🧠 The Ultimate Gacha System Breakdown: What Every Game Designer Should Know by Jakub Remiar

This is the main and pretty much the deciding factor of what you want to do.

So, token systems in abstract terms, it basically means this kind of currency that defines the progression of your collection.

So, usually it can be shown as, as you see here, as hero characters or other collectible entity.

It doesn't need to be hero characters, can be like, as you see in golf clash, could be just golf clubs or something like that.

But again, this is something that's the main pretty much defines your collection system.

As said, they are required through random drop rewards from different drop pools of various rarity levels, having usually different drop rates, you know, legendary gacha, this gacha exclusive gacha, so on and so forth.

And the important part is, of course, how long can we roll the gacha until we have them all, the depth of the gacha.

This is, of course, for free-to-play critical implications because we are not premium.

We want the game to last pretty much forever because this is a game and service model.

So, best case scenario, you can roll the gacha forever, which implies that we still need to add more and more character into the pool.

Otherwise, the game, you know.

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Hello, hello dear listeners.

This is Jakub again in one of those solo sessions on Two and a Half Gamers Podcast.

Yeah, so there's been a lot of requests for this and I think you can get a little bit confused when I'm talking about gacha systems and stuff around their tokens and duplicate systems and all these other things.

So I decided to put my older talk, the one that is the GDC, back again and update it a little bit and walk you through it in a way basically, so you are a little bit more up to date with the terminology and this whole kind of categorization of gacha systems, how they work, how they can break very easily, and which are the most common ones, and how to know them.

So, I guess, yeah, this is pretty much it.

What is gonna what we are gonna talk about today.

So, let me share the screen and we can go.

So gacha,

yep, this is the like the first question.

What is gacha?

What is loot box?

It's basically the same thing.

It's just that gacha originates from Japan and the word gacha pon, as you see there, is this kind of machine, which is still pretty much on every corner street in Japan.

where it's a random reward machine basically.

So you throw in 100 yen

and then you get a random reward out of it.

That is usually pretty much the gist of it, how it works still in Japan.

It's a vending machine that dispenses these capsule toys that are called gacha.

And again, because Japan had mobile phones much, much sooner than the rest of the world, this was like one of the main inspiration behind the gacha systems that were done there in

their games.

In the West, as said, we know this word as loot box, and it's much more associated with a chest-like

item or container rather than this vending machine.

But it's basically the same, it's just a different name for the same random reward mechanic as you have seen.

And again, this has been a very, very dominant progression system across not only mobile games, but also AAA games.

Like

we've seen numerous iterations everywhere.

Also, the Star Wars 2 Battlefront fiasco with

Darth Vader being locked behind loot boxes and stuff like that.

So, yeah, that's just the gist of it.

Moving on,

as we'll go through the different gacha systems, first let's talk a little bit about the parts of the gacha, like how the system as an engine actually works, and what are the main things to focus on or main parts that you don't want to screw up, basically.

So, first thing is token system.

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Now let's get back to the episode.

This is the main and pretty much the deciding factor of what you want to do.

So token systems in abstract terms, it basically means this kind of currency that defines the progression of your collection.

So usually it can be shown as, as you see here, as hero characters or other collectible entity.

It doesn't need to be hero characters, can be like, as you see in golf clash, could be just golf clubs or something like that.

But again, this is something that's the main, pretty much defines your collection system.

As said, they are required to random drop rewards from different drop pools of various rarity levels, having usually different drop rates, you know, legendary gacha, this gacha, exclusive gacha, so on and so forth.

And the important part is, of course, how long can we roll the gacha until we have them all, the depth of the gacha uh this is of course for free-to-play critical implications because we're not premium we want the game to last pretty much forever because this is game as service model so best case scenario you can roll the gacha forever which implies that we still need to add more and more character into the pool otherwise the game you know

if we reach the end of it and we have the full collection like we leave that's the churn point so we never want to reach that

in order to do this you need to be able to adjust your gameplay also because it's not that easy.

Like for instance, Monster Strike here, I mean this is this image.

These guys already are past 3000 characters, so you really need to know what you're doing in order for this system to be able to even absorb these things.

The other system, which is the one that's mainly being given the role of absorption, is the duplicate system.

So that handles the problem of you getting the same character and what to do with it.

So there are many ways how these duplicant systems work,

again depending on the type of gacha.

