The Gacha Craze Isn’t Over, But Some Developers Are Rethinking The Controversial Genre

Love them or hate them, gacha games are huge right now, and there’s no sign that’s going to change on a large scale any time soon. By their nature, they exclude players without a lot of disposable income and can form the same addictive attachments as other forms of gambling. But the potential to make a boatload of money means the incentives for developers to keep making them are huge. Despite that, a few developers have been bucking the trend toward aggressive monetization lately and hoping to find success without fleecing their fans.

Back in 2022, in the wake of Genshin Impact’s massive success, developer Hotta Studio released Tower of Fantasy. One of many games to take inspiration from Genshin Impact’s character designs and open world, Tower of Fantasy set itself apart by featuring more elements of massively multiplayer online RPGs, letting players interact with one another a bit more than in a typical gacha game. Now, it’s taking the surprising step of seeing how well its gacha MMORPG could work if it just dumped the gacha part entirely.

As of November 25, Tower of Fantasy has launched a brand-new server called the Warp server. Rather than just offering more space to add players, the game works in a fundamentally different way on the Warp server. Playing there, you won’t see any gacha elements at all. On every other server, you still trade in-game currency (purchasable with real money, of course) for a random selection of characters. On the Warp server, however, there are new ways to earn the rewards that gacha banners offer elsewhere. Some can be earned directly by playing special events and others can be earned by logging in repeatedly and participating in daily quests.

Tower of Fantasy’s Warp server launch comes just a day after another experiment in removing the gacha half from a gacha RPG, and this one is an even bigger change. Solo Leveling: Arise launched on PC and mobile platforms in 2024. Based on a popular anime series, the game initially drew a lot of players, but also received heavy criticism for its overbearing gacha system, which makes progressing without spending money extremely difficult.

But this week, developer Netmarble launched Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive, a reboot designed for PC. Unlike its free-to-play predecessor, Arise Overdrive is a paid game (going for $40) that doesn’t feature any gacha mechanics. As with Tower of Fantasy, the new port doesn’t replace the existing gacha game, instead offering an alternative way to play.

Neither game is likely to usher in an anti-gacha revolution. While Tower of Fantasy and Solo Leveling: Arise were criticized for their gacha systems, there are much more fundamental issues in both games. In Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive in particular, players on social media have largely found that the game’s progression systems — which were initially built with gacha in mind — are still a grind even without real money on the line. And the repetitive gameplay of Tower of Fantasy is still intact even in its Warp servers.

But the fact that developers are experimenting with removing gacha at all feels significant. Typically, gacha games don’t need everyone to buy into their monetization mechanics to succeed. A small handful of players spending huge sums is more than enough to make up for the large number of players who never spend a dime. So if a game’s gacha mechanics are so unpopular that it doesn’t even attract those big spenders, it’s a sign that something needs to change.

The launch of Tower of Fantasy’s Warp server and Solo Leveling: Arise Overdrive comes on the heels of an even bigger anti-monetization move. RuneScape, the long-running sandbox MMORPG, recently made the decision to remove its own controversial lootboxes, leaving the final say up to a vote by its players, who overwhelmingly approved the change. None of this means that gacha games are going away any time soon. They’re still much too profitable for developers to turn away from en masse, but if some are making a move as dramatic as pulling out their biggest money-making systems altogether, it could be a sign that gacha fatigue is finally putting a dent in the massively popular, and equally controversial, genre.