A Chronology of the Gambler’s Fallacy in Localized Japanese Gachapon, Popmart Blind Boxes, and Mobile F2P Gacha Games
Updated: 7 days ago
HON 203: Seminar in Multiculturalism (Japanese Popular Culture in Global Contexts) Spring 2026
When I was 10 and visiting the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas, I stepped into a casino for the first time, intending to cross through with my parents to make it to a dinner reservation. I was ill-prepared for the sight that would greet me: thick swolls of cigarette smoke hung in stilled air, fixed from all the lingering tuxedos that oggled over spinning, whirring, click-clacking machines. Fingers tapped at buttons, pulled at levers, drummed anxiously against plastic and metal as three rotaries spun round and round. For any arcade-obsessed child who had self-proclaimed herself to be the queen of the claw machine, such a gaudy sight was entrancing. I wanted in. But when I stepped on the showroom floor, a burly man, sleeves rolled to show muscles rippling, put a hand up. “21 and up to be on the casino floor. Stay on the path.”
Of course, my smile disappeared for the rest of the night. I sulked through dinner and fell asleep dreaming of pattering behind the bouncer’s back and hiding under the coattails of one of the players, just to see what all the fuss was about. But for all my imaginary, stubby-handed fist-shaking toward that bouncer, now that I’m 21, I see where he was coming from. I see the legislation he upheld, the important lesson that not all spaces are safe for children. Gambling is addictive, as addictive as any other substance that might’ve been on the casino floor that night.
It’s strange to admit, but twenty years later, this narrative has somehow been lost. No longer is there the bouncer, with a stern enough look to wither my devious little smile; Somehow, gambling has made its way into child-friendly spaces. We see it everywhere here in America: the Popmart store on Michigan Avenue, where, if you stand inside for 15 minutes, you’ll see two dozen children waging rhetorical warfare on their parents as they attempt to convince them that a 40-dollar Hello Kitty blind box Labubu is worth their purse. Children now race against adult scalpers in a rush to Target to buy the newest blind Pokémon card packs, or a Mystery Dumpling at Five Below, in an attempt to find the coveted Golden Dumpling (in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory fashion, finding one of these will earn a lucky child a $1000 shopping spree at its mother store). We also see it in games they play: shooters like Overwatch, Apex Legends, or CS: GO use the flashy concept of a loot crate, allowing players to front their parents’ credit cards to unlock cosmetics for their favorite characters, weapon wraps, or currency to keep the gambling going. Gambling is intrinsic to American youth culture. Like how vapes were marketed to lure a new generation of smokers in with their promise of flavors and colored plastic finishes, blind box toys and loot-box reliant games are developing into primers for a generation of gambling addicts.
These types of products were not a homegrown idea. In fact, they’re Japanese-born, derived from the humble fukubukuro: a retail tradition most commonly practiced during oshōgatsu, the Japanese New Year. Japanese residents will flock in droves to depaato (Japanese department stores) during this time, to buy discounted blind bags filled with practical goods. Since its boom in the 1980s, fukubukuro is believed to grant the buyer of one of these bags good fortune for the coming year, though some believe this tradition dates farther back into the Meiji Period (1900s) or Edo Period (1800s), when silk traders would relinquish leftover mystery scraps at a discounted price; at least, this is what popular Japanese department stores Mitsukoshi and Daimaru purport (Tse, Generaisan; Bouwers). There is a level of practicality to fukubukuro, where lowered prices mean lowered stakes. All buyers feel like winners for scoring a good deal on products catered to adults, like clothes or food, as opposed to toys. In fact, the stakes are nearly nullified when considering that many Japanese individuals believe that, regardless of what you get, tradition dictates that buying a fukubukuro means luck will favor you in the coming year. This distinct cultural element detaches fukubukuro from being solely transactional, and shifts it into a hybrid zone that blends consumer culture and spirituality.