But

yeah, it's pretty much a thing for excess or duplicate tokens that you are getting from the gacha system.

Because again, we need to roll it forever and we of course need to get duplicates in the process.

Usually it's operated by soft currency.

which is the kind of burning currency that you use.

For instance, here you see that if you want to upgrade this character, it costs some kind of soft currency.

Or cards in Clash Royale, if you upgrading them with their shards, it costs gold, of course.

So there's this kind of system that gates the upgrade mechanic of these things.

For instance, Clash Royale, oops, Clash Royale economy is based on gold scarcity.

So usually you have much more cards to upgrade than gold that you have for the upgrades, which is again one of just the design paradigms there.

And the important part is again that duplicates needs to be meaningful which means that getting a duplicate needs to still move you towards your progression.

So let's say

if I obtain a legendary token that I already got and there is no real use for it I will feel very bad because I could have gotten the other legendary but I use my legendary luck for this token that I have no use which is a problem.

So common solution would be to incentivize having duplicates such as

evolving my character by giving him more powers if he consumes his own duplicate or increasing his skill points or limit breaking him.

A lot of these games currently have some kind of system set up in a way that actually incentivize you to get multiples of legendary or whatever characters.

So once you get the first one that's great but then you need I don't know five more copies or six more copies like in Ponkai Stario Genshin Impact in order to fully unlock all of his powers which are really really strong if you literally literally have six duplicates absorbed into that one.

Yeah, as I said, the best system is the one where every drop is valuable, no matter if it's duplicate or not, or if it's a different token, doesn't matter.

Deck size.

This is another important subsystem of Gacha.

It represents the number of tokens per can take into the core gameplay at one time.

This is again super important.

Games can die based on wrong numbers that they would input here.

So, this gives us the much needed strategic element because we can only take a limited amount of tokens into the battle, which creates the whole deck building, strategic, dev tactical gameplay stuff.

Sometimes this is not really that visible, as for instance, some hero tokens are also carrying a layer of equipment, which is basically another set of tokens.

So, for instance, here we have where we are, we have two fleets of

six ships, so all together 12 ships from Arzulan, but each of these ships also have their own equipment, I think, six items on top of it.

So it's a lot of items and a lot of gacha roles to kind of get them up and running, pretty much execute properly their whole combo or strategy that you're doing.

In other systems, again, the characters, like Archer, for instance, characters are not the token system, or let's say now they are because Archer had a lot of updates in the meantime.

But for instance, the inventory and the equipment is just

the token system and the deck size.

For instance, here, in original Archero build, when they launched, there were just six

inventory items, but you can compare it to nowadays and you'll see what happens more on that later.

The important part is that if the deck size is too small, the game will suffer from not being able to properly differentiate challenges and strategic decision will become less impactful.

So this basically means that if I will have just one strong character or two strong characters and my deck size will be two, these can probably handle most of the challenges in the game.

Therefore, I don't have the need to roll more characters to upgrade and to have them.

So the wider we get this the better and games usually lock out also your teams which means that they require you to bring two or three teams of different characters again pushing you to upgrade more and more and more of these characters That's very important.

You need to be incentivized to upgrade all of your characters, actually, because again,

water challenge requiring electrical guys and fire challenge requiring water guys.

Again, just one of those systems that gives you a clear meaning of what team to build.

Collection driver.

And this is the overlap that I'm going to jump in from the previous sub point.

This, I think, is the most crucial and kind of hidden part of gachas that people really omit because token system duplicate system indexes, you can copy from any other game.

It's like quite easy, and you see it clearly how it works.

But collection driver, these drivers aren't that easy to copy and aren't that clear how they are actually incentivizing you and how the game gates progression based on these systems.

So, for instance, golf clash uses

a terrain system of these golf courses that dictates which golf clubs are best suited for each of these different tours or tracks or whatever.

In

Monster Strike, again, you can see that it's pretty much driven by elemental system.

So we have dark element, fire element,

leaf element or whatever.

Very bread and buttery system.

F Carina, for instance, they have their own elements.

This is three plus two.

The The Asian style monster strike, they have 4.

So, again, it depends, but there really needs to be some kind of a system that is doing this pretty much collection driver setup where it creates challenges for you, and these challenges need to be overcome by a different set of characters.

This is the thing that can drives your collection.

It could be an ever-changing metagame in a PvP meta game, and that's for instance how Clash Royale works.

Each arena, they add more and more tokens into the gacha.

The shifts the meta, and you need to adjust to it.

So your build from arena six won't really work in arena seven or eight, therefore, you need to change it because, again, new tokens that counter your previous tokens or different strategies, and blah, blah, blah.

There we go.

This is all part of core gameplay.

And when you're designing gacha system and when you having gacha system setups, it needs to be compatible to the core gameplay.

So core gameplay needs to have enough depth and vectors so you can connect these parameters from it into your tokens and then it will make all sense.

So example, Monster Strike, for instance, a lot of characters have these specific abilities or properties like, I don't know, immune to laser ball.

Because it's a pinball game and the pinball tokens, you know...

you throw them all over the place in this kind of rectangular board fashion they hit the wall a lot of times and one of the mechanics in the dungeons is a laser wall.

So, if you don't have the laser wall immunity setup, you will die in laser wall dungeon.

Very simple.

So, in order to beat that dungeon, you need to bring units that are immune to laser wall.

And there we go, because it's the part of core gameplay.

Yeah,

again, the same applies as from the previous setup.

If there are characters that are not balanced properly and they're just too strong or too

overpowered, regarding that they don't really feel the challenge to change them in different types of content, then yeah, the games become the gacha pretty much breaks because why would I need other characters if these two three or whatever characters can solve all my problems?

Okay, so now that we know all these things, let's look at like three of the different gachas that are most prevalent on the current market.

Solid token gacha

so or as I like to say hard gacha is the type of gacha where the main layer of tokens consist of very big collection, where the best tokens are really hard to get.

And this is the big differentiating factor because this is coming mainly from Asia, and usually Asian games have hard token gachas or solid token gachas.

By solid token, imagining that you cannot divide these tokens into fragments, they are gained in these binary scenarios, all or nothing.

So it either drops from the gacha or doesn't drop from the gacha.

It again depends on your your luck and on the depth of your wallet that you're willing to throw at the gacha.

But basically

you have, you know, if you're free to play pair or if you don't really throw money, you are very, very lucky if you can get even like one of these five star like top priority characters.

Just to give you an example, when I was playing Empires and Puzzles for one year,

I never got a five star character from the gacha during that whole one year.

I didn't pay anything there, but I still was playing the game pretty frequently every single day so yeah that tells you like how hard it is

um

one thing and a cheat code basically to recognize this gacha is that there's usually stars or some kind of different

visual like for instance here you have these charms or whatever asian symbols

that are under the characters that determine their strength so let's say four star characters are worse than five star characters five star characters is usually the common of knowledge of like these are the best ones but of course you can upgrade them like you see here where you end up with i don't know 20 star superstars or i don't know something but the baseline is like it's about the starting point that's the important part because a lot of these characters are defined by the starting point of for instance four star guy starts from lower stats than the five star guy and then that means that four star guy ends up evolving sooner than the five star guy whereas five star guy continues evolving and becomes much more stronger than the four-star guy.

Quite simple.

Also, what are the big games that are using this system?

So, of course, we have the behemoth of the industry, which is Tuzzle and Dragons and Monster Strike.

Monster Strike recently just passed 8 billion in overall lifetime revenue.

Amazing game.

Unfortunately, they shut down the international server in 2017, but yeah, this is like one of the best games to study actually regarding Gacha system because this is the gacha system the biggest one of all time

yeah so we have puzzle and dragons that was the first game that crossed 1 billion revenue on mobile followed by monster strike that was the second one then you have again you see a lot of asian staples here such as faint grain order

dragon ball z on mioji

Summoner's War and then of course

we can't omit our kind of latest entrance into this setup, which is the whole Hoyoverse portfolio of Genshin, Impact, Holocaust,

and Zenless Zone Zero, which are all running on Hard Solid Gacha.

On Western front, we don't have that many games that are successful, or there aren't even that many games to begin with.

So, the most successful one, I would say, would be Empires and Puzzles, which is

directly iteration, direct iteration of Puzzle and Dragons.

Then, we have Marvel,

Contest of Champions and then Red Shadow Legends

and Legendary Game of Heroes, which is again one of the other follow-ups of Puzzle and Dragons, but they didn't scale to the heights that actually guys from Small Giant and Piris and Puzzles did.

They were actually acquired by Zynga later down the line.

