Poll of the Day > Do you have a gacha game addiction? What are some ways to stop it?

(+) Yeah! (+)

I recently racked up a nearly $800 credit card bill, and my main expenses were due to gacha games, so I guess its safe to say that yes, I have an addiction. After my mom put into perspective about how big that chunk of money is, I decided to try to curb my playing of gachas. I'm just trying to figure out strategies to get rid of my addiction....

I don't have a gacha addiction but I spend a decent amount of money on one game I like.

best not to play them anymore. the vast majority are garbage anyway.

1) be too poor to buy anything
2) play more generous gacha games like princess connect or blue archive and stay tf away from stuff like granblue or raid shadow legends

The only way to really stop it is to avoid playing those games. Addictive tendencies are something you can't really fix. Your only option is to try to avoid situations where they can cause you harm. In this case, that means casinos, gacha games, any games with paid loot boxes, or any other circumstance where you're encouraged to gamble with real money.

Play better games.

I'm serious, switch your addiction to better safer games.

As it's a form of gambling I'm aware it's not that easy to give up. However as others have said the only way to stop your addiction is spend more time playing others games. Ones that are not designed to just take your cash constantly.

You did this topic wrong. It's supposed to be a poll, and you're supposed to be a lot more judgey

No. I don't spend money, let alone spend money on jpegs.
My life was basically destroyed by gambling.

Delete the app and remove your card info from your app store

make getting back into the game an inconvenience

Just keep reminding yourself that the game will probably be dead in 5 years and all that money will be wasted

Zareth posted...

Just keep reminding yourself that the game will probably be dead in 5 years and all that money will be wasted

So if you spend money on anything that isn't permanent (plays/movies/concerts/food - outside some cheap slurry that provides the necessary nutrients to live/weddings/birthday celebrations/amusement parks/etc) it's wasted money that you should regret having spent it on?

sveksii posted...

So if you spend money on anything that isn't permanent (plays/movies/concerts/food - outside some cheap slurry that provides the necessary nutrients to live/weddings/birthday celebrations/amusement parks/etc) it's wasted money that you should regret having spent it on?

Sounds like whale cope to me

Sunk cost fallacy. Delete the games, destroy your account if you can, and go get addicted to something else. Solitaire, maybe. If you really want to engage with gacha mechanics without the financial loss, play Xenoblade 2 or some other game with faux gacha mechanics and ween yourself off them.

I was into Dragalia Lost for a while but it became a drag and kept taking up more and more space on my phone with every update

I got into the Gundam Breaker Mobile game for a bit but it also started to drag, then I heard it was getting shut down anyway

The biggest problem is balancing challenge and resource management. Levels often become impossible to win or impossible to lose based on certain numbers, and figuring out how to make those numbers go higher eventually becomes the whole game

Thanks for the ideas and suggestions everyone! Yes, I guess the only solution is just to quit.

I love gambling, so why do all gacha games on Steam suck? I'd rather gamble on counter-strike knifes

These games are actively designed to exploit people like you. Avoiding them entirely really is the best course.

adjl posted...

The only way to really stop it is to avoid playing those games. Addictive tendencies are something you can't really fix. Your only option is to try to avoid situations where they can cause you harm. In this case, that means casinos, gacha games, any games with paid loot boxes, or any other circumstance where you're encouraged to gamble with real money.

That's it exactly. Best of luck

Jen0125 posted...

I don't have a gacha addiction but I spend a decent amount of money on one game I like.

Me with Bandori

Zareth posted...

Sounds like whale cope to me

So you don't have a valid counter argument and need to resort to an attempt at a personal attack? Personally never spent anything on a gacha and likely never will. Doesn't mean there isn't value there if you have the funds to justify your expenditure (if you have self control issues, you probably shouldn't be gambling in any way period) and gain enough enjoyment out of the experience to offset the cost.

PikachuMaxwell posted...

Thanks for the ideas and suggestions everyone! Yes, I guess the only solution is just to quit.

if you're actually addicted that is the only way to stop spending money. stop playing ALL gacha games.

Jen0125 posted...

if you're actually addicted that is the only way to stop spending money. stop playing ALL gacha games.

^

the solitaire suggestion was unironically a decent one. gacha mechanics used to mess me up until i quit completely, but having ADD and a phone makes the itch hard to ignore sometimes. try getting a solitaire app or something similar that's not toxically monetized if you're in the same boat.

I don't know what a gacha game is. Is Pokmon go one? I played that for two or three years and maybe spent 100 total that time on it.

I don't really do mobile games.

BADoglick posted...

I don't know what a gacha game is. Is Pokmon go one? I played that for two or three years and maybe spent 100 total that time on it.