This was subverted, however, with the rise of gachapon. It was a blend of the clever fukubukuro and the “American cool” gumball machine that created these jumbo-sized bauble dispensers, where buyers exchange tokens for office supplies, stationery, jewelry, and figurines; not the crudely mass-produced toys that American gumball machines spat out. “American cool” nods to Douglas McGray’s framework of “national cool”, which suggests a symbiotic relationship between Japan and America in its localization of each other’s cultures and products (McGray). In a similar fashion to how Tokyo’s Shibuya Square adopted its own Nike store or how L.A. began to see an influx of manga shops, in 1965, the gumball machine made its way to Japan in the innovative hands of Ryuzo Shigeta as the quirky gachapon machine, where it exploded into a Japanese cultural mainstay (Wang, 1). Since 2016, the gachapon industry in Japan has made 100 billion JPY (Japanese Yen) in revenue, or $628,121,000 USD (Sagguneswaraan et. al., 2025). What makes gachapon a safer form of gambling is its price point. Most gacha balls guarantee some form of provisional prize, one that is enjoyed briefly due to lower quality, then likely discarded; the price-per-token for these machines reflects that, with most gachapon costing no more than $2 to $5 dollars (around 100 to 300 JPY). Other gachapon are more expensive, with some of the most luxurious gachapon costing $20 a roll, to win big-ticket items like a laptop or a Nintendo Switch (this is where addictive behaviors develop, as players are more prone to spin their way to a good deal on a lucrative item), but this type of gachapon is an outlier in a culture of gambling that focuses primarily on low-cost, low-quality, high-fun trinkets that encapsulate a passing fad.
Since the rise of gachapon, these mighty machines have manifested into what we know today as blind boxes: a condensed form of luxury gachapon. While Japan does have its own brands of box figurines, like the curious green Smiski, or the wistful-eyed Mosfousand cats, China has more famously adopted Japan’s gachapon and fukubukuro to create its own ornate blind boxes like the sensationally devilish Labubu with its triangle-toothed grin, the puffy cheeks of Crybaby, and Xiong Meow’s Skullpanda, a series of gothic toddlers adorned with fur hoods and hip fashion. With their cute, memorable designs, they give tweens and teens a curated “in” into collector culture, with the figures’ bright colors, doe eyes, and American franchisability (i.e., Skullpanda’s collaboration with My Little Pony, Labubu and SpongeBob, as well as Disney-curated blind boxes like Stitch’s Little Emotions, where the lovable blue alien flops on the ground and wears a plunger on his head). But this “in” comes at a cost much higher than gachapon. Nowadays, blind boxes cost upwards of $25 to $40, with no guarantee of what is inside. It’s gambling with a kid-friendly face; instead of $1,000 jackpots, it’s a secret rainbow-eyed Labubu they can hitch to their backpacks and show their friends. Even still, the argument can be made that where traditional slot gambling does not guarantee a prize, blind boxes do. Perhaps not the wanted prize, but a prize nonetheless.
What this argument does not account for, however, is the subliminal solidification of a gambling framework that encourages child buyers to keep purchasing boxes to complete the set or find the secret figure. Blind box purchases slot perfectly into the ever-famous gambler's fallacy that 99% of gamblers quit before they win big, even though “there is no evidence that several poor or low-value boxes mean the following boxes will be more valuable” (Selassie et. al.). Just like traditional pachinko or casinos, these boxes are psychologically hijacking, and can go as far as to create gambling tendencies in underdeveloped minds (Selassie et. al.). Further, researchers found that blind box binging raises adolescent anxiety and depression (Duan et. al.). These conclusions effectively led to China banning the distribution of blind boxes to children under 8 in 2023 (Yang). As blind boxes, particularly Labubus, have become an internet sensation among circuits of youth-oriented content farms that introduce these collectables as desirable and culturally relevant, children view this content and are primed to become unhealthy consumers and, down the line, gamblers. It’s FOMO (fear-of-missing-out) at its finest for these children, whose insecurities dictate that they must stay ahead of the cultural curve by buying Labubu’s never-ending barrage of limited edition and region-exclusive boxes.
