Japan Ready To Ban "Gacha" Gameplay Pages 1 2 3 NEXT | |
Can't be just hack or mod the game? | |
Good, next go for game companies that hire psychologists to use Skinner mechanics to increase revenues. | |
More like "Gotcha" Gameplay. | |
Stick the two company names together and you get GreeDeNA. No? I though it was funny. | |
I can't make it too much farther than this because my brain is having trouble accepting the fact that kids are spending hundreds to thousands of dollars monthly on online gaming. My brain can't accept the fact that so many children are spending that kind of money on anything, let alone online games. Are they all stealing their parents credit cards? Is everyone in Japan just rich?! I don't understand...
That's pretty good! Made me laugh and I award you 5 points. | |
What the hell? How could so many people be stupid enough to blow so much money on something they know is so unlikely just for some item in a game? I couldn't even imagine EA or Activision trying to pull something like that. I think even they would realise that people would just tell them to go fuck themselves. | |
It;s been proven that you are _more_ likely to work for something if you do it like this. It's pure gambling exploiting the way our brains aren't great at probability :( | |
In terms of blowing sizable amounts of money on sheer probability, I think I'll stick to football betting. Also, this story is pretty interesting considering gambling is illegal in Japan. Unless this is a loophole or not really "proper gambling". | |
Except they have, to an extent, pulled these kinds of stunts. Of course, the Gacha mechanic is also heavily prevalent in the west, as damn near every other F2P title available uses it. | |
"that's nothing like buying packs to randomly unlock player types!" | |
Intrestingly enough, RuneScape implemented a mechanic quite similar to this about halfway through March. Pissed off alot of players too.
People in Japan are much more vulnerable to things like this. Im not sure why, but they are. | |
Works for me. The less companies are allowed to act like fucking parasites, the better. | |
Now i prefer your "Gotcha Bitch" style of gameplay, sort of like this. | |
It sounds quite a bit like the TF2 crate system. You pay $2.50 to get a key to open up a crate. That crate can have any number of strange weapons depending on the crate (virtually worthless), a couple of hats with about 25% chance of getting one of the two I believe (not worth much), and a 1% chance of getting an unusual hat, which are random between the majority of available hats and come in a variety of random effects. So the chances of getting the hat you want with the effect you want is about as low as you winning the lottery I'd guess. That's why some unusuals with better effects can go for hundreds of dollars. So, that said, could this impact TF2 in Japan if it is in Japan? | |
When the threshold from 'gaming' to 'gambling' it must be stopped for minors. besides that most gambling venues are in the hands of the Yakuza anyway this is a good sign. | |
Think about it, if your a game developer, why take your time making good games when you can make a crappy text based flash game and market it to the mindless masses? | |
Obviously the work of Berg Katse. (Waits for someone to get it.) | |
If Korea did this, NEXON would go broke. | |
I've fallen for this, curse my gambling addiction | |
Are they really? I always assumed that they just have a lot more people, so 10% stupid people in each generation are a lot more in absolute numbers. | |
My money is on loophole. Since you don't win money, it isn't gambling. Not in the legal sense, anyway. | |
Considering this is essentially gambling which is either entirely illegal or absurdly regulated in Japan (my friend says that the most they have is pachinko parlors, which may be illegal since he also said it was the Yakuza that owned them) there really is some strong precedence to be had here. I'm not actually that surprised about this, and I honestly expect other nations to start doing something similar as this becomes more common. | |
I don't see how this even qualifies as a "game". Sure you can "lose" but there is no skill in this, even tangentially, it is pure chance - chance that you don't even know the odds of - and just throwing money at it. This is not a problem with video games, this is a problem with gambling masquerading as a video game. Where is the competition, the pitting of skill and learned expertise? None. This is the worst kind of gambling, this is more like a cult as at least in a casino you get something of actual monetary value if you do win, here you get a virtual prize that isn't fun to use and you can't even claim the prestige of having earned it by skill. It's an obsession with fortune, luck, chance. | |
As has already been said, if you don't win money, it's not illegal. | |
The difference is in TF2 you're limited by the number of crates you find, so the effect is curbed by the game itself. By the sounds of it, the only limiting factor in this "gatcha" stuff is the amount of money the player has to spend. Also, I assume that by saying "kids who were blowing hundreds or thousands of dollars every months on games", the author is referring to the total amount spent globally by the player base, not each individual player. Otherwise... what the hell am I doing in North America when I could be making millions every year in Japan! | |
i misread the title.
