Richard Garfield recently penned a manifesto on free to play (F2P) games that encourage spending, or what he calls “skinnerware”. While there is perhaps a little bit of irony in the fact that the person responsible for creating one of the bigger “skinnerware” games, Magic the Gathering, writing a manifesto decrying the exploitative nature of these types of games, reading his post made me reflect on the F2P games that I play.

Certainly it’s been something on my mind for the past year or two because of the rise of Japanese F2P games in the global market. The western-style F2P game never really appealed to me, starting from the original Farmville, which probably popularized the genre in the west, all the way up to the modern phone-based games being pushed with massive ad campaigns like Game of War or Clash of Clans. And a lot of the resistance I had to the genre comes from some of the issues that Garfield raises in his manifesto — these are games designed to tap into addictive personalities, preying on people who want to see “progress” in their games by encouraging spending in order to move the game processes along.

I ignored the first wave of “big” Japanese F2P mobile games to come to the English speaking market, Puzzle and Dragons and Monster Strike. Hearing people talk about spending hundreds of dollars on Monster Strike (I believe one of the hosts of the 8–4 Play podcast even made a resolution to not spend any more money on the game) was enough to turn me off.

Around this time I did, at least unknowingly, have experience with the main money-sink mechanism of the Japanese F2P game, the “gacha”.

A bank of gachapon

Colloquially named after “gachapon” or toy capsule machines, gacha in Japanese F2P games operate under a similar principle. You put money into the game, normally a nominal fee that is as low as a “real life” gachapon (100 yen or 1 dollar), and you get a randomly generated reward based on a predetermined loot table. It’s both an insidious and an ingenious business model, one that is similar to the booster-pack model found in Magic the Gathering and since replicated in Hearthstone and dozens of other online collectible card games, because it encourages you to constantly spend money in order to get the item you want. As a player, you are paying for the chance of winning something that you want. Whether you get that coveted prize is a whole other issue — you might get that toy on the very first capsule you open, or you might get it on the hundredth turn of the gachapon.

Yome Collection

I was introduced to YomeColle years ago by a friend in the anime community on NeoGAF and little did I know that I was being exposed to the whole Japanese F2P system with this seemingly innocuous app. While not a game, it was still built entirely around the gachapon idea. Essentially, you could collect your favorite anime characters and listen to lines performed by the characters’ actors specifically for the app. There was a small element of “competition” in that you could see how much affection you showered on these characters in an in-game leader board and compare yourself to other players, but for the most part it was app whose primary appeal was collecting the unique character dialog.

Each of the blue spaces represents a set of lines that you can collect for the character.

And the only way to unlock them was to buy a special in game currency and then use that currency to take a spin on the in app gachapon.

At the time, I didn’t really know about capsule machines but in hindsight it made perfect sense that they would essentially replicate the physical gachapon experience in the app itself. When you took a spin on the gachapon, you had to physical spin the dial, after which you would be rewarded with an animation of a capsule being ejected from the machine. The capsule would open and then you would see if you were “lucky” enough to get unlock one of the blue squares pictured above, or if you got a “consolation” prize of a mostly useless item that you could use in game.

The app did use the mechanic that all F2P games use to encourage constant engagement in order to give players the opportunity to play the digital gachapon for free — if you logged on each day, you would be able to accrue enough in game currency to have a few spins — but if you were serious about unlocking all the blue squares, you would inevitably have to spend real money because you were never guaranteed a good prize.

I don’t want to dispute the business model, because YomeColle lasted for years on the goodwill of anime fans who were each willing to spend hundreds of dollars on spinning the gacha dial, but even as a casual player I could see how it could be exploitative because of the sheer randomness of the gacha system. You also had to trust that the game’s random number generation was fair and not skewed against you as a player in order to get you to spend more money — something that gamblers have to worry about when it comes to casino slot machines, which also meant that you had to really trust the app developer not to skew the results of the gacha in the “house’s” favor.