As with many trends and traditions, it was only a matter of time before fukubukuro, gachapon, and blind boxes made their way to the digital frontier, where a more aggressive version of child-friendly gambling began to take shape. Before 2010, microtransactions were a blip on the digital map of video game monetization. When players bought a game, there was an innate expectation for all content to be accessible. But this model of play was turned on its head in 2010, when Japanese mobile game Dragon Collection was released as a mobile, free-to-play gacha game. Players could access base content for free, but more dedicated players could use a gambling system to exchange real-world currency for digital 2D cards used to breed pet dragons (Sagguneswaraan et al.). It was a humble beginning for this game genre, but in the past 10 years, it has catalyzed one of the largest game industries to date. Now, meccas of the genre like Japan’s Uma Musume Pretty Derby, where players spend money to roll for kawaii horse-girl hybrids, or Fate/Grand Order, a side-scroller that focuses on cute anime girls with big swords (a nod to the trend of “Japanese fighting girls” trope), among countless others, govern the mobile gacha sphere. In Game Development 2042, a future-forward book by Tim Fields discussing where the gaming industry will end up in two decades, readers are slammed with the statistic that “mobile phone gamers still pay homage to genre-defining games like Puzzles & Dragons (another early-stage gacha game) every week in a market that reached almost $14 billion annually in 2020” and that “Japan had 125M citizens in 2020, and 76M of them were gamers” (Fields, 32). It’s easy to see why; these gacha games are developed to be played on mobile devices, making them ideal options to gamble on the go, may it be waiting in line at the store or riding public transport to school. No longer do players need to be tethered to a wired TV console or a boxy PC in their office. Games can be played anywhere, anytime.
While this sounds theoretically ideal, it realistically feeds off an epidemic of boredom spending. Boredom harbors feelings of inefficiency or monotony, which encourages overspending on unneeded goods to “make their leisure time feel more valuable” (Emir et. al.). Victims of this boredom spending paradigm are at higher risk for “internet usage, habits, drug addictions, digital addiction, and gambling behavior” (Emir et. al.). Considering how K-12 students have breaks for lunch or advisory, long bus/train rides to school, or time between extracurriculars that may be dedicated to playing, or even spending, on these gacha games. To children, school can be boring, and monotony is frequent. Gacha games offer a way to “fix” that.
Since Dragon Collection, F2P (free-to-play) systems have developed into far more intricate schemes, but still operate on the same premise: players spend real-world money either to expedite the resource-gathering process or to convert real-world currency into in-game currency, which can be used to pull (to gamble) on a banner (like a slot machine or a blind box series, a banner is an in-game space where the gambling takes place. Different banners offer different rewards). These banners replicate the affordances of traditional patchinko machines, or Japanese slot machines, where game designers are guilty of including “well-timed claxions and bells, to systems which stimulate the FOMO of a “near miss” to (game) mechanics that encourage the “just one more” mentality that keeps punters pulling the metaphorical lever and remaining in a mental “machine zone” for hours at a time.” (Fields, 103). Sagguneswaraan echoes this, stating that “without sufficient player control, the gameplay experience moves closer to compulsive, addiction-like behavior” (Sagguneswaraan et. al.). With gacha’s kid-friendly interface and accessibility (that forgoes the pachinko parlor commute for a few taps on a screen to open an app), this uncanny resemblance becomes dangerous. But unlike patchinko, fukubukuro, gachapon, or even blind boxes, gacha prizes are completely removed from spatiotemporality; they are located within a digital bubble, intangible outside the player’s screen. There is no real-world use for winning a 2D anime girl, and yet players will shell out hundreds to win big on banners. It’s a strange phenomenon that surpasses gambling in the traditionally monetarily-driven sense. This intangibility makes gacha a more dangerous form of gambling than blind boxes, encouraging overspending habits for products that exist in the abstract.
