It’s official – Second Life has banned gachas! I expected under the new regime leadership, this policy and many others will follow to clean up the grid and be in compliance with governmental regulations.
While I occasionally played a gacha machine here and there, I’m mostly a beneficiary of the extras from friends. Gacha was fun when it was cheap, but over the years, pull prices have doubled, and the chances of a rare nearly impossible. But I do realize the reason why people play – cos it’s cheap, random, and fun, unless you had terrible luck! If you can score the rare after one or two pulls, you felt like you were winning. I asked my friend Sparkle, aka the Gacha Queen, her thoughts on this policy change.
Here’s what Sparkle had to say on the policy change:
Banning gachas is something that will impact both designers and collectors financially. Designers will need to find a way to replace this income loss with something that is fun and exciting. Weekend sales are great but they are getting saturated. Collectors will be impacted because reselling allowed them to spend more and offset spending a lot on a machine through resale.
It will also impact designers that are at a beginner level of mesh creation; gachas allowed them to create fun cute uncomplicated items, that were not expensive. Many residents liked gachas because it allowed them to check out a new designer they were not familiar with, at a low price point. Lastly, it is a piece of Second Life history that changed Second Life’s design marketing and shopping. We went from crazy fun collecting, running to yard sales to find that one of kind cute item at a good price, to a proliferation of gachas events, that became less fun and overpriced.
I will miss playing and chatting with people about collecting, trading, and bitching about how hard it was to get an item. I think it will hurt not just economically but socially; gachas events were something we talked about, anticipated, and was a shared experience.
Sparkle (Gacha QUEEN)
Banning Cons – It will mean we pay more for novelty and decor items. There will be potentially less of those around, but designers could make that work as a weekend sale item. Cheap decor items may be less abundant.
Banning Pros – Less inventory bloat, you are more likely not to spend impulsively on an item. You’re more likely to be able to get the items you want as copy, if you want to build a fence, for example, you won’t need to play multiple times for the section, less likely to lose an item due to inventory loss.
Many brands have already begun offering sales on previous gacha collections and converting the items into fatpacks or a direct sale model. I’ll miss scoring items cheaply, but I won’t miss the frustrations of not getting a rare and ending up with 20 chairs in my inventory.
Let me know what your thoughts are on this gacha ban in the comments!
I’ve always despised gacha, though, to each his/her own for those who enjoy it. Usually I wanted one or two items and would delete all the crap I didn’t want, thereby flushing $ down the toilet. The idea of reselling is beyond tedious.
I’m glad. In the recent year, the value for what you get doesn’t even equate to the price you pay per pull. Compounded by having sometimes 15 commons, but all different colors, which then made you endlessly play or search just to get one color of an outfit. And don’t get me started on the color choices themselves, with white and black almost always being rare. You end up paying 3-4x as much for an outfit just to have one color. Then nobody can resell the weird orange or teal colors, because It’s a ridiculous shade. Or you spend 5k and only come out with 12 chairs, a plant, and 30 knick knacks that nobody wants. Gacha used to be fun, and exciting. You could chance it, but still get an item that was at least worth it’s price.The rares were things that were really a boon, and worth the hit of 2-5k. Recent years have made it exhausting and a waste of money.
It is day one of no gacha’s and I am very sad. I am going to miss playing the machines very much. It is not gambling at all. It is just a fun way to shop with a little bit of random chance thrown in. I loved collecting sets. I loved getting a cheap decor item. But the thing I will miss the most is the rush of getting that rare you REALLY want! Pulling it was so much fun! I think that if you don’t like gacha- don’t play it, its NOT gambling, and let the rest of us have our fun.
I really disliked how gacha use had increased in annoying ways. I usually would ignore booths at events just by seeing the word “gacha”.
The cute and random prices always had a pass for me, as it was something you could share and/or enjoy. The ones that got me to dislike gachas so much were the ones where you would gain a “Right sleeve – green” then a “Bowtie – red” making the prizes pretty much useless, unless you got a rare item. I am sorry for the loss it might supose to designers and resellers, but I am not sad that it is gone.
Agreed!