For a programmer, are those gacha "vending machines" available in code libraries? I would love to experiment with implementing one in a productivity web application.
Gacha games are mostly card-puller games. You pay $X for X pulls, with more expensive packages giving more pulls with a supposed higher success rate of 'winning' (getting a good/rare pull).
They use hidden weights, as well as max item rolls per day. This means that to keep items rare via artificial scarcity they will only allow so many of those cards to be pulled per X hours/days/whatever but they don't tell you this anywhere. So if that new hot card that just dropped is up for grabs, you buy 10 pulls. But you don't know that it's already been pulled X times by other people, so you have literally no chance to 'win'. So those pulls will be wasted.
The companies always lie about chances to win, the pulls are insane, you can see streamers do massive pulls, the numbers are sometimes out there, just community gathered.
A real life example is one of those light-roulette machines at arcaded where you slam the button to stop the spinning light. The only actual chance you have to win is after $X has been spent on the machine, before that threshold has been met winning is impossible, stopping the light at the correct spot won't matter it will simply roll to the next losing light. Or claw machines are the same and will only actually close enough to grab a toy after $X has been spent.
Gambling is one thing but these skinner boxes masquerading as games are pure evil as they change the rules constantly and make winning downright impossible.
This is why I’ve always been a bit surprised developers haven’t done more to get ahead of these kinds of issues with responsible disclosures and transparency, because it seems to be just inviting regulation. I honestly don’t think most F2P games pull the kinds of slimy tricks you’re accusing them of (most just use simple loot tables and RNG), but there’s nothing holding them accountable to say they can’t because everything is opaque.
I played some when they first dropped and the android playstore options were limited. You could see the bullshit weights first-hand if you had enough free pulls. Again, this, along with streamers doing massive pulls, and community-gathered spreadhseets are where I get my information, not from the game page that says '1 in 100 chance of legendary pull!' because, again, it's always been bullshit.