After the release of Genshin Impact, a ton of open world gacha games started to unveil, this almost started a trend. However, these games aren’t easy to develop as there’s so much content, assets, dialogue, networking and thousands of other features to create.

Let’s use the example of Genshin Impact, since it’s the most popular gacha game at the time of typing this article. What makes Genshin Impact special is the story, characters, atmosphere and music. At least from what I have observed.

What makes a gacha game a gacha game? Well, at first glance you may think it’s because of the Anime characters, but it’s actually the way you obtain those characters.

It’s “Luck”#

Not particularly, it’s more like

”Rigged Luck”#

The gacha systems in these games are unfair, to the point where if you want a specific character and their banner has ended you simply cannot obtain them. In most gacha games there are “limited banners”, this means you can only obtain that specific character during a specific time period, once it’s over you’re completely out of luck.

Well, I could still buy them-#

No. You cannot.

The only thing you can do is wait for the character’s next banner.

Anyways, we haven’t even talked about skip buttons yet-#

Yeah, I got carried away and completely forgot about the topic.

Gacha games have a tendency to force un-skippable cutscenes and dialogue scenes upon their players. I believe this is to increase the time the player spends on the game. But my question is why would that matter? Gacha games are free to start with and there’s no advertisements whatsoever, so it couldn’t possibly be that. Could it be to prevent players from creating an account, getting lucky with their pulls, speed running the game and selling their accounts for profit? The reason is unknown, but is certainly not fair! Skip buttons are of a high importance, because some players (including myself) may have a shorter attention spans than other players, meaning they should optionally be able to skip dialogue if they have lost interest. Another reason could be: what if you’re not understanding the story at all, and therefore want to skip? Or perhaps you dislike the story and are only there for the gameplay and the characters. All reasons are valid and hopefully gacha developers will take this into consideration.