Good things are made rare or slow to earn so you'll pay to skip the grind.
Things are made rare or slow to earn on purpose, so buying becomes the shortcut.
A shortcut past a grind the designers tuned to be tedious: rare drops, slow currencies, locked heroes. The scarcity is part of the design, so the shortcut only has value because the game made the wait or the odds unpleasant.
In a pay-once game, scarcity is a design tool. In a monetised game it becomes the product: the designers lower the rewards for free play, so the paid route is the sensible one. Loot boxes pushed design towards manufactured scarcity and grind engineered to be bought away, and gacha games keep the rarest characters deliberately scarce.
When rare things are rare because the game needs them to be, not because the shop does.
Star Wars Battlefront II priced Darth Vader at 60,000 credits, about 40 hours of grind, and offered the shortcut for money. The loot box lineage pushed design towards manufactured scarcity and grind engineered to be bought away, and gacha games keep the rarest characters deliberately scarce, with collection goals engineered never to quite complete. The idea of selling a cure for a designed problem runs from FarmVille's wilting crops to the loot box.
In May 2012 Japan's Consumer Affairs Agency banned 'kompu gacha', where the last item in a set became exponentially harder to pull.
Historical prices and revenues are in US dollars at the time unless marked A$.
Star Wars Battlefront II priced Darth Vader at 60,000 credits, about 40 hours of grinding.
Japan's Consumer Affairs Agency ruled 'kompu gacha', where the last item in a set became exponentially harder to pull, illegal in May 2012.
Covered in Video Games & Money: Ep 26 · Loot box, Ep 30 · Gacha.
