The Gacha Gaming sub genre has been evolving for the past few years, and has become a staple of the rapidly growing, massively profitable mobile game industry. Some gamers are very critical of gacha games overall. They believe they are incomplete cash grabs that ruin the industry. And in some cases that may be true, but it would be very shortsighted to ignore the beast that is growing right before our very eyes. Genshin Impact released a few weeks ago, and has had a very successful launch. I believe this is going to be looked at as one of the most monumental video game releases of all time. Now that is a very bold statement to make. But I truly believe we are witnessing video game history. We have all of the ingredients, sugar, spice, and cute anime girls. This series will cover important events in Gacha gaming history. From its humble beginnings, leading all the way up to the massive success that is Genshin Impact.
The gacha or lootbox mechanic(we’ll talk about lootboxes later) has been present in many games. But for this series we are going to focus on the more traditional gacha games as we know today, and how the history of Gacha gaming has led to games like Genshin Impact becoming so successful relatively quickly. One of the first gacha games that saw major success was Konami’s Dragon collection. Dragon Collection was released in the year 2010. This was a few years after Apple released the App store in 2008. An important note because mobile gaming blew up massively with the success of the iPhone.
Dragon Collection wouldn’t be classified as a gacha game at launch, but it would be considered a social network game. Some of you are young, but around this time games like Mafia Wars, and Farmville were extremely huge on Facebook at the time. Just for perspective the original creator of Farmville is a billionaire now. Dragon Collection was released on the social media network GREE. The name is derived from an abbreviation of the “Six degrees of separation” concept which is the idea that all people on average are six, or fewer, social connections away from each other. They were also six steps away from your bank account as well. Very clever to name your social network after this. It is insane to think Dragon Collection had an estimated 10 million players within the first few years of it’s release, and with the GREE social network being estimated at around 30 million users around that time, it would seem that nearly everyone you knew was playing this game. If you were Japanese of course. This is similar to the aforementioned Farmville that was blowing up around the same time, and subsequently caused many users to delete their Facebook accounts in anger because they were sick and tired of your spam Farmville requests.(I was one of those)But it doesn’t matter since the game is closing at the end of the year. It seems nothing is safe from the wrath of 2020.
The gameplay of Dragon Collection was rather simple. Limited animations, card battler gameplay. It isn’t the most engaging, and its age really shows when you look back at it. We can see other players’ profile pictures in the menus, which is a common staple of social network games. From my research this is considered to be the oldest true social/Gacha game to take off. To be clear this is not the first game to have a gacha mechanic. We have seen MMORPGS such as MapleStory implement this into their games long before, but Dragon Collection was the oldest mobile game to blow up in the Japanese mobile gaming scene. This game is so old. It originally came out on feature phones. On the website SiliconEra there is an article that featured an interview with Tatsuya Nishioka, who was the Senior Director at Marvelous Online at the time. The article is titled: “How Angry Birds And Dragon Collection Changed The Fates Of Two Markets”. An interesting read to show how two mobile gaming markets were developing at the same time, but playing different types of games. What I found most interesting was his take on the shift of the Japanese gaming market.
“Let’s first look back at the history of casual games in Japan,” Nishioka suggested. “Casual games became popular in Japan around 2009 or 2010. In those days, GREE and DeNA were only providing services on feature phones. The card game boom first started in late 2010, when Konami released Dragon Collection. It had a cumulative total of 10 million users then, and at the same time GREE and DeNA were announcing their SNS community was around 20 to 30 million users, so you can understand how huge Dragon Collection was.
-Tatsuya Nishioka
Dragon collection was a massive success, and was able to take advantage of a shifting market due to the smartphone boom. Little did we know that this would be the humble beginnings of a massive gaming market.
A year and a half later after we got our hands Dragon Collection. We got the hot new game on the block Puzzle and Dragons. The match three game came out of nowhere. Released in Spring 2012 by Gungho Online Entertainment. A game built by only six people was able to take the top spot of the Japanese App Store, and it held that spot for a really long time. At one point, the game was raking in 2.5 million dollars a day. Pennies to Jeff Bezos, but still a pretty penny nonetheless. In an interview with VentureBeat, Gungho Online entertainment CEO Kazuki Morishita was asked. How his game got so popular.
Good luck. [Laughs] I established the company when I was in my mid-20s, and back then I had a very hands-on approach. The company was smaller, so I could oversee all of the creative direction and production and development. We had a very big title in Ragnarok Online, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, and as the company grew from there, I focused more on the business aspect.
Source: VentureBeat
What is shocking about the success of this Gacha game is the fact the Android version was released seven months later, combined with its performance in the United States. P.A.D. Dominated in Japan, but the performance was lackluster stateside during its first year. Hovering around the top 50 grossing apps, and within the top 800 downloads. For context it is important to note that Morishita stated that he did not focus on any advertising, mentioning that he wanted higher ratings for the game first, and explained there was a better return for advertising in Japan.
Puzzle and Dragons has been a massive success even to this date it is still one of the highest grossing mobile games eight years after release. It is estimated to have made over 7 billion dollars in revenue. Basically the equivalent of everybody in the entire world giving GungHo one dollar, that is absolute insanity.
The success of Puzzle and Dragons did not come without criticism. The gacha mechanic would come under heavy scrutiny which would lead to one of the most important events in Gacha Gaming. Stay tuned for the installment in the Gacha Gaming History series. The End of Kompu Gacha! The Japanese Government Cracks Down!
Be sure to check out the video associated with this article on Youtube!
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