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Comment by notTheAuth | Hacker News Reader

How is this different than instigating demand for Lamborghinis and 30 room mansions?

Gaming people to do things of nonsense utility is about all humans have to do after basic life supporting logistics.

Seems like mining fake objects, while power consuming, is less literally damaging than rocket ships and garages full of cars, boats, and 5 mansions that never get used.

It’s not outside the realm of possibility pretend loot is what the masses have to look forward to “owning” aside from basics down the line.

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I think the main difference is that when buying a home or car, the person knows what they're getting and for how much money.

There is no intentional sunk cost fallacy or gambler's fallacy at play.

What you've posted would be valid if the topic of discussion were NFTs or skins where a person gets exactly what they pay for, no more or no less.

A gacha-style game operates differently from an NFT or car or house. It's not "If you pay $200 you get this digital item in the game", it's instead "If you pay $2, you get a 0.6% chance of getting the item." After you spend $100, the next chance is still 0.6%, and our human brains are really bad at realizing that. That's how it preys on us.

If the game were instead "Pay $200 and you get this digital item", I would consider it less predatory, and I bet it would also have far less profit.

Genshin (and many other gacha) are actually more like the second option since they feature a mechanic known as pity where after a certain number of pulls the chance to get the item goes up to 100%. In Genshin that is at 180 pulls but because they also ramp up the chance to a featured item as you pull more realistically it is more likely to happen at around 150-160 pulls. This is still crazy (especially if you buy all of these pulls with money because the dollar to pull exchange rate is absolutely ludicrous) but it does mean that an F2P player can guarantee that they will get a character they want after a couple of months of saving.

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