Having never played gacha games but getting a good laugh out of this, is this really a thing people play? How different is the real gameplay?
If you commit to playing the gacha for an extended period of time, the system of:
- daily rewards that encourages you to play for a couple minutes each day to get enough currency to get good characters from the gacha
- newer characters being better than older ones (in visual design appeal and/or power-level)
- harder end-game content requiring better rosters of characters (or more grind)
- sales on the premium currency used to pull
- the ol' sunk-cost fallacy
all combine to encourage players to spend money over time
In this regard, the game in the post obviously does not have the scope of a game that actually costs money, and doesn't have the goal of getting you to spend money, but it does cover the grind and gacha part of pulling for different rarity characters and such.
It's really well done, and hilarious.
What I was wondering is what is the gameplay delta between this and a real gacha game. Some games, while basically a dressed up RNG, still give heavy weight to player input and decision-making in determining the outcome, whereas some games the player input essentially serves as the trigger to simply generate the next random number.
The idea of video games being the equivalent of coin pusher arcade garbage is a relatively new one.
If games were just non-deterministic randomized RNG generators than the entire speed running community (and the associated hand-eye coordination) would be pointless.
Even many tabletop games are really just interesting ways to modify numbers.
Though of course, it's the way you manipulate the numbers that makes it fun.
So you create these gross oversimplifications as numerical values that can be discretely manipulated, then toss in some RNG to make things a bit more fun especially in games like Dungeons & Dragons.
But I've also been DM'ing a D&D campaign for years, and I've found that the farther you can get away from needing to refer to the numbers, and instead rewarding player ingenuity is both more liberating and more fun.
Gacha is really just a monetization approach. The mechanics that accompany it are the real draw, and you can have card games, RPGs, tactics games, action games, etc.
In fact, I would describe this as an idle game, not a gacha game. In other words, a gacha-themed Cookie Clicker reskin. The emphasis is on the gacha, but in a real gacha game, rolling gacha occupies <1% of the playtime, and this doesn't adequately capture how the gacha model intersects with real gameplay mechanics.
Gacha is not related to battle systems at all. wordpad was referencing the random awards from the battle system as another funnel.
Constantly trying to no-true-scotman what Gacha means, is not definitive or compelling.
The specific type of battle system is not inherent to a gacha, but having a gameplay system of at least moderate complexity is. The one thing that virtually all gacha games share is that they have a large number of distinct game pieces of varying rarity. This lends itself specifically to deckbuilding/teambuilding. I've played dozens of gacha games and they all have teambuilding elements. I'm sure you can find some exception that proves the rule, but it is the basis for the genre, insofar as it is one. If you wanted to actually boil a gacha game down to its abstract essence to showcase what playing a gacha game is like to someone who had never played a gacha game before, you could not possibly give them an accurate experience without it.
In real gacha, the odds of pulling something good are generally super ridiculously low.
The odds are generally so bad that they will implement a "pity" system to avoid the awful PR from the common case of spending a ton of money and getting absolute garbage.