Another affordance of gacha is that, after so many pulls, a player will be offered pity: a system that cushions players with consolation prizes if they are unlucky with their pulls. While pity sounds generous in theory, pity only comes after a player has spent an exorbitant amount on the game, usually hundreds of dollars. Chinese titles like Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail are notoriously guilty of this. Most notably, in Genshin Impact, if a player is unlucky, they may spend $180-$333 to guarantee receiving a single character (Sagguneswaraan et. al.).
This pity system was the child of domestic legislation. Policy makers started noticing similarities in gacha games and traditional modes of gambling, which led to “national authorities and academia (beginning) to discuss potential regulations on RRMs (random reward mechanics), albeit predominantly at the national level.” (Sato et. al.). Different countries reacted to the gacha game controversy in different ways. The US hardly reacted at all, leaving legislation to the state. Other countries, like Belgium and the Netherlands, completely “banned certain forms of RRM implementations” in 2018, including gacha games and loot boxes.” (Sato et. al., 2024). But after a series of debates in 2012 regarding game transparency, Japan paved the road toward developing safe modes of gacha, leading to a series of national legislative changes. Japan first lobbied for the global disclosure of drop rates, or “disclosing the probabilities with which players receive a particular reward”, a ubiquitous practice in nearly all global gacha games to date (Sato et. al.). Similarly, Japan banned kompu gacha, a form of digital gacha in which users were incentivized by rare, exclusive items to gamble repeatedly until they obtained a complete set of digital items. This version of gacha was outrageously addictive. Seattle-based news agency McClatchy Media reported that “In one case (of kompu gambling), a middle school boy was charged more than 400,000 yen ($2500 USD) in just one month, while a primary school boy racked up 120,000 yen ($700 USD) in charges over three days playing the games.” (McClatchy Tribune Business). With children racing to complete sets of gacha prizes by throwing fistfuls of their parents’ money at Japanese game companies like GREE and DeNa, it was only natural that Japanese officials barred the use of kompu business models nationally.
Curiously, while legislation cracked down on kompu in the digital world, blind box companies still encourage kompu spending by offering “whole sets”, or a boxed collection of every toy in the line. Labubu sells these boxes at $160 to $600, depending on the age and number of items to be collected. While whole sets are not explicitly incentivized by Popmart or Labubu, kompu collecting has curated a culture of prestige. YouTubers and content creators will buy boxes in bulk and open them on-stream for their viewers. Even the packaging subliminally reminds buyers that there are more figures to collect by printing each figure in the set on the box’s exterior, encouraging consumers to buy not more, but all.
While blind boxes are primative in their legislation, crackdowns against kompu and opaque gacha systems worked for some time. Western and Japanese game titles fundamentally differ in their approaches to the gacha genre, but both suffered losses from this global push for this type of legislation. GREE, the parent of popular Japanese gacha games like Another Eden, suffered severe pushback in light of these debates. The Economist reports that “In three days the value of GREE, whose 35-year-old owner, Yoshikazu Tanaka, has been called the youngest self-made billionaire after Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, plunged by a third.” (The Economist). Similarly, California-based Blizzard completely removed loot boxes from their game Overwatch in light of backlash against steeply-priced loot boxes without pity systems.
But backlash and legislation have only proved that legislating gacha games is a battle of inches, not miles. Stateside, American youth still partake in a digital gambling culture that persists in Western-born games. Take the first-person shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS: GO), notorious for developing a culture around the selling and buying of rare gacha-pulled skins. Basic loot crates can be bought for a few cents on the dollar, but most players buy upgraded boxes for $20 to $30 a piece, which have higher drop rates for lucrative weapon wraps. These wraps usually sell for $5 to $20, but for a lucky few, a loot box might contain a skin worth millions. Most notably, CS: GO’s case-hardened (blue gem) karambit knife #387 is worth 1.5 to 2 million dollars (Bozhenko). In a stereotypically American fashion, gacha has become an endeavor of profit, not of enjoyment. This becomes dangerous because, like the NFT craze in 2020, these weapon wraps are at heightened risk of deflation due to their immateriality. A risk that was realized when, in 2025, Valve released an update that flooded CS: GO’s store with an unprecedented influx of rarer skins, causing the market cap to fall nearly 1 billion USD overnight (Stubbs, 2025). Despite this, CS: GO crates are still advertised on video platforms popular with adolescent viewership, like Twitch and Kick, luring young players with the sweet song of money.
