They may be free to play, but they could cost you much more than your average videogame.

Video games have gotten expensive. A PlayStation 5 can be bought for around $1000 in retail stores, and large games can cost more than $100 on store shelves.

But there are other games that are free to play on any device, the catch is that they often ask for upwards of hundreds of dollars, not for the game, not for micro transactions within the game, but for a chance to earn a specific digital collectible from it.

And if you don’t get the collectible you want right away? The option to buy more in-game currency is always there for you so you can try again.

These are Gacha games, and they aren’t a particularly new phenomenon. The name is believed to be derived from Japanese ‘gachapon’ machines, the type of vending machine that dispenses toys in little capsules. It is a hint at the main mechanic present in these games.

Zhia Zariko, Games Lecturer at SAE University College and Studio Director of indie startup studio Were You Followed, describes the mechanic saying: “The most common design element for gacha games is, essentially, the digitised version of a ‘blind box’. Someone purchases a chance opportunity for a variety of things, each of which has varying return values.”

Trading card games such as Magic the Gathering and Pokémon TCG employ a similar strategy in the real world. The cards are sold in foil packs of 10, exactly which cards are in a pack is a mystery until it is opened. There is a chance that with every pack you might get a rare, valuable card. But, by design, you’ll often get something far more common and less exciting instead.

While it is entirely possible to spend a substantial amount of money on trading card games, gacha games take care to remove any barriers that slow down spending decisions.

For one, they are almost always free-to-play, mobile games with a very low barrier of entry. When a player first joins these games, they are often showered with gifts and limited-time events, before the progression of the game slows almost to a halt if the player doesn’t have the special characters, weapons or other items required to continue.

Zhia says this, combined with other tactics, such as artificial scarcity and obfuscating the value of purchases, are key to making the games more addictive, and to lowering the resistance to spending real money on them.

Darian Chamberlain used to play Genshin Impact, one of the most popular gacha games currently available. He has since abandoned the game despite having spent a “moderate amount” on it, complaining that it has become almost impossible to progress without spending even more money: “If you didn’t have the newest characters or the latest weapons, you couldn’t complete the highest level content in the game.”

He showed me all the different ways that a player could earn premium currency in the game, or at least all the ways he could recognise. There were daily challenges that would award him a small amount of currency, allowing him to “roll” for a character every few days.

There is a lot of jargon that has developed in gacha game communities, the most predominant of them being “roll” or “pull”. Every game has a different name for the action that allows you to get new characters, such as “wish”, “summon” or “build”. If you’re describing the act of trying to get a new hero, or a new weapon or whatever other collectible that you only have a chance of getting, you’re rolling for it, not unlike how a gambler rolls dice at a casino.

And the only way to meaningfully progress is by rolling for more powerful, less common characters. After playing the game for hours and only receiving a small amount of the premium required, it can be very tempting to spend just a few dollars to speed things along, to cut the grind by a few hours.

This is a pressure that Logeenth Rao has experienced throughout his playtime in different gacha games, but he has managed to resist spending money on games. He says: “I kind of remind myself that these games are always in a bit of a time limit, because it is an online game and at some point, it will just stop, and at that point it’s like I bought all of these characters for nothing.”

Both Chamberlain and Rao describe seeing other players spend over $200 in these games attempting to get a single character. Eventually, they would get the character they were hoping for, but possibly only after the game’s built in “pity system” kicked in and guaranteed that they got what they were after.

According to fan-made documentation, Genshin Impact guarantees a rare character after around 90 rolls, costing upwards of 14,400 “Primogems”, the premium currency of the game. Primogems can made by converting “Genesis Crystals” one-for-one and Genesis Crystals can be bought with real money. Currently, an Australian dollar will buy around 74 Genesis Crystals, depending on how many you buy at once. With each roll costing 160 Primogems, or around A$2.16, the 90 rolls to get a guaranteed character costs around A$195.

But just getting one rare character might not be enough. Many gacha games have systems that allow the player to enhance one of their already owned characters if they have multples of it.

If you’re feeling a little lost from the constant exchange and conversions, don’t worry. It’s by design.

As Zhia puts it, “The small amount that transactions normally are obfuscates the actual cost of the process overall and can cause large bouts of uncontrolled spending spanning over periods of time. Most Gacha players are only spending negligible amounts of money, but that adds up over time and over the number of users spending.”

The cumulative effect of this spending is evident in the revenue reported by the game companies. According to Sensor Tower, Genshin Impact is Australia’s top-performing adventure game by revenue with 49,700 active Australian players at the end of March 2025. According to Statista, these players’ cumulative spending since the game launched in 2020 averages A$48.60 (US$31.76), meaning between them they have spent approximately A$2.4 million on this one game alone. And note, this doesn’t include what players who are no longer active have spent.

All of this money being spent for a reward that isn’t guaranteed draws a lot of comparisons with gambling, and it’s led many people to try and legislate it.

China has implemented several laws that attempt to make gacha games fairer, and more transparent, with debatable effectiveness. They mandate that the odds for obtaining different characters be displayed and made clear for the players, as well as mandating there that must be some sort of the previously mentioned pity system.

Because many of these gacha games are released for a global market, some of these regulations from other countries can protect players in Australia. The changes implemented to comply with these regulations are often applied to releases for global or regional markets, meaning that Australian players are also shown the odds for rolling for specific characters, as well as other changes made to conform to the Chinese market.

However, Australia itself has done little to regulate gachas, which is especially surprising for a country that has consistently struggled with gambling and that loses several billions of dollars every year to the practice.

Players debate whether gacha games are gambling, Rao says that you’re not explicitly told at any point to spend money on these games, and the spending remains completely optional. On the other hand, Chamberlain says that despite never being told to buy premium currencies or other items, it is very clear that the game heavily incentivises players to do so.

As a game developer, Zhia has a very focused view on this issue: “It is absolutely gambling because every functionality is, essentially, a gambling practice. The legal minutiae is whether or not the outcome can be traded for a fiscal gain, in all honesty.”

And Australian governments, for now at least, seem to agree, but not quite to the same extent. Currently, all gacha games have to do is disclose that they contain “chance-based in-game purchases” to be rated as Mature by the Australian Classification Board.

Zhia is dismissive of this, saying “Ratings aren’t going to help, in all honesty.”

What he thinks will help is putting more resources into informing the public about what is happening, why it’s happening, and ensuring they can make more critical decisions.