As someone who grew up playing games like World of Warcraft and other AAA titles, I’ve seen how the gaming industry has evolved over the years—and not always for the better. One of the most disturbing trends is the rise of gacha games, which are, at their core, thinly veiled gambling systems targeting younger players. And I think it’s time we have a serious conversation about why this form of gaming needs to be heavily restricted, if not outright regulated.
Gacha systems prey on players by offering a sense of excitement and reward, but at the cost of their mental health and well-being. These games are often marketed as “free to play,” making them seem harmless, but in reality, they trap players in cycles of spending and gambling. You don’t just buy a game and enjoy its content—you gamble for the chance to get characters, equipment, and other in-game items. It’s all based on luck, with very low odds of getting what you want, which leads players to keep spending in hopes of hitting that jackpot.
This setup is psychologically damaging, especially for younger players who are still developing their sense of self-control. Gacha games condition them to associate spending money with emotional highs, which is the exact same mechanism that fuels gambling addiction. You might think it’s just harmless fun, but it’s incredibly easy to fall into a pattern where you’re constantly chasing that next dopamine hit, just like a gambler sitting at a slot machine. Over time, this not only leads to financial strain but also deeply ingrained mental health issues, such as anxiety, depression, and a lack of self-control when it comes to spending money.
Countries like Belgium and the Netherlands have already banned loot boxes and gacha systems, recognizing the dangers they pose, especially to younger players. The fact that these systems are still largely unregulated in many other regions, including the U.S., shows just how out of control things have gotten. The gaming industry has shifted from offering well-rounded experiences to creating systems designed to exploit players’ psychological vulnerabilities.
We need to follow Europe’s lead in placing heavy restrictions on gacha and loot boxes. It’s one thing to pay for a game and know what you’re getting; it’s another to be lured into a never-ending cycle of gambling for content that should be available as part of the game. Gaming should be about fun, skill, and exploration, not exploiting people’s mental health for profit.
It’s time for developers and legislators to take responsibility and start protecting the players, especially the younger ones, from these predatory practices.
In that case aren’t most games gambling? You fight a boss and you die. You have failed and you lose progress of the boss fight which means the failed fight was a waste of time. Gambling.
My actual point is that despite us having a relatively good intuition on what is gambling, defining what gambling really is is pretty hard. Be too broad and you will end up marking non-gambling things as gambling, be too narrow and you get things like lootboxes that definitely feel like gambling but don’t actually fit most legal definitions of gambling.
Your definition is so broad it encompasses almost all games and as such is useless when you want to use it to regulate gambling on games.
It is gambling becaae there is a “house” you at playing against, whoever sets the odds and has a financial interest in them.
If you’re playing a singleplayer game, you are still triggering the same mechanisms, but no one is profiting from you staying up until 3am playing a singleplayer game you already paid for.
So all subscription games are gambling? What about Fallout 76? It’s not gambling if you just buy the game but if you buy the subscription the game becomes gambling despite the game fundamentally stays the same and the subscription doesn’t add any RNG to the game?