoy the sensation of a tidal wave of crapulent cosmetics and unpredictable barriers between them and looking good.