New Chinese regulations for Gacha games can slow down transactions and lower the player count drastically.
When it comes to gaming in the Far East regions, they tend to steer towards mobile gaming rather than focus on AAA or indie titles, as mobile games can fit well with the fast-paced lifestyle in those regions. However, what we usually don’t see is the immense amount of money these mobile games are making. While the games are considered free-to-play, in-game transactions can easily let players go on a spending spree. These games are locally known as gacha games and include heavy implementation of luck-based unboxing that incentivizes in-game purchases.
As one can guess, the addiction can eat up people’s minds, and it usually ends up with people overspending their hard-earned money on gacha, which are unfortunately hardcoded to give people lower chances of unboxing something decent. There are a few games in the Chinese market that employ this tactic quite well, Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail are a few of them, but there are some small, unknown games that usually run on the same scheme, just like any other mobile game that is based on loot boxes.
The Chinese government, which is pretty much determined to fight back against the gaming industry, is coming up with regulations to ease the addiction of paying huge amounts to games with gacha elements that are disguised as “adventure games”. Currently, these regulations are in draft; however, they might become a reality soon. Said regulations include limiting the amounts of money you can spend on loot boxes, warning people not to spend too much money on the loot boxes, and removing daily rewards altogether. There are some obvious reasons behind all of these actions, and it is not hard to guess why.
For the removal of daily rewards, the developers give you a reason to log into the game. Although you might have no reason to log in, such as no updates to check out or no new bug fixes, daily rewards still draw people in, despite the game providing nothing new; it also encourages people to spend money on gacha as well. As for limiting the amount spent and warning, the reasons speak for themselves.
The result of the regulations severely damaged the stocks of companies like Tencent and Netease, as they own a big portion of both the console and mobile gaming industry with their popular titles. Right now, the changes only affect the Chinese players, but it is unknown whether the same regulations will start to take place overseas and in the EU.
A few years ago, in 2018, some EU countries banned opening loot boxes in order to fight back against the addiction to spending money and prevent kids from going on a shopping spree without their parents’ knowledge. Some time ago, another controversial in-game purchase problem was found in Epic Games’ Fortnite, though it was related to how the purchase button was very close preview button, thus leading to accidental purchases.
In recent times, the Chinese government has also tried to limit young people’s time spent online with another regulation being worked on. This regulation would limit the amount of horse being spent online by people under the age of 18. Seems like the Chinese government really wants to settle down the addiction to technology among both young and elderly, with both time being spent in front of computers and spending money on gacha games.