It should be worth noting that I started playing YomeColle after Japanese developers ran into legal trouble for the practice of “compu gacha”. If it wasn’t bad enough that the promise of a prize from one a spin of the gacha was completely random, in the old model — which was also found in YomeColle before the practice was made illegal — asked players to collect several smaller pieces of one of the blue squares before you could unlock the blue square itself. The practice was banned because of its similarity to gambling, which I suppose is one step beyond the simple “innocent” fun of trying to get a toy or item from a gachapon. Certainly I’m glad I never experienced that level of exploitation, because I can only imagine the amount of money one would have had to spend in order to get something that you wanted.

Even though I had experience with gacha from YomeColle, it wasn’t really a mechanic to which I paid much attention because I was more concerned with traditional games. EA would introduce the collectible card game mechanic into its sports games through the Ultimate Team mode, which it would then introduce into other games like Mass Effect 3 and Dragon Age: Inquisition, but for the most part the F2P model was just something that wasn’t on my radar outside of the news stories of “whales” that would spend tens of thousands of dollars on games or children who accidentally bankrupted their parents by making unauthorized purchases on their credit cards.

It wouldn’t be until the launch of the global version of Love Live: School Idol Festival in 2014 that I would become immersed in the F2P model and the gacha system.

I actually tried my hand at reviewing it back on my blog in 2014, and even back then I had my reservations with how the game’s free to play system worked. Of course, at the time I didn’t make the connection between the gacha mechanic in YomeColle and the one in Love Live: School Idol Festival and just saw Love Live as yet another F2P game. After two years of experience however, I’ve come to fully appreciate how the gacha system operates in the wild.

Even though Love Live and games of its ilk don’t digitally reproduce sensation of spinning the gacha found in YomeColle, they clearly use the same system.

Gacha systems from various games. Starting from the top-left: Love Live, Idolm@ster Starlight Stage, Aria Aqua Ritmo, Final Fantasy Record Keeper, Granblue Fantasy, Kantai Collection

With the exception of Kantai Collection, where the gacha currency is based entirely on the time you are willing to put into the game rather than on how much real money you are willing to spend, each of these games (and the many more that I simply haven’t played) have essentially evolved to create a system that encourages spending by maintaining a sense of fairness so that players don’t feel completely cheated when they “gamble” on these slot machines. But the principle is the same — you put money in, press a button, and then watch an animation that shows you which prizes you have won.

The “contemporary” Japanese mobile game gacha (I put that in scare quotes only because some of these systems didn’t exist two years ago) shares some similar features. First, these games give you two choices for making spins on the gacha. You can take a single spin on the gacha for a small amount of in game currency or you can spend a large sum of in game currency to draw to do a 10-in-1 draw which guarantees a “super rare” drop. It’s a psychological trick used in marketing all the time, where you are convinced that buying an item in bulk will save you more money in the long run. In this case, these gacha systems have been designed so that you believe that you can “cheat” the house rules by paying more money into the game.

Second, these games may give consolation rewards each time you put money into the game. In Love Live, after you spend 250 “loveca” (or 18000 yen if you were to buy the loveca in “packs” of 50), you will get the opportunity to take a spin on the “consolation” gacha which has a higher rate of giving an Ultra Rare card (which typically has a drop rate of 1%). In Granblue Fantasy, spending around 90000 yen gives you enough “cerulean sparks” to be able to pick whatever prize you want. In the case of Granblue, this system was introduced because of a controversy that erupted when it appeared that the developers misled players about the drop rate of a specific prize, as some players spent hundreds of thousands of yen without getting the prize that they wanted.

Third, every game lets you earn gacha currency at a fairly fast pace. Love Live gives you one loveca for free per day. Combined with login rewards and event rewards, an active player will receive enough in-game currency to make a single “10-in-1” draw per month. Other games can be more or less generous, but in general they want players to be participate in the gacha even if they don’t spend any money. The generosity doesn’t come without a cost though, because the so-called Skinner-box effect is still in play here — if a player doesn’t receive the prize they want with their free in-game currency, then they might be compelled to spend real money instead.

