From Gacha to Ethical Crossroads: The Line I Drew, Then Had to Cross

Last updated: February 2026

I made a vow early in my career. Then the industry evolved, and I had to figure out what my principles actually meant when tested against reality.

The VIP Call That Changed Everything

I joined Zynga in 2014 and spent my first few years working on match-3 puzzle games. Honest work, genuinely fun products. I remember feeling, in some quiet corner of my brain, like I had landed on the right side of the monetization debate. I wasn't building slot mechanics. I wasn't in that world.

This was the mid-2010s, the years when Western studios were aggressively importing gacha and slot mechanics from Japan and scaling them fast. Gacha had exploded in Japan in the early 2010s, and by the time I got to Zynga the industry was fully awake to what these mechanics could do for revenue. Most players didn't even have a name for what they were spending money on yet. The studios certainly did.

One day I sat in on a VIP player call for one of our slot-style games. These calls were meant to celebrate top spenders, make them feel seen and valued. I was there to listen and learn.

At some point the conversation turned to this particular player's spending. The number was staggering. Millions of dollars. I sat very still and did the mental math on what that meant relative to a normal person's life. Later I found out they made around $60,000 a year.

The call ended. Everyone moved on. I couldn't.

I hadn't built that game. I wasn't even on that team. But I was part of the same company, the same ecosystem, the same industry cheerfully optimizing every mechanic to make this easier to do rather than harder. Variable-ratio reinforcement, unpredictable payouts, the same psychology that makes slