Oh, man. I worked as a community manager for a free-to-play mobile gaming company in the US about 10+ years ago. The gacha mechanic just absolutely ruined gam

Oh, man. I worked as a community manager for a free-to-play mobile gaming company in the US about 10+ years ago. The gacha mechanic just absolutely ruined games for normal, everyday users. You had random moms and grandmas write in with the sweetest messages asking for features or reporting a bug. For the most part, their feedback and requests went right into the garbage can. Meanwhile, we had people from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Singapore spending $40K USD per week on in app purchases. Gacha is effectively gambling and exploiting users' propensities for addictive behavior. We would jokingly call it the "Gotch Ya!" mechanic. Feature roadmaps, bug fixes and A/B tests were all about "optimizing the funnel" -- i.e., how do we get these whales to spend more money or more parts of the app. Good god, it was so demoralizing.