Fourth, every game’s gacha system is time-limited. Unlike slot machines, where the payout is the same regardless of when you play, these games manipulate the player by controlling the supply of the rewards. If you don’t spin the gacha during a specific window of time, then you’ll miss out on the reward. This technique is also drawn from common marketing practices, where the promise of a time-limited sale encourages consumers to buy a product that they might not need simply because it’s on sale. In fact, this is probably why players of these games go on spending-sprees and pour hundreds of dollars into a game’s gacha. They want a specific prize and will spend as much as they can in order to obtain it. For example, in Final Fantasy Record Keeper, there were players who spent lots of money trying to get the “Shout” relic. Of course, this relic has re-appeared since its first appearance, but the demand was so high that players were almost desperate in their attempts to get the relic from the in-game gacha.

The gacha is a system that appears benevolent at first, since it seems fair on the surface, but can lead to a lot of bad financial and personal choices — just like real gambling

So knowing that these games are exploiting you as a player, inasmuch as they are designed to encourage you to spend money even if you can play them for free, what is their appeal? Why do so many people, myself included, play them? Why have they dominated the Japanese marketplace?

I can only answer for myself, and perhaps generalize a little through anecdotal experience, but there are few key reasons that these games are appealing despite the fact that they can be so damaging.

Theme is the perhaps the biggest reason why these games are appealing to so many people. Unlike the generic titles like Game of War, which is only notable because of the commercials featuring Kate Upton, many of the smaller but still profitable Japanese F2P games are based on existing properties that have preexisting fans. Fate/Grand Order is a very popular game that launched with a built in audience — fans of the Fate/Stay Night media franchise. Unlike a lot of games that had to start from scratch in terms of trying to attract an audience, the developers were able to immediately attract players to their game based on their name alone. With the death of multimedia franchises, at least when it comes to franchise tie-in video games, Japanese F2P games still thrive on being attached to a popular intellectual property. I’m a fan of Final Fantasy, so it was natural that I would be engaged in a game that brought together every game in the franchise and rendered iconic characters in pixel art form. Other players might be fans of the Kingdom Hearts franchise, so they would have at least tried out Kingdom Hearts Unchained χ, the mobile game that launched earlier this year.

Every Final Fantasy character rendered in nostalgic 16-bit form. The purest of fanservice.

Having a game that is based on an existing property also encourages greater investment on behalf of the player, which has the potential to drive players to put money into the game’s gacha because of they are fans of a particular character. There are tons of videos online showing players putting a lot of money into a game in an attempt to obtain a desired drop. Here’s one from Love Live, for example:

Obviously, being a fan of the Love Live characters motivates someone to spend a lot of money to try to get a specific time-limited Ultra Rare card. So while games like Love Live will probably never be as popular as the biggest F2P games on the market, they have dedicated fans who will support the game through their ongoing connection with the property. For these people, the IP is as important as the game itself.

But even if a game isn’t based on a preexisting property, there are still ways that Japanese F2p games can appeal to fans through the use of the greater anime zeitgeist. For example, both Kantai Collection and Granblue Fantasy feature well-known voice actors which is very much part of the appeal. Or it could be as simple as an appealing art design, which is clearly drawn from or influenced by designs found in anime. The fact that these original franchises spawn spin-off media which in turn feeds back into the popularity of the game is an added bonus. In the Western context, Angry Birds is the perfect example a game that launched a transmedia empire which in turn translated back into advertising for the game.

Gameplay is also an important factor in their appeal. Obviously there are many types of games in the mobile F2P space, but I’ve found myself gravitating toward rhythm games. The genre is has found a new life on mobile, as the touch interface offers a perfect interface for the standard “scrolling song chart” mechanic that many games rely on. Sure, you lose the preciseness of tactile buttons, but tapping on the screen with your thumbs or fingers offers a close approximation and also allows for more complex charting (such as Love Live’s 9 lanes). Rhythm games are also perfect for mobile in that they are very easy to pick up and play, since a single session with the game only lasts as long as a single song.

RPG games also translate well to this space because of their turn-based nature. Combine that with a stamina system that limits the number of actions you can perform in a single sitting, and the genre has the same portability and mobility of the rhythm genre with the bonus effect of creating long term engagement. In fact many rhythm games feature some light RPG mechanics as well in order to provide something extra for players to do in between playing songs.

