Most games people play are mobile games.

Gatcha makes companies a disproportionately large amount of money so they produce more of them.

Gatcha mechanics are in nearly every modern game.

Most games people play are gatcha games.

The most popular games now are cs:go and cs2 both gatcha games.

I think it's fair to distinguish gatcha for cosmetics from gatcha for game mechanics - the later is a far worse user experience than the former. But, otherwise, yea I think that's an extremely fair statement - a whole lot of games remain gatcha free but by player volume the vast majority of games incorporate some sort of gatcha (even if it's just cosmetic stuff).

I disagree. They're both gatcha. CS may not be pay to win the way a gatcha added mechanism works but aesthetics matter and still are designed for extraction. Any gatcha in a game is designed to extract money. The purpose isn't how fun the game is with or without it, it's the fact that it's normalized in all games.

It's an industry standard to have some sort of gambling with real world money for extraction and all gatcha games are used as a funnel for this extraction, therefore I don't see a reason to distinguish them. There isn't a 'fun first' gatcha game, since they're designed to make you buy at the core of their existence.

I think it's good to distinguish them because there are games like Genshin Impact that have literally no accessible gameplay without constantly feeding money into the machine. I am also disappointed in the fact that Valve has started bundling in loot boxes for cosmetics - but games with cosmetic only gambling actually have a gameplay loop that's accessible and equal for everyone. Games that have gatcha centric gameplay are literally just clout games where you can waste money so that everyone knows how wealthy you are.

Both are bad but one is far worse.

Skins are more nefarious. They make you think it's ok, and you can still play a full game, only the full game isn't the game you wanted to play anymore, it's just a giant ad for the gatcha. You win to get gatcha. Gameplay just tells you to either pirate it, accept it or don't bother, it's much more honest.

I hate to have to post this here but

> Genshin Impact that have literally no accessible gameplay without constantly feeding money into the machine

is completely false. By even a conservative estimate 80% of the game can be played for free. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find a worse example to try to make your point.

And yet people have a ton of fun playing them

It may be true, if we go by simple quantity of games. Low-quality mobile games with gambling mechanics get churned out at very high rates, especially compared to AAA titles. I wouldn't be surprised if most games are gacha by volume, but probably not when adjusted for number of players or total number of player-hours.

> probably not when adjusted for number of players or total number of player-hours.

I would disagree, given how the major sports franchise games and multiplayer FPS games use gacha mechanics too.

I am not deep into mobile games but I doubt that gambling games are easy to churn out. Is that accurate?

The normal in app purchase trap is time saving bonuses as far as I can see

There are some "real" games which started with the intention of being fun and then added some in-app purchases to make money. (Angry Birds, Plants Vs Zombies, etc). Then, there are bare-minimum games which basically only exist as a shell for gambling mechanics. Endless Candy Crush clones, incremental / idle games, and so on.

The first type are, indeed, not easy to churn out (at least no easier than any other game). The second, though, are the sort that most third-year CS students could make in a few days of concentrated effort, and individual companies often make many, many games that are basically the same but with different assets. They're then sold with misleading ads in the hopes that a few whales will get addicted. The cost to produce them is so low that even single digits of whales buying lots of in-app-purchases can result in profit.

(There's also a third category: terrible games with a license to beloved franchises, with E.T. being the canonical example. Many of them are microtransaction hell, but more often they take advantage of the brand to sell them for an up-front price. Same strategy, though: minimize production values, market as aggressively as possible within budget, accept a relatively low return which is still net-profitable.)

Do you have any stats though? Because I don’t believe that.

It seems unlikely that you’re going to have people whaling for rare drops in a trash game with no social network. Whaling is often a status thing and benefits from network effects.

I played some Nintendo’s / Cygames gacha from a while back and its revenue numbers were pretty middling despite being pretty darn high end. Are people really making money on games that are just barely serviceable with no fan base but a slot machine in them? I find that hard to square.