Gacha Games in East-Asian

Transmedia Franchises
Joleen Blom
Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies
Kanslerinrinne 1
33014, Tampere University
[email protected]

Keywords
Gacha games, free-to-play, East-Asia, Games-as-a-Service, transmedia

INTRODUCTION
This paper calls attention to the monetization models of gacha games from the East-
Asian region (here meant as Japan, China and South Korea), which are free-to-play
(freemium) games in which players are incentivized “to buy or accumulate in-game
currency which can be used to obtain a randomised virtual item that might —to greater
or lesser degrees— enhance or progress the game” (Woods 2022, 2). Despite the
influence of popular culture from East-Asia on global game cultures, the role of gacha
games within the marketing schemes of global media franchises is often understudied
in Game Studies due to the field’s tendency to concentrate on Euro-American centric
phenomena. Yet, freemium games from East-Asia account for the majority of the top
grossing mobile games world-wide (Chapple 2022c). For example, the gacha game
Genshin Impact (2020), which is the main product in a larger transmedia franchise by
the Chinese developer miHoYo, has generated over 3.7 billion US dollars in the past
two years (Chapple 2022b). Overlooking these games risks not only omitting the
impact of East-Asian game industries on a global scale, but also undermines a nuanced
understanding of how entertainment franchises employ a variety of strategies to
channel fan behaviour towards monetary, temporal, and labour investment in freemium
games and related products.

In the spirit of the conference’s theme “Limits and Margins of Games”, this paper
therefore presents a work-in-process study that aims to supplement our understanding
of regional game cultures by examining how gacha games from East-Asia are
developed and released as part of a transmedia franchise, while it simultaneously
explains how these games contribute to digital trends worldwide. The study’s leading
research questions are: what role do gacha games and their characters play in a
transmedia franchise, and how do gacha characters encourage consumption and
playbour by fans in a transmedia franchise? The study intends to collect theoretical data
on gacha games and its characters, and empirical data on players to understand the roles
of gacha games and the characters in encouraging players to invest in the game and its
franchise. Additionally, this study adopts the trend of regional game studies within
Game Studies that investigates different regional gaming cultures and identifies
connections between them (Liboriussen and Martin 2016). It therefore treats East-Asia
as a cultural region, which may be understood as a market construction where platforms
and media ‘coproduce’ a sense of the regional in their reception, distribution, and
production, and draw on a pre-existing set of cultural tendencies within the region
(Steinberg 2019, 217). From this regional perspective, transmedia franchises are
understood as media mixes, which are strategic practices from the East-Asian region to

Proceedings of DiGRA 2023

© 2023 Authors & Digital Games Research Association DiGRA. Personal and educational classroom
use of this paper is allowed, commercial use requires specific permission from the author.
spread character-centred content across different media platforms and related products
(Steinberg 2012, viii).

FREEMIUM GAMES IN EAST-ASIA

Freemium games from East-Asia belong to the Games as a Service (GaaS) trend, where
game studios “indeterminately support and periodically release content incrementally
for existing games instead of developing new games or stand-alone sequels” (Dubois
and Weststar 2021, 2). In the early 2000s, games were sold as standalone premium
products that generated value through the sale of boxed or digital units (Bernevega and
Gekker 2021). However, with the rise of GaaS, the monetisation model of games
shifted from premium to freemium; that is, the game itself is free-to-play but contains
in-game purchases (Nieborg 2015). These purchases come, for example, in the shape
of lootboxes, random boxes that offer players an item from a pool of items, which are
often found in freemium games from the Euro-American game industries (Macey and
Bujić 2022). In contrast, freemium games from East-Asia often contain the gacha
mechanic, which has its own historical development on the mobile phone in Japan
(Matsui 2021). Gacha derives from the gachapon, capsule machines in Japan that sell
balls containing different items. Upon purchasing, consumers may or may not receive
the item they want. Gacha has been a peripheral but a common appearance in Japanese
transmedia franchises, as it does not only appear in games but also appears in the shape
of collectibles and playing cards (Ito 2007; Steinberg 2017). Nevertheless, both
lootboxes and gacha have been criticised by scholars and policy makers for their
potential to stimulate gambling disorders, and some types of these mechanics are
therefore regulated through industry self-regulations or consumer protection laws (Xiao
et al. 2022).

GACHA GAMES
This paper focuses on gacha games produced in Japan and/or with Japanese companies
that functions as the core text of a transmedia franchise. This paper will provide a close-
reading of several gacha games, such as Disney Twisted-Wonderland (f4samurai 2020)
and Genshin Impact in conjunction with a close-analysis of their related transmedia
franchises (in which the games are produced, and related products are sold) based on a
field study in Japan. These games are chosen for the study, because the production and
distribution of their content requires international collaboration between East-Asian,
and even global, companies to affect a large international audience. For example,
Disney Twisted-Wonderland is based on the intellectual properties from various
transmedia franchises owned by the Disney corporation but developed by the Japanese
online game developer f4samurai. The game was initially produced exclusively for
Japanese audiences but is now increasingly distributed to global audiences. Genshin
Impact uses the visual aesthetics associated with Japanese popular culture but is
developed by the Chinese developer miHoYo. The game has been distributed to players
world-wide from the start, and is highly popular in China, Japan, and the USA (Chapple
2022a). Furthermore, miHoYo collaborates with Ufotable, a Japanese animation studio,
to create an animation, thereby expanding their transmedia franchise (Diaz 2022). As
such, these case examples might look Japanese at first sight, they demonstrate that the
‘co-production’ of gacha games is not confined to a single country, like Japan, or
necessarily the East-Asian region.

According to Hartzheim (2019), licensed mobile games from Japan function to amplify
existing larger entertainment franchises. These games advertise the core texts to various
audiences, and actively stimulate player consumption for both in-game purchases and
franchise products (234). By examining these games, this paper will supplement
Harzheim’s observations, showing that gacha games have gradually become the core
product of a franchise, and are strategically employed by large conglomerates with
world-wide reach. The gacha mechanic has come to occupy the forefront of many

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entertainment franchises, which extends to franchise products outside of the game. That
is, most franchise products contain a randomisation of items from a pool of items so
that consumers never really know which item exactly they buy. This is important to
consider, because in the larger predatory trend of digital capitalism where consumers
are tracked to enhance user productivity and capital accumulation (Fuchs 2017, 117),
freemium games are also a part of this trends, because they tend to leverage player data
to channel player behaviour towards consumption (Whitson and French 2021). As this
paper will point out, the franchise products of freemium games are often not studied in
in how they channel consumption in- and outside of the game.

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