Watching Daxyn has play Kancolle has always made the game fun to watch, even though the entire game is basically watching a series of dice rolls that you have minimal control over. But the RPG mechanics layered on top of the fundamental RNG that underlies the game is enough for him to have this kind of experience:

And sure, Love Live will never be as extreme as Jubeat or the hardcore Japanese games of that ilk, but it can still provide very fun rhythm game experiences:

Some players have even built their own controllers for the game, showing that there are at least some people who find the game engaging enough based purely on gameplay alone:

Games as service, or the idea that these games are living entities that continually evolve, is perhaps one of the most important aspect of the free to play game. It’s not enough to just release a game and wash your hands of it and just wait for the money to come in, designers also have to find ways to keep players constantly engaged and willing to spend time with their game over the next flavor of the month. This idea goes far beyond simple fixes to any bugs that crop up or balance changes to the gameplay, because that is just expected by players at this point. Instead, the idea is to tap into the loyalty players have to the game by providing a constant feed of new content. F2P games exist almost like MMOs, but rather than wait months for the next content update, most of these games offer new content every two weeks.

There are a couple aspects to this idea of games as service — on the surface level, this means simply relying on the depth of the theme to help generate new content. So Love Live can keep introducing events based on songs written for the franchise and include prizes based on the different costumes that the characters have been known to wear, or Final Fantasy Record Keeper can cycle through every single Final Fantasy ever made to introduce new story elements and characters to the game. This is important because it drives players to constantly play the game, or at least log into it often to check if there are new prizes that they want to win. Not only does it provide new content, but it also encourages players to stick with a game lest they miss some one time prize or content update that they might be interested in.

The other aspect is that beyond new content, players — particularly the more savvy ones — really want to see new mechanics introduced to the game as the game progresses. For rhythm games, while the fundamental way to play the game will assuredly stay the same throughout the life of the game (hitting notes as they scroll down a chart), the context for this play can be constantly updated. For example Idolm@ster Starlight Stage just introduced a tour mode, reminiscent of the single player campaign found in the Rock Band games, where you tour around Japan trying to get new fans. It may not be the most complex implementation of the idea, but it provides a new context for the gameplay that is different enough to feel fresh.

Starlight Stage’s new tour mode.

Fairness, or at least the perception of fairness, allows players to feel as if they can still progress even without getting the jackpot in the in-game gacha — the so-called “god drop” or “god roll”. Broadly, this means that the game still feels fair to play even if you aren’t lucky enough to get the one big thing that everyone wants. The Japanese solution to trying to mitigate the pure random chance of the gacha is the “friend” system, where players can rely on other players who were lucky enough to hit the jackpot in order to give them a boost. In rhythm games, you can summon a friend who has an Ultra Rare card to give you a boost in your own game. Of course it’s better if you can hit the jackpot yourself and get the drop that you want, but you can almost always count on other players to help fill the gaps on your team if you aren’t having any luck with the gacha.

This perception of fairness goes hand in hand with the perceived generosity that gacha games offer players, whether by giving them a consolation prize, or by giving players who can’t afford to spend money on the game enough currency to try their chance at the gacha at a reasonable rate, because it allows players who aren’t “whales” to feel like they aren’t completely being trounced by the players who are willing to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on the game.

It should go without saying that being “fair” is probably the fuzziest concept to get right, because it’s so subjective. Unlike theme or gameplay, where you immediately know if a game is appealing to you, there’s no immediate way to judge a game’s fairness. If someone is willing to spend a thousand dollars a month to try their luck at a game’s gacha, then that person’s idea of a game’s fairness is probably much different than someone who isn’t willing to spend any money on the game. Certainly one of my biggest complaints of Final Fantasy Record Keeper was the fact that the “big” 3000 crystal/50 mythril (which is around 50 dollars) gacha roll did not give any kind of bonus consolation prize. I didn’t spend money and when I blanked on a gacha by not getting anything useful, I was always disappointed and frustrated with the game. I can’t even begin to imagine the frustration that some of the big spenders that I saw on the FFRK subreddit must have felt when they went through the same experience. DeNA finally introduced a guarantee to the gacha to the English version of the game with their latest gacha update, to bring it in line with many other Japanese mobile games, and I think it’s better for it.

