Japanese Social Gaming Companies Embracing Box Gacha After the Kompu Gacha Ban

In May of 2012, the Japanese government banned kompu gacha dealing a huge blow to Japan's biggest social gaming companies. Gacha is a game mechanic in which players test their luck for their chance to win a mystery item paying real world money for each of these transactions. Since the transactions are absolutely random, there are many documented cases of players spending exorbitant amounts in an attempt to win a specific virtual item. However, a lack of regulation meant that some companies could set the chances of winning an item at practically zero, meaning that players would be paying repeatedly in an addictive, and useless pursuit of a virtual item. Why kompu gacha was banned in the first place In the case of kompu gacha, translated roughly as “complete gacha”, players would have to collect several items in order to get a chance of winning a larger, rarer prize. Essentially, kompu gacha was a game of bingo with no way for players to know the chances of drawing a particular “number.” Adding to this, the potentially addictive mechanic of collecting items led to the government banning these practices. Kompu gacha played a huge part in the record profits that had been posted by Japanese social gaming giants like DeNA and GREE. The main problem here was that players enjoyed the kompu gacha mechanics, something that was viewed gleefully by gaming developers as a win-win situation. However, kompu gacha makes winning the prize so random that it essentially becomes a gambling mechanic. Since underage children often had access to games using the kompu gacha mechanic, this was an inexcusable situation for Japanese lawmakers. The two cases that made headlines included a child in middle school that spent more than five thousand dollars in a month on kompu gacha games and an even younger child that spent more than a thousand dollars in only a couple of days. After the scandal that followed, the government was forced to start regulating the game industry and ban these kinds of game mechanics. Although kompu gacha was banned, gacha remains alive today Paying for a chance to win a virtual prize is still a core game mechanic. In fact, at least 80% of the most popular social games still include gacha machines and, for many game developers, the revenue from gacha's micro transactions contributes more than half of their games' revenue. However, the industry has taken some measures to reduce uncertainty in gacha and allow players to predict what is going to happen and how much they are willing to spend on winning a particular prize. Most gacha machines allow players to “spin the wheel” for one hundred Yen. There are also gacha machines with a higher chance of a better payout that offer spins for three hundred Yen. Replacing kompu gacha with box gacha As soon as gaming companies caught wind of the possible banning of kompu gacha, they started trying out different gaming mechanics that satisfy their customers' need for betting real world money for the chance of winning a virtual prize. However, these new methods would necessarily need to be more predictable and less addictive than their predecessors. A mechanic known as package gacha or box gacha has started to gain popularity as an alternative to abusive kompu gacha mechanics of the past, allowing players to have the same thrill of potentially winning a rare item after spinning. Basically, box gacha involves “filling” a gacha machine with a set number of game items or cards, fully disclosing the number of cards in the machine, how many of them are common, less common, rare, super rare, and even super special rare. In normal gacha, each spin's odds would be reset, meaning that every spin would have the same odds of hitting a rare prize. However, with box gacha each time a prize is won it is “removed” from the box, letting players know that they can win the prize they want if they play a certain number of times. Each spin increases the probabilities of winning a particular super rare or super special rare prize. This is definitely an improvement over kompu gacha, where there are cases of players that paid millions of Yen without every hitting the rare prize they were seeking.

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Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.   About the Guest Author: Nida Rasheed is a freelance writer and owner of an outsourcing company, Nida often finds herself wanting to write about the subjects that are closest to her heart. She lives in Islamabad, Pakistan and can be found on Twitter @nidarasheed.