On gacha games
Sorry to my friends that are currently playing it but I am sick of hearing about Umamusume. I'm really sick of hearing about gacha games in general to be honest.
Getting into Final Fantasy 14 was my first real exposure to otaku culture and so much of it these days revolves around these gacha games. And I have tried a couple of them - Tokyo Afterschool Summoners (one of the few gachas targeted toward gay men: instead of pulling for anime girl jpegs you pull for buff hairy anime men jpegs) and the recently released Infinity Nikki. None of them held my interest for very long. Even in the case of Infinity Nikki, where the actual gameplay is really good the inevitable gacha hooks eventually sink in and the fun stops. It feels like there's a new one that pops up every couple months that people get obsessed with then drop for a new game.
I just really do not fuck with these games and I'm honestly kinda shocked at how prevalent they are. It's gambling but you're not actually winning anything! Why spend money for anime jpegs when you can go on pixiv or twitter or bluesky and see all the same pictures for free... or even commission someone to draw you a picture.
Umamusume is especially egregious given that it's a gacha game revolved heavily around horse racing, where the characters are anime girls that are based off real life race horses. The ethics of that is a whole other rabbit hole we can go down but it's just so so so strange to me. My favorite streamer Northernlion has been playing this the last few days and I was joking with my roommate that at least a few people are going to develop gambling addictions after being influenced by him to try the game.
I remember the huge backlash years ago about loot boxes in games like Overwatch and Star Wars Battlefront II. I feel like those are essentially the same thing as gacha and at this point I think it's safe to assume we lost that battle of video game monetization.
Hopefully someday gacha games go extinct and we can get back to the real peak of mobile gaming which is paying $3 on the app store for an iOS version of Time Crisis but I'm not holding my breath.