I think balancing fairness is part and parcel with the “skinnerware” tuning decisions that some economics or gambling consultant makes behind the scenes. I have no evidence of this of course, other than the fact that it seems that every company seems to have an economist on staff, but it would explain why all games with gacha, whether it’s Overwatch or one of the Japanese games that I play, push the edge of “decency” when it comes to how exploitative their gacha are. I’m sure a big question they must ask themselves is “How much can I exploit my players before they begin to feel cheated?” Casinos go through the same thing, but they can at least offer amenities to their big spenders to try make their customers feel that they aren’t getting completely fleeced when they lose big at the tables or slots, and the attempts to balance gacha is, at least to someone with no insider information, seems to be a similar high wire act where a designer has to balance a game’s exploitative nature with its generosity. The fact that both Granblue Fantasy and Final Fantasy Record Keeper went through bouts of player revolt over the perceived fairness of their gacha only shows how quickly players can turn on a dime if they feel exploited. I have no doubt that there are countless other games that have gone through the same problems balancing fairness in their games.

So where does all of this self-reflection leave me? Perhaps first and foremost, it makes me appreciate how much work goes into making one of these games. It’s not just a matter of throwing together a game that you click through and then slapping a slot machine to it. I also don’t see these games as inherently “evil” as I thought they were. Yes, there are some aspects of “skinnerware” as described by Richard Garfield that can be found in all of these games, but if you exercise some measure of self-control (or, push comes to shove, have a friend stop you before you go down a spending rabbit-hole) you can easily have fun with these games without feeling exploited or victimized.

The attitude you bring into the game can help tremendously — a common refrain I’ve heard about going to a casino is to just treat any money you spend as part of the experience. So it’s not about winning or losing money, but spending money as part of the cost of entertainment. You’re paying for the experience of gambling, the rush that comes from risking hundreds of dollars on a blackjack hand, and not for the actual result. For me, once I simply let go and decided to just focus on playing the games and ignoring the gacha entirely, I found myself having a lot more fun. Do I want that Ultra Rare Nico card? Who doesn’t? But I’m not going to worry if I don’t get it, because I’m still having fun with the game itself. The moment you make any game about beating the gacha, which for most games means beating a 1% to 5% drop rate, you set yourself up for frustration and disappointment. Be happy if you hit the jackpot and get what you want, but just learn to live and let live if you don’t.

Perhaps the biggest part of learning to play these games with that kind of attitude is to understand that even if you do put in hundreds of dollars, you odds of “beating the house” are still the same. This means you either have to be ready to lose the money and get nothing, just as you would if you have gone to a casino, or choose to never invest that much money into the game in the first place. For me, I’ll buy some in-game currency from time to time to show support to the developers, but I’ll never make a huge “whale” purchase and I think not exposing myself to that “risk” is part of the reason why I’ve been able to keep up with these games for so long.

Interestingly, I feel like some of these ideas can apply to the more traditional games that I play that have begun to introduce slot machine mechanics. Microsoft has gotten into the game by introducing requisition/bounty packs in Halo 5 and Gears of War 4, and EA, Blizzard, and Valve have basically nailed the science of the gacha in every game they make now. Many of the principles of design apply — EA is probably the biggest winner because they can release an update to a sports game every year and then get people to spend hundreds of dollars buying ultimate team packs to rebuild their rosters. But many of the ideas I have for spending on these in-game gachas apply as well — don’t expect to hit the jackpot, and understand that the money you do spend in the game is to give you the “rush” of playing a slot machine and that you shouldn’t expect to hit the jackpot.

Skinnerware games, at their worst, can be bad experiences that prey on people and I can see why Garfield decided to write his manifesto against them. But I think there’s a way for designers to make good, engaging free to play games and also a way for players to enjoy playing them in a healthy manner. There’s an element of mutual trust and respect that should exist between designer and player, and as long as the designer doesn’t see the player simply as a walking wallet waiting to be emptied (and in the case of Japan, requiring regulators to step in and stamp out any bad practices), then there is a way for designers to make money from these types of gacha games while also providing a space for players to have fun.