I often say that I play gachas in spite of the gacha. The two I play, Zenless Zone Zero (ZZZ) and Wuthering Waves (WuWa), are both games that have fun and unique combat and great character designs. In fact, I found out about both games due to seeing cosplays of the characters and liking the designs. Despite the fact that I do enjoy both games, I fundamentally believe that both would be better without the gacha mechanics. They both use fear of missing out to drive players to spend money and essentially require, particularly if a player is free to play, daily logins. The games are actively antagonistic and predatory towards their own players. So why play them?
Before answering this, I will briefly explain the mechanics of gachas. At least for the two I play (I don’t want to generalize the entire genre/mechanic), roughly every 3 weeks, a new character and weapon for that character will be released alongside a rerun for an older character and weapon. While that character’s banner is active, a player can spend in-game currency to “pull” on that banner, which gives them a random chance of obtaining the character. While the character can be won early through luck, there is a gurantee after a certain amount of pulls. There are many further intricacies to this system, but this gives a general overview.
Pulls are obtained in one of two ways: spending money or completing in-game tasks. These tasks come in a variety of forms, though the main ways to obtain them are through story quests, special events, beating endgame challenges, and, most prominently, dailies. Dailies require the player to log in everyday to complete generally short, easy tasks in order to gain pull currency. The main daily shared between games is spending regenerating energy in order to get upgrade materials for characters and weapons. Players can also just spend money outright in order to get pulls. However, it costs a lot of money to obtain a character; in ZZZ, with the absolute worst luck possible and without spending any currency obtained by playing the game, it would cost $475.20 to obtain a character. Therefore, the average player needs to log in everyday to maximize his resources.
My favorite ZZZ characters
With the background set, we return to the original question: why play these games? For me, the most immediate answer is the amount of characters. Every three weeks, there is a brand new character with a new design, mechanics, and story. This is, for better or worse, enabled by the gacha. Most other games with large character rosters can’t introduce characters at this rate because of the financials of doing so. But gachas are able to generate constant revenue and therefore support releasing characters in this manner. Character design is something I really value, so this is a huge draw for me. There’s a reason these games are so big in cosplay spaces, since the ever-growing roster constantly gives new characters to cosplay. This by no means excuses the pernicious business model, but the gacha system is a part of why the games I enjoy exist in the way they do.
My favorite WuWa characters
The games also give excellent extrinsic motivation to play. Shiyu Defense and Deadly Assault, the two primary endgame modes in ZZZ, award roughly 4.5 and 2 pulls, respectively. These modes are fun and challenging and are what I look forward to most from the gameplay. The added extrinsic motivation of getting pull currency makes them feel even better. I am doing something fun and earning a tangible reward for it.
This is what motivates doing dailies. As a firm free-to-play player, I have to get all the pulls I can muster if I want to be able to get new characters and weapons. I don’t personally enjoy playing dailies, they’re extremely easy and monotonous, but I do them because of the rewards. The little bit of time I spend each day, the work I put in, allows me to earn rewards that can then be used for something fun. This is great when it’s something I already want to do, like with endgame, but it is also an effective motivating factor to get me to do things I otherwise wouldn’t want to.
Dailies exist as a form of video game work in an interesting space compared to other forms. American Truck Simulator, for example, is a game where the primary gameplay is working. A player picks up the game because he wants to do the work of driving a truck, at least in the form of a game. The daily system, by contrast, exists as an external structure around the main gameplay that helps motivate it. Combat is the primary gameplay in both ZZZ and WuWa, and there are other games with broadly similar combat systems, like the Devil May Cry and Bayonetta series, but neither of those have gacha systems. Earning pull currency is ancillary to the main gameplay rather than constituent of it, but it also is a driving factor for much of the player’s interactions with the game. This external quality of gacha also allows for mutability of the gameplay genre: while ZZZ and WuWa both feature hack-and-slash combat, Honkai: Star Rail has turn-based combat, and Goddess of Victory: Nikke is a third person shooter.
Iuno’s gacha animation
The other primary draw of the gacha system is, simply put, gambling. It feels really good to win or get an early. For an example from my own pulls, when Vivian first ran, I spent the entirety of her patch debating whether to pull her. With mere hours left on her banner, I finally decided to spend what I had (from memory, around 50 or so pulls) and got her at 37 (for context, ZZZ’s soft pity starts at 74 and hard pity is 90, so this was a pretty early pull). I was incredibly excited and felt great. By contrast, during Vivian’s rerun, I pulled on her weapon, and it took me 140 pulls after losing my 75/25. That felt horrible. But in either case, there was still the inherent thrill of gambling, of the uncertainty of winning or losing. This is most certainly a draw for players to gacha.
Vivian’s gacha animation – Source
These are all tangible benefits for the player. The system is still ultimately predatory and bad, but it does offer genuine benefits to a player’s experience. The player is asked to work, to spend his time, money, or both, in order to get the characters and weapons he wants, but the combination of the strong, extrinsic motivation as well as the other draws of the game, such as events and endgame modes, help mitigate the monotony of this work. These are games meant to supplement other games, to be played a little bit each day with occasionally longer sessions when new content is released. They are a time-sink, but a slow one that constantly rewards the player.
Despite this, these would be better games without gacha mechanics, and I do believe I would enjoy them more. The lack of access to characters is an easy thing to point to; I don’t have Changli, one of my favorite characters both design-wise and mechanically, in WuWa, and I have no ability to get her. The game won’t even let me pay money for her. This wouldn’t be the case in a gacha-less game, and that would make the game better.
However, I can’t help but wonder what the removal of the extrinsic motivations would do to the game. While they would be better procedurally, would they be better affectively? While not having Changli hurts my experience, would endgame modes feel worse without the rewards? Obviously, I cannot answer this question, but it plagues me. To quote Blink-182, “work sucks, I know,” but would these games feel better without work?
I often say that I play gachas in spite of the gacha, and I do believe that is true. But what if I’m wrong?
I appreciate your stance as a firm free-to-play player; my brother and I approach the genre in the same way. Though, the existence of the gacha elements is part of the conceit of the game being free. “Whales” and casual players who do pay are bankrolling the developers, while we reap spoils that we did not earn: a large game with continuing expansion of content. In one way, you could think of avoiding the temptation of spending money on microtransactions as the only “cost” of playing the game. A gacha game with the gacha elements removed would likely cost some amount, maybe even a subscription if the large scale content roll-outs were to remain. While eliminating micro-transactions in gacha games and abroad would likely have a positive benefit on the world, and is something I would hope for, I appreciate the ability to play these games without paying, at least for now
I completely agree with your point on how ZZZ could do without the gacha mechanic. Personally, I haven’t gotten far in my own playthrough of ZZZ, only getting past the prologue, but I remembering thinking to myself that ZZZ felt like it could have been its own physical game disc on a console. Unlike WuWa or Hoyoverse’s other major gacha games like HSR or Genshin Impact, ZZZ is a much more closed off world. There are only few places the protagonist could travel, and the “open” world aspect is in the form of dungeons that are also closed off. The source of these thoughts it most like the fact that ZZZ is very reminiscent of the Persona series’ game format: a day/night cycle where certain activities take up time in the day, the limited traversable areas, the dungeon travel, the shops you can visit. I could go on and on about how many other similarities there are between ZZZ and the Persona series. But this wasn’t meant to be a comparison. I wanted to point out with how many similar mechanics ZZZ has with other traditional video games, it lends itself more to a standalone console game rather than gacha game; and honestly, I’m a bit tired of every mobile game being a gacha game.