I don't really do mobile games.

It varies from game to game, but a common structure is to have a party made up of characters that you draw randomly, whose stats, unique abilities, and other measures of their power will vary. You'll often need to tweak that party to best suit different challenges, so you'll need several parties' worth of good characters to progress at a decent pace, and character growth is often fuelled by sacrificing duplicates or other unwanted draws. Naturally, this is really easy to monetize by selling draw chances, manipulating the rarity distribution to encourage buying extra draws beyond the ones you can get for free, and running limited-time events that offer unique characters that you'll most likely miss out on if you try to rely on just the free draws you get (bonus points where those events often give extra free draws to create the illusion of just barely missing the ones you want).

There are variants on that, but the core component is the "gacha" system of drawing new items or characters or whatnot to fuel progression as a core mechanic. It's similar to loot boxes, but the difference is that the random draws are the basis for the whole game, rather than just being a side mechanic.

funkyfritter posted...

These games are actively designed to exploit people like you. Avoiding them entirely really is the best course.

As much as I've already said pretty much this, this really bears highlighting because it cannot be stressed enough. Everything about these games is designed to prey on people with addiction and/or impulse control problems. By design, they present themselves as being easy enough to avoid spending money on, even for those that have struggled previously, then they slowly drive in the wedge of presenting their monetization as being reasonably priced or otherwise easy to justify (especially cultivating the sentiment of "I've already had so much fun for free that I basically owe them a little bit of money by this point") before ramping it up slowly in hopes that you won't notice how bad it's getting.

It's specifically hard for those prone to addiction and/or with impulse control problems (such as those presented by ADHD or autism) to notice this happening and resist the desire to splurge, and that's exactly what publishers are counting on. It doesn't matter how likely you think it is that you'll be able to resist the urge, you are the prey in this scenario and you will not be safe if you choose to hang out with the predators. The only way to beat it is to avoid it altogether. That really sucks, especially as these monetization strategies invade more and more games (especially popular ones), but that's unfortunately just the nature of the video game industry these days (really, it's been the industry's nature forever, it's just within the last 5-10 years that they've really been able to ramp it up).

adjl posted...

It varies from game to game, but a common structure is to have a party made up of characters that you draw randomly, whose stats, unique abilities, and other measures of their power will vary.

And oftentime weapons, summons, and other less interesting stuff than characters but end up impacting your power level more than the characters themselves. Granblue can get really bad about this by populating the gacha with both weapons and summons, with the first time you obtain a weapon giving you a corresponding character. But you almost always want one of a premium weapon maxed out (4 copies) in your grid of 10 weapons, and usually going for a premium grid is both superior and far easier to max out, not counting money. And then you need 4 copies of a summon for a premium grid to even be functional. But having more than 4 of any one specific summon is absolutely pointless, so they end up being filler draws. And it's incredibly unlikely you'll even get one copy of anything specific- even during double draw rates, you have a 0.3% chance to draw one copy of something on rate up, and a 0.014% chance to draw everything else. And at least for the entire time I played the game, the premium-enabling summons never went on rate up.

You can function entirely fine by only doing pulls about twice a year and using free resources that you get one of every couple months to uncap weapons and summons, but that requires a lot of self-control that many don't have. And they're earned in the game's one competitive event, so if you're behind the curve already, it gets harder to catch up. It's got a veneer of "well just play optimally and you won't be that far behind" to suck you in, but the game is so god damn grindy. And the worst part is, it's actually really fun when you're not in infinite grind mode.

I pulled for one specific specific character every time she was on any sort of rate up for about six years and never got her, mostly because I didn't have the patience to save up 300 pulls for a guarantee and thought she'd turn up eventually. If I wasn't being totally stubborn over it, a quick $800 would have gotten her immediately.

I have had a bit of a problem with some in the past, once you delete the game and the account 95% chance you never go back.

At that point the desire to start from scratch is usually a huge hurdle to any return. I was able to slowly ween myself off of spending but even back at my worst it was more like $300-400 over a 3 year period all together.

agesboy posted...

It's got a veneer of "well just play optimally and you won't be that far behind" to suck you in, but the game is so god damn grindy. And the worst part is, it's actually really fun when you're not in infinite grind mode.

And therein lies the scheme: Make a fun game, make it just barely too grindy to actually be fun, then sell solutions to that grind that people will buy to get to that fun. As much as companies are fond of saying "these purchases are optional, we're just letting you skip the grind if you want!", they consistently leave out the part where they unilaterally implemented the grind in the first place for no other reason than to motivate purchases.

I have a reverse gacha game addiction. I love playing them and getting the most out of them without spending a dime.