Can you explain me the gatcha fever?

[Amity Slade]

I have only once ever tried a gacha. There was only one item in the gacha I wanted. I got it on the first try. So now I'm retired from playing gachas, with an undefeated record.

 

[Evola]

I like the yardsales better than playing the gachas themselves, the latter I tend to play more if I'm not wanting something necessarily specific but want to throw a little money in support of the creator. It's like a whole separate ecosystem within the overall SL market, just putting products in a machine by itself won't get anyone anywhere. The recent Gacha Guild hunt was amazing for example, but wouldn't have been anywhere near so if it were just vendors in a nicely themed mall area - it's about giving people a whole experience more than just pushing products and raking in $L. The gacha machines are just one of the tools used to accomplish this..some creators use them far better than others.

 

[Fauve Aeon]

I like the weird ones at Japanese sims that are like...L$11.
They were popular before the craze and some are still around. I’m eh and meh with them. I’ll play, but if it’s something where I really only like the rare, sometimes I hit the MP and for commons, yard sales. Commons for pull price are ok, I can edit things well enough not to wreck them most of the time and SL rarely eats my stuff anymore. I’m setting up a tacky resale co-op shop for me and a couple of friends, I think it will be a fun thing.

 

[Raymond Figtree]

Gacha is far from dead, or waning. I have been playing gacha machines and collecting them for four years now. Good people in the community, and I have a Marketplace store that nets me enough to pay my SL rent. The actual machines are the devil. You will get the same crap common five times in a row and some of the creators set it so that the rares almost never pay out. The trick is to know what something is worth and buy it at a yard sale when you see it's a bargain.

There's a lot to it, so it's hard to judge it. I will go to a creator's store if I like one of his or her gacha sets and buy more of their items. It's good promotion. But a lot of the machines are filled with crap sets, especially these days. Also, most of everything has been done so there's a ton of retreads now. But creators like Jian, 8f8, RH and Dust Bunny all have a lot of worthwhile stuff in their machines.

 

[Mechanical]

By and large outfit set gachapons are the most unoptimized since sculpt first came out. Excessive abuse of multiple max resolution textures and model geometry that is so tightly packed the products would not need textures in wireframe mode can push gacha hungery avatars into high ARC and jelly doll them, and nearly always on any viewers that now or that will support blocking through texture memory and geometry use.

 

[Gomi Mfume]

i just want to say that gatcha shit has near ruined the marketplace website for me.
any time i want to browse a particular category of items, there, i have to wade through sometimes hundreds of gatcha listings for the same damn item.

they REALLY need to implement a separate category for gatcha items and enforce it. (ie: not allowing single copy listings in the general categories?)

 

[Amity Slade]

There is a separate category for Gachas.

There is also a category for Used Items. Since "Used" doesn't really have the same meaning for digital items as it does for physical items, the category should probably be re-named "Resale" or "Second-Hand Items" to more clearly indicate that category as a place to unload gacha prizes people have won.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

The ones where you have to collect multiple pieces to make a complete set have been banned in Japan for years.

Gacha Watch: Japan's Social Game Industry Shifts Gears After Government Crackdown

 

[Penny Patton]

I've always felt that if the gacha prizes in question were small, fun collectibles on the level of something like a beanie baby, or the plastic bobbles you get out of real world gashpon machines, it's not a problem. However, when you start putting everything into a gatcha machine, things that have real value to people, it just becomes a predatory business practice no different than loot boxes in videogames. And it's become so widespread in SL that I feel it's actively making the SL experience worse even for those of us who have no interest in them.

I'd love it if they were a fad that is on its way out, but I still see them everywhere.

 

[Chav Paderborn]

I've always felt that if the gacha prizes in question were small, fun collectibles on the level of something like a beanie baby, or the plastic bobbles you get out of real world gashpon machines, it's not a problem. However, when you start putting everything into a gatcha machine, things that have real value to people, it just becomes a predatory business practice no different than loot boxes in videogames. And it's become so widespread in SL that I feel it's actively making the SL experience worse even for those of us who have no interest in them.

I'd love it if they were a fad that is on its way out, but I still see them everywhere.

Yeah, it's clearly a money-making scheme at this point based on people being sort-of addicted to the them. I gave up on them ages ago after winning about 12 of the same dress trying to get a hair thing. Win for the gacha owner though since I spent way more than I'd have spent on the item if it was for sale in the shop. (I didn't even get it in the end!)

They just don't feel like a bit of fun any more, they feel like an attempt to squeeze more money out of a dying platform and an oversaturated economy.