Meanwhile, Chinese gacha cornerstones also continue to soar, with games like Genshin Impact still making billions in revenue by selling pulls to underage users. In fact, despite Japan’s paternity of both gachapon and gacha, Chinese additions to the gacha industry, both physical and digital, have suppressed Japanese pop culture through titular releases like the aforementioned Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, and Labubu. When Japan invented gachapon, China elevated the idea into a blind box and enchanted Westerners with stores like PopMart and Miniso. Even though Japan created the gacha industry, Chinese game titles like Genshin Impact have superseded Japanese games globally. Analysts have speculated why this is, whether it's a lack of consistent releases on Japanese soil or an issue of globalization. Based on observations, trends more consistently suggest the latter. Take Uma Musume Pretty Derby, one of Japan’s most popular globalized mobile game exports, and compare it to the might of Genshin Impact. Genshin Impact was released globally in 2020, whereas Uma Musume Pretty Derby was released in Japan in 2021, but was only localized and distributed to a Western audience in 2025. Perhaps this is because Japanese audiences can carry the industry on their own without the scaffolding of Western buyers, given how Japan’s user base spends an exorbitant amount on these types of mobile gacha games. Sato and co-authors of her cross-regional analysis of RRMs (random reward mechanisms) found that Japanese audiences had a higher tendency to accept RRM models as opposed to Western or Chinese markets, due to the country’s clearer legislation practices and these games’ assimilation into everyday culture (Sato et. al.). Japanese consumers love gacha, and video game companies are simply not as compelled to localize their products when they already perform so favorably at home.
I do not blame Japan for the rise in child-oriented gambling. What started as a traditionally spiritual trend was subverted into an American-localized vending machine fad, which snowballed into overpriced blind boxes and digital gachas. While the benign concepts behind gachapon may have originated from Japan, America and China subverted Japanese-born gacha culture into a wheelhouse for capitalism and profit, and have done so to incredible success with trends like CS: GO loot crates and Labubu hauls. Legislation on gachapon systems has been attempted most effectively in Japan (and China, with their ban on blind boxes for children), but nothing global has stuck, and the effects of its absence in the US are searing. In the US, children are free to gamble physically or digitally, leaving much-needed limitations to be enforced by parents who might not be informed about the newest fads. This becomes an issue when considering gacha games and blind boxes perpetuate boredom spending, cause users to fall into the gambler’s fallacy, and result in not just addiction, but anxiety and depression. Furthermore, social media continues to perpetuate child-friendly gambling through blind box openings and store hauls, teaching children that excess consumption is normal. This type of sensationalist behavior has been curbed in Japan, where a series of debates in 2012 dictated the implementation of pity systems and the ban of kompu gacha. Of course, Japan isn’t completely innocent, as these gambling games and toys are still accessible to children, but the efforts made are far more substantial than those of the US. Regardless of national efforts, there is a glaringly apparent exigency to legislate gacha worldwide (not just nationally), introduce game systems that celebrate transparency, and educate children about responsible spending habits, yet these industries mostly continue to fly under the radar, with little repercussions for invariably molding a future generation of overconsumers and gambling addicts. There’s no bouncer standing at the front of Popmart or phoning in every time you open up Genshin Impact, like that one that blocked me from stepping on that casino floor, but shouldn’t there be?
Works Cited
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