Last one, I think, into this kind of

bigger field is Red Shadow Legend, which was launched at the beginning of 2019 but again there's new games coming all over the place it's just that it's much harder to kind of establish a foothold now in the current market based on the u.s situation but yeah if you want to study on see the solid token gacha system in its current kind of best form i would definitely recommend hoyover's portfolio of genshi impact holkey star and zenos on zero these guys definitely know what they're doing even though they are facing pretty big diminishing returns on their portfolio because they are essentially making games for the same audience with very little modifications.

But yeah, we'll see.

So how this system actually works.

So

we usually have very large collections, like literally hundreds.

You need something like

in some cases like 200 characters or like 300 characters to even launch the game.

There needs to be different rotating drop pools that can be time exclusive and they are usually time exclusive which means that let's say

and again to give you an example genshin impact have like three week cycles so every three weeks there's a new character or like new gacha system doesn't necessarily a new new gacha banner doesn't necessarily need to be a new character sometimes they just re-roll or recycle the the previous ones for like limited period of time but most of the time they can add the new character today and not not one but multiple so that tells you like how much content they like the shout

genshin is like, I don't know, 200 million just for the maintenance, $10 million just for the maintenance of all that, like giant content right now that these guys are pushing out.

Again, really hard to get the best tokens and hard to upgrade them fully because, as I said, with one legendary, it just starts and you need all

its other progression layers.

You need this inventory, you need this skill points, you need this and that, and whatever.

So it's great that you finally have it.

It probably costs a lot of of money or a lot of gacha rolls, but still you can get more out of it.

But again, once you have it, you're kinda safe, let's say.

Um the duplicate system sometimes you can get literally nothing.

It's very very cutthroat in a way that lots of times these things just don't get you anything.

Tokens can eat up all other tokens, increasing their stats.

This is usually the case where you recycle other characters into your main characters, pretty much consuming them through a fusion system or even a recipe system like Summoners War or Rage of the Legends they have a recipe system literally so if you build it up and consume it like a recipe you actually get like a legendary character or good character so that can also happen

and yeah duplicates having special bonus or unlockable effect the one that we talk about that like limit breaking something giving more skills or other things there.

Deck size.

Usually it's around five tokens with multiple layers and multiple decks.

Could be four, could be six, could be more, but like this is pretty much the usual setup.

In order to properly play the game, the player has to build multiple compositions of his deck to be able to overcome all games' challenges.

This is our usual water deck, fire deck, electric deck.

something something pick your element or pick your like driving mechanic from the game and you need to build different teams that this is this is a big focus.

That is mainly the PV progression and many side progressions that often represent the endgame content of the game.

Social element is how the utilized in this stage, such as social helper mechanic, where you can select your best token to be borrowed by your friends.

This is usually the thing that these things have, therefore, they push you to have the best friends in your friend list.

You kick the inactive ones and always keep the best ones because sometimes, in like games like AFK Arena,

you you literally need just

great friends in order to pass levels because you literally use

once a day you use their best character, which could be just, I don't know,

two months more upgraded than yours, which actually helps you to solve levels.

And then there's no other way to do it without those friends.

This really pays off the social helper mechanic.

Said, it's mainly Pv-driven.

PvP is more of an afterthought or again, not really a focus of these games.

It's there.

There are special characters just designed for PvP, of course, because they also want to cater to this kind of audience, but it's not a priority for these games.

It's kind of a nice thing to have somewhere there on the sideline.

Main thing is, of course, always the bosses, the clans, the

PvE rates, and stuff like that.

That's the main content of these games where their solid token gachas are in place.

Advantages.

So we have great

longevity, where, as you've seen like Monster Strike is still doing like nearly a billion a year

system scales very well and it's super deep because again we have all of these challenges all these characters that are multiple progression layers on top of them.

So yeah, it's still very very

deep and very very robust pretty much and again it has super monetization capability usually how you immediately recognize these games when looking at their revenue charts is they're very spiky and they all come in spikes.

Most of the spend is done during the initial release of the exclusive gacha or like like the new characters through these banners.

People buy it or and then once they have it they can play it a little bit and then wait until another one hits the rotation and then they buy it.

So it's not the usual constant flow of something like I don't know Clash Royale or these like Golf Clash, all these other games where it's like a constant line of I don't know, two million, three million a day.

This is more of a like very, very big spike.

So like I'm monster strike was, I don't know, 12, 15 million.

Yeah, pretty much very, very big spike, but then again, and drops down very heavily and then just goes.

