The Alibi of Transparent Gacha

A small number floats on the screen. 0.5 percent. The probability of obtaining a highest-grade character. Game companies call this kindness, and regulators call it achievement. South Korea mandated probabilistic item information disclosure by law starting in March 2024, with penalties possible for violations. Yet revenues have not declined. Far from dying, gacha appears healthier than ever.

Typical criticism stops here. It's because desire is strong, dopamine is frightening, people lack self-control. All explanations that reduce it to individual moral problems. I doubt this explanation.

Gacha survives not because humans are weak. It's because the system is designed to account for desire. Probability, pity, pickup, limited, rerun. These words are not gaming terms but accounting entries. A ledger that most efficiently extracts the resource called willingness to pay.

So what did transparency accomplish? Probability disclosure certainly reduced information asymmetry. With the number 0.5 percent displayed, it's now hard to claim deception. That very point is the trap. The disclosed number becomes not information but an alibi. "You pressed it knowing it was 0.5 percent." Responsibility for loss quietly shifts from designer to user.

The cost of transparency is transferred this way. Game companies fulfilled their disclosure obligations and expanded the territory of legality, while users newly shouldered the weight of personal choice. Efficiency always increases someone else's costs instead of reducing someone's costs. The side whose costs decreased here is the game companies' reputational risk.

Knowing the odds doesn't prevent loss. Even someone who precisely understands 0.5 percent loses to the intuition that pulling 200 times should yield one. The gap between actual expected value and perceived expected value—that gap is revenue itself. Disclosing numbers doesn't touch this gap. Rather, it covers it with a roof called legality.

Look at the pity system. A structure that guarantees delivery after a certain number of attempts. Superficially, it's consumer protection. In reality, it's the game company pre-setting the spending ceiling as a price. The pity system is designed not as "you can stop once you spend this much" but "we can make you spend up to this point." A price tag wearing the shell of a protection mechanism.

Platform power intervenes here. Most mobile gacha payments go through app stores. Apple and Google take commissions of around 30 percent, riding atop the massive flow of probabilistic revenues. When regulation targets game companies, platforms stand one step behind. The greatest beneficiary of desire accounting doesn't display numbers on screen.

And what about data? Who stopped when, where they pressed one more time—every minute signal is collected. Through A/B testing, pity positions, limited periods, pickup display orders are constantly adjusted. Users know the odds but don't know they're real-time experimental subjects. What's disclosed is only result probability; the algorithm optimizing extraction remains undisclosed. The real asymmetry remains there.

Say a Busan university student put two months' allowance into a limited character. Is he irrational? Is it his own responsibility since he pressed knowing it was 0.5 percent? I see that frame itself as design's victory. As long as responsibility is tied to the individual, the structure is eternally innocent.

There's a strong counterargument. Why prevent adults from spending their own money on games—it's freedom and preference, the argument goes. It's half right. Consumer freedom must be protected. But free choice only holds when information is symmetric and design is neutral. If one side holds all behavioral data and experiments while the other sees only one result number, that's not freedom but asymmetry. We don't call that a market.

So this isn't about stopping technology. The gacha format itself isn't evil either. The problem is by whose rules that format operates. Current rules were written by game companies and platforms, and disclosure obligations merely added one line of alibi.

Better design is possible. Displaying not just result probability but actual cumulative spending amounts to reach pity on screen. Disclosing the existence and variables of A/B experiments. Setting as default not just minor payment limits but adult monthly spending caps that users set themselves. None of these would kill gacha. They would simply make both sides view the cost accounting ledger together.

Disclosure is the starting line, not the finish line. South Korea was the first country in the world to legally mandate probability disclosure. Then we also have the right to ask the next question. Why, when odds are disclosed, do losses still flow in only one direction? If the answer isn't in the numbers, what we must look at is the hand holding the ledger. Transparent gambling isn't non-gambling—it's just a well-organized ledger.