because your subconciousness tells you that japan is weird play it here http://nigoro.jp/game/rosecamellia/rosecamellia.php | |
technically, ME3 multiplayer runs on the gacha concept. You buy randomised upgrade packs that may give you a weapon or character class you want, but way well give you guff you never use. And the packs that offer better gear can be bought with both ingame creds you earn from playing, and real money. | |
Someone needs to link that video of the guy that spent $700 on the Haruka gacha in Cinderella Girls and didn't get the card he needed to complete the set. Apparently, that's what sparked this whole series of events leading to the ban. | |
Good concept on the surface, but I guess you can still wind up broke at the end of the day. Seen the ball bearing system used in the infamous pachinko parlours but I didn't stay around too long in them. The only thing your guaranteed to win in one of those places is lung cancer. | |
Is still think it's fraudulent in the same sense those psychic advisers are frauds. You give them money for predicting the future but there is only a small probability they'll be accurate to the point where it's a worthless guess or no better than using your own intuition of future events. And they can charge VAST sums of money for no reliable prophecy or removing a curse that never existed. The scam here is implicit lies about the probability of winning and the value of the prize. I know little about Japanese culture and society, I probably know enough to know I don't know anywhere near enough but I don't fully understand their broader attitudes towards chance and luck. If it is socially ingrained that when the odds are not known then it is good to assume the odds are in their favour - and they better hope it is that way as if that is not true they are "unlucky" or something and should seek to rectify that by - for example - spending vast sums of money to get the tokens that are "proof" of their personal luck. In which case this is an scam as it exploits people's superstition and implicitly lies with the broader assumptions of personal luck/chance. Again, I am not well versed on how Japanese society approaches chance, but I have detected a certain assumption of luck being associated as a personal characteristic and a positive one and if you aren't lucky then you are and inferior person that people won't want to hang around with. I follow the science, the same dice has the same chance of landing on any given number whether thrown by a man who HAS BEEN lucky or one who has been unlucky. Any winning streak is an illusion for how of all the possibilities the winning streak will stand out the most and that winning streak will not necessarily continue. Chance of an outcome is determined by the action, not the worthiness of the beneficiary. Is that what "Gacha" is selling? The illusion of providence? It's telling that addictive gamblers keep a close record of how much money they have won yet spend so little of their winnings on actual material goods and services, they instead put most of their winnings back into the slot machines - I think - to help reaffirm they have the situation under control and they can "make" it win. Either by a system or by luck or by "I just gotta win". Could be Gatcha is doing the same thing but cutting out the winning and re-betting part, cutting directly to "proof of providence" with its virtual tokens? I'm not against making a fair wager between two personal friends. But institutional gambling is far from a fair wager. I have been challenged to wagers and refused to accept them precisely because I know for a fact I have a huge chance of winning and it would be unfair for both of us to put down the same money. But institutionalised gambling asks everyone else to put the most money in and the house KNOWS it is most likely to win. That and it is of course a zero-sum game, no more wealth can come out of gambling than you can possibly put in. Video games you spend money employing people to turn worthless pixels into valuable art and entertainment. | |
I doubt it, as TF2's economy is distinct from this. In the store you pay for what you get. Hats and weapons have a set price and when you pay you DEFINITELY get them. The random-drop is a perk from playing the game normally. You can't make anything happen any quicker, you just enjoy the game (that you can play for free) and it just gives you stuff for playing a game that is inherently enjoyable. Remember, the default weapons are fun to use in such a varied game (it got a 92% metascore in 2007), the item drops give further variety to the gameplay. In other words, you don't pay for the chance. In fact the chance is totally free. Just download the game and you are at a random and steady rate given new items. The only paying is for specific guaranteed items, virtual items but still distinct upgrades to your account. You know what you are paying and you know what you are getting, that's simple market commerce. You may not agree with some prices, $5 for a hat may be too much for a virtual at, but it's purely cosmetic you don't have to pay and very few of the weapons are so rare (by random drop) and powerful you need them to be competitive. The best and most flexible weapons are usually the stock weapons. Even the Spy's enforcer, one of the few weapons that is a straight-upgrade, is now being tested in beta to be nerfed so it has an advantage but equivalent disadvantage. | |
Is it just me, or does this seem like this might not address the underlying problem that a significant number kids in Japan apparantly have unfettered access to hundreds or thousands of dollars of money to blow every month. Stopping them from using it on whatever cheap, addictive thrills these games provide won't suddenly teach them the value of money. | |
Umm... not to be defending the exploitative practices that these companies have but isn't paying money and hoping to receive a random and rarer valuable item the basis for things like Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Pokemon (and back in the day, baseball) cards? I can remember many friends dropping a lot of money each week to buy packs of Magic cards to hope they got some of the rare ones. How come no one ever stopped that practice? I find it amusing that one would be viewed as a hobby, the other a habit. | |
Because in those packs you received physical goods and the world still doesn't accept that digital items can have real world value. The fact that RMT (Real Money Trading) is a bannable offense also enforces this.
Trust me, there is nothing cheap about the thrills in these games. The developers charge exorbatent amounts for a single roll. To the point that $10 day one DLC just looks like a bunch of small time whiners to me at this point. At least you know what you're getting for your money in that case. | |
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Japan Ready To Ban "Gacha" Gameplay
Stock in Japan's two leading social game companies have taken a serious tumble following word of a government crackdown.
Japanese social game companies Gree and DeNA agreed in April to impose limits upon the amount of money that young gamers can spend on their games each month. The caps were put into place to curb the out-of-control spending habits of kids who were blowing hundreds or thousands of dollars every month on games, presumably in hopes of preventing direct government action against the industry.
Unfortunately for them and others, it wasn't enough to head off intervention. Japan's Consumer Affairs Agency announced today that "kompu gacha" ["complete gacha"], a central mechanic in just about every DeNA and Gree game, may actually be illegal. "Gacha" is basically a draw for a random virtual item, while "complete gacha" requires that players draw a specific set of gacha items in order to earn another, rarer or more powerful item. It's rather like having to win the lottery four or five times in a row to claim the prize, and it's had the effect of driving players to blow huge amounts of money on extra gacha chances.
Things have apparently gotten bad enough that the Japanese government is planning to take a novel but rather extreme approach to bringing them under control. Instead of relying on spending limits, the Consumer Affairs Agency is going to ask social gaming companies to stop using the mechanic entirely, a change which could have a serious impact on revenues.
The situation is serious enough, and the news is bad enough, that both Gree and DeNA saw their share value tumble by more than 20 percent following the announcement. Other big-name companies felt the crunch too: Konami's stock dropped by 18 percent, Namco Bandai fell 9.5 percent and Capcom was down 6.6 percent.
And that may not be the end of the pain. "I wouldn't be surprised to see the government crack down on gacha once again [for example by forcing game providers to display the probability of getting certain cards], or push the industry to get the real-money trading phenomenon of virtual items under control," Dr. Serkan Toto, an expert on the Japanese social gaming market, told GamesIndustry. Neither Gree nor DeNA have commented.
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