Same also goes for Gameshin Impact.

You can literally see that every three weeks there's a big spike in the revenue chart.

This is how it is.

Which brings us to disadvantages because it's very heavy content driven and there's a lot and lot a lot of content that you need to add into the game after the global launch so yeah it demands a really big team and big capacity from your live ops production to kind of keep keep running because this is just how these games work

As I said, it's not only afterwards, but even before, like from the start, because again, people go like crazy and it's because it's pv e-content they eat it out like there's no tomorrow so we still need to have a sizable chunk of content for people to go somewhere like i would always recommend something like three months worth of content for you to launch the game and then during those three months until people reach the end of it you hopefully give them more

put the carrot on a stick somewhere further down the line so they can still chase it and kind of move after it.

Gatcha pools can feel luck-based and unrewarding.

This is like one of the biggest disadvantages for Asian games in the Western market where people in the West are not really used to these gotcha-based mechanics of binary situations of,

you know,

we either have it or you don't have it.

Like that, that's also where all the pity timers are coming from, where all these mitigations of these mechanics are coming from.

And that's also where this whole different gacha system was born because that was the main purpose and main innovation that that they did there that they

removed this very lag based feeling which again people in the west aren't really that comfortable with

yeah so let's talk about it shard token gacha so

this is called either shard token gacha or fragment gacha engine or however you pretty much want to call it it's something that can be split into parts

as the name implies tokens are divided into shards which are needed for the upgrade.

It's pretty easy to update most of the tokens eventually.

The hard part comes with the upgrade.

Every drop is rewarding, and all shards come towards the token upgrades.

Gacha pools are very generous and always gives the feeling of progress.

The cheat sheet again, the visual hint is that under each of our characters, there's this kind of a loading bar which is being fulfilled as you collect the tokens.

That's the immediate thing that you can spot a

shard token gacha in a game where, yeah, usually it's a derivative of Clash Royale.

That's that's most of the times that I've seen.

But again, Supercell uses it in a lot of their games.

Idlers started using it.

There's other games that are clever that didn't chase after Clash Royale, like Golf Clash.

They are using it.

Many, many games are using it because this system is working very, very well in the West.

It's very scalable.

So the top games that are being used here is, of course nearly all the supercell games clash royale bro stars golf clash force was using it when it was launched random dice was using it and now rush royale is using it so the my games can follow up on that game

then we have trailer park boys which was the first idler that implemented this progression in

adventure communities we changed with it idle mind a tycoon later implemented it

hero wars has it

Golden Goblins has it, which is currently the best idler on the market, in my opinion.

Star Wars, Galaxy of Heroes has it, or Marvel Strike Force.

So, yep, there's lots of games that are having this.

It's, I would say, not that obvious on the market that, like,

because in the West, we don't have that much RPG tradition, so the revenues aren't that big because only so few games are there, whereas in Asia, it's pretty much everywhere.

But it's still a major chunk of revenue is coming from shard token gacha games, definitely.

So how does this work?

Torques are given by increasing amounts of shards.

These economies scale as he goes.

So for instance, to give you an example, in Clash Royale, in Arena 1, if you get skeletons or giants from a...

I don't remember which ones actually, or goblins which you get, you get, I don't know, five shards per per drop from a chest like a common chest if we go arena seven or whatever higher and we get same situation that the common chest opens and we would have the goblins we would instead get 20 or 30 or i don't know how many shards because the system just scales and this feels great because it's increasing numbers and suddenly you're showered with these tokens because as i said you can give all of the tokens to the player like you trip feed them legendary after legendary shard after legendary because they still cannot upgrade the legendary and yeah, it doesn't matter.

Therefore, it's just much more constant and flexible.

So instead of big spikes, you constantly give them a little bit of something that they eventually upgrade.

And upgrade.

The time to upgrade is the important part.

We'll talk about it a little bit later.

But yeah, it's mitigating this whole giant lag-based randomness.

So we have one expanding drop pool that is unlocked by player level.

Again, that's the same thing as Skash Royale, whereas you start with i don't know six tokens then next arena you move you add three or four more tokens next arena same the other arena same and suddenly at the last arena like the clash wheel is i don't know what like 120 tokens and starting this is very good because it always

increases the size of the pool and by increasing the size of the pool of course we're lowering the chance of you getting the token that you want making the gacha deeper and deeper meaning it can absorb more and more money so that's great but also it has this very nice kind of onboarding side effect whereas when we locked all these tokens from behind higher level arenas you just get to play with a specific set that's designed for beginners and then you add a little bit more which again is a little bit more advanced not the really advanced tokens so It's great with pacing the content progression of gacha.

This system works pretty well in that.

Easy to obtain best tokens, but very hard to fill a grape.

As I said, you can get legendaries pretty much every single day, just very small amounts.

But then again, the upgrade numbers kick in, and you need to get, I don't know, 500-600 tokens of these legendaries.

So, yeah, it takes still a lot of time.

Even though you're still getting them every day, it takes a lot of time to upgrade them eventually.

Overall collection is much smaller than Solid Gacha.

Yeah, this is the other big difference that

usually all of these tokens needs to be relevant both in end game and uh early game.

So you don't build a collection of like monsters like three thousand tokens like Clash Royale is what?

Clash Royale is now nine years old and it has what like one hundred thirty, one hundred fifty tokens, something like that.

It can still go from that because

their tokens needs to be working a little bit differently and they don't have that much pressure on creating the like that men that much content like remember not nowadays but back in the day supercell was

very

very focused on these small cells whereas the clash royale team was i don't know 10 people or something some kind of very small small size and it was still able to operate this multi-billion dollar game so it's definitely much more easier but that that much harder to build in order to make this work

duplicate system each duplicate counts and feels as frequent small steps of progress.

As I said, this is just very, very rewarding.

Tokens can only merge shards of its own duplicate.

This is super important.

You cannot really merge different shards like in previous stuff, where we would just fuse all the unwanted characters, especially the low-rarity ones, to kind of give XP to our main character.

We can't do that.

And this puts a very interesting mechanic here because it pretty much puts the whole gacha on rails.

Because when you get and open these chests, it can be very easily projected, as you're pretty much having a percentage chance to get every single token from it.

So by opening those eventually you have the same pace on a

longer term statistic where you pretty much get all the tokens on equal values with some randomness and noise on top of it.

You can calculate very easily how many days it will take you on average to get all of these tokens and pretty much all of them from all of the characters from one rarity?

Yeah, it's just on Rails.

And what this does is that it pretty much creates a very cohesive experience for

everyone and every single player, which is great because you can control it and script it and

make sure that everybody's having a great time instead of being on one side of the Gauss curve having a bad time.

Each level of token requires more and more shards of its own, ending with thousands.

Yeah, as I said, the whole economy scales.

So, not only do we get more and more rewards, more soft currency, more tokens drop from these chest systems, you also increase the requirements for these upgrades.

And ClashQuery pretty much has exponential upgrade curves, so every next upgrade is like

doubling the cost of previous upgrades.

So, you end up with years, actually.

It takes literally years to kind of upgrade these tokens.

Now, deck size, original setup of Clash Well was eight without any additional layers.

Idle games can use whole collection as a deck.

This is literally a cheat code where idle games, what they did, they put the multipliers behind the idle part of the game behind these cards.

So, this is talking about adventure companies or golden goblins, where literally if you if you remember like how adventure capitalists work, like you have like these different Excel roles basically that are scaling themselves.

So, instead of putting a number like 2.2 or 2.3 on whatever times you put a character there you put him on a gacha progression and you just increase the number of multiplier from that node and it works perfectly so yeah for anyone making idler definitely recommend going check that one out because you use all of these tokens all the time because again you reset the nodes and in every single level they are the same nodes so it's perfect it's really really genius but for normal games you usually have something like six to eight tokens in the setup.

Collection driver usually is a competitive PvP metagame.

This bodes same for Golf Clash, where in Golf Clash, you have

it's a PvP game because, again, you're competing in parallel with the player that you're going one-on-one again, even though there's zero interaction between you two.

It's just that whoever can scores it's on less shots.

But the PvP in their case is the PvE side of it, which means like how fast can you take on the terrain challenges?

A clever single-player content requiring different deck compositions.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I said.

Yeah, most of the times it's PvP driven because the PvP metagame it's adjusted to that expanding pool of tokens in different arenas which changes these things.

So it's it's mainly PvP driven.

Advantages.

Very generous.

Frequent drops adjusted literally and developed for Western audience.

Whoever did that in Supercell was a genius.

Luck is not a major factor considering the drops.

So even though it can feel lucky, it's pretty much on Rails and there's like an illusion of

luck.

Needs much less tokens to start and not heavy content driven.

So sounds great, doesn't it?

Like, why would anyone choose the Asian gacha?

So wait a second.

Each token needs to be meaningful in the endgame, which can get very problematic because

you are instead of upgrading your

rare fire tank character to legendary fire tank or whatever, like filling these roles in these different teams,

you need to create

decks and builds that can compete against each other, which is just much, much, much more harder.

And your players also need to understand these strategies and build those decks, which again creates a little bit of niche.

And we are in a problematic situation that this is very very hard to balance because

yeah imagine the moment that you add another token into the 130 token pool and it has basically synergies with all the other tokens and shifts the whole thing and completely changes it and stuff yeah just like it's a nightmare trust me i've been there seen that and not done that because I would uh yeah was able to do that but it's just much much harder that was also one of the things why all of the games that were following Clash Royale failed on miserably.

And if you've seen that in previous slides, Puzzle and Dragons was followed by Monster Strike pretty successfully.

So yeah, it's not that easy to build this thing.

Not able to monetize on collection aspect

because we're not having really a collection as everybody has pretty much the same collection.

There are no exclusive gachas, no exclusive time things, like you can really put whatever some kind of very important token from the deck like giant on like

three week timer banner gacha that like you can only get him during this time and then you can get him I don't know next year.

This won't work in this model.

So it's much harder to monetize these things because the exclusivity and all of this kind of very very big luck base factor is now gone.

So we also sacrifice that.

Harder to build collection drivers which can destroy the whole system.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I just said on previous slide.

The PvP metagame needs to work very well and you need to intuitively know and slowly script the unlocking of these tokens that will be, you know, counters, different setups, so on and so forth.

So it just takes much more skill to execute this whole setup.

And then we have the merge token gacha.

And this is like one of my favorite systems actually,

because I would say this is an eclectic system that takes advantages of both systems without taking that much disadvantages.

This was found, this already

found success during the later half of 2019 with games like AFK Arena

and Archero.

Overall collection is not that big compared to Solid Token Gacha, but still bigger than Shard Gacha.

Tokens here are usually merged with their duplicates, upgrading their rarity.

Luck plays a much bigger role than in Shard Gacha, but this role is not that major as with Sawy token gacha.

So we're literally taking the middle ground in both content

creation and luck impact.

The visual hint to recognize this gacha engine, the usual cheat sheet, is that you see a lot of tokens of the same type with different rarities in the inventory.

So what that means is basically you see here we have these two green sites and they are on common rarity but we also have the same site on uncommon rarity which means that if we merge these two or I think this is merge three now yeah this is a merge three one so if we would have one more common site we would merge these three common sites to get another uncommon site and so we would upgrade it and move on forward blah blah blah

there are different things in the merging setup so we talk about those but yeah I'm Pretty positive that this works very, very well.

And I think

current setup is moving especially for games that are designed more for the west towards this this kind of setup this or the solid one shard one

you don't see that much shard gacha token games uh anymore in these these like last years

so as said this was spearheaded by f kierina and archero

how it works Tokens are merged in a pack of three or two into each other, increasing the rarity.

The higher the rarity, the higher the level cap unlock of the token.

So pretty simple.

Each duplicate counts and feels a small step of progress because, again, it's a little bit similar to the shark token gacha.

Tokens can only merge their own duplicate, or, and this is the kicker, tokens can only merge duplicates from the same element or and their own duplicates.

So, I think I don't have an image here, but basically, what this does is that you're upgrading tokens in Hefkerina, for instance.

You only need to upgrade the, I don't know the

Lion Guy token Brutus one so you need copies of Brutus and then at some point you need to upgrade him again and you don't need copies of Brutus you just need copies from heroes based on the same rarity from the same element so that means that the heroes that I'm actually not using that are kind of bad I still upgrade them because I'm using them as fuel to upgrade my other main character which again is coming from the

the sorry token gacha system the fusion system that's there so this combines both and i think it works very very well

all the big games from hubby portfolio are testament to that that this system works very well especially on more casual casual players

deck size around five six tokens with multiple layers and multiple decks survivor io launch with six items then they added more six item test deck parts now they have i don't know how many items but yep something like six items i think is the sweet spot here.

Collection driver, mainly PvE progressions with multiple sideline progressions.

Yeah, literally, I think Dark Forest in AFK Arena.

There's like every single mold that you can imagine.

PvP is usually an added bonus, not the focus.

So again, an afterthought.

Yeah, these games don't really have that much focus on PvP.

And again, because we have this heavy PvE progression, we have support for social features such as clans, such as social helpers and all these other things.

So this one is, I think, very

kind of

the good middle ground that you should be using and you should use, especially if you're doing hybrid casual games and all these other things, because

they, again, they don't require that much capacity or skill to execute compared to the previous systems.

Luck can be heavily moderated based on the design decision and you can literally

push it one way or the other depending how much stingy you want to be during the requirement of you need just the same token or you can use the other token like this is the main kind of slider that you can move there duplicates feel rewarding and they can unlock chain merges

yeah one other thing is that this thing which is in disadvantages creates big pressure on inventory management because you're literally playing inventory tetris where a lot of these these things are just cluttering your inventory.

Whereas you're just missing that one common token that would give you three immediate merge into uncommon, which would again merge the uncommons into rare and so on so forth.

And like suddenly, one token unlocks, like, I don't know, seven to eight merges.

So, yeah, this is like one of the maintenance systems that needs to be think about.

You think about here.

Yeah, it's just a side effect of this that it's just problematic.

is the middle road between shared and solid token code and demands.

Yeah, we talk about that one.

You can easily increase the pool of tokens again, the same because it's a PV-driven progression.

We don't really need to think about the PVP meta again that much.

So it's quite easy to add more tokens constantly into the pool.

Creates a big pressure.

Yeah, we talk about heavy features admin seems too complex to approach.

Yeah, so that means that some of the things that there are there

can be very overwhelming if you unfold all the features of the game immediately.

That's why these games like excel at unfolding very, very slowly and you need to do it.

So

you start Survivor I/O or Archero, there's just like one button in the whole menu after the first battle, which is like upgrade skill tree.

And then it slowly unfolds battle after battle, feature after feature.

Because in the end there will be very heavy feature set.

Like survivor io has literally like two main ui ui main menus just with all all the features that it downloads like all those side progressions everything pacing is the key because it can get very overwhelming

so now we have some kind of accessibility range accessibility range that that's like how i want to kind of frame this as this is more of a continuum this is not again a binary situation so we have solid token games which have tokens that are very very hard to get And then we have shared token games, which

have tokens that are very easy to get, and you're pretty much

getting all of them anyway.

And then you have the merged token games, such as, again, all the hubby portfolio, AFK Arena,

where or AFK Journey,

where it's a middle ground.

And it's a very, very good middle ground, especially it's working very well for hubby.

but there's not that many companies that can pull this off that successfully.

So in Asia, the solid token model still rules, and if I would have to bet, I would guess most of the revenue is coming from Solid Token games.

In the West, yeah, it's different, of course.

These models are just much more accustomed to the Western audience regarding the shard token system.

You could see that with Brawl Stars basically, like striking to the moon.

But yeah, my prediction here is that we will still see all of these systems being used and the combinations of those.

Like some, for instance, Hero Wars, they have again a little bit of a

merge token set up there where you need to first unlock the heroes from the shards and then you have the yeah, yeah.

So there can be a little bit of in-between modifications, but my guess is that solid tokens will still rule the Asia because it has the best monetization setup and pretty much the most aggressive monetization, which Asian audience is used to, so this will still work.

Shard tokens will again work very well in in idlers or maybe some other genres that are able to adapt them into their progression.

PvP style game like Clesh Royale and Brawlstars are very hard to do, and only a few companies such as Supercell are able to pull this off.

So I'm a little bit more skeptical towards seeing like big shard token games rising in the west in the near future.

What I expect fully is that we'll see more and more of heavy solid token games arising in the east and maybe even overlapping into the west a little bit, but yeah, that's there.

And of course, guys from Hubby will continue their pipeline because their whole progression of Rogue RPG is always the same in this merge gacha token setup, which works great for them.

They're not that big, but still, Capybarrago and Archer 2 are pretty good successes, so they'll continue there, and I think that's a good middle ground.

Okay, that's it.

Thank you for listening to this little bit of a refresh on how gacha systems work.

If you have any comments or want to kind of ask questions or suggest another topic or any pretty much thing that comes to your mind, feel free to let me know either in the comments or you can join our Slack where there's a lot of helpful people.

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And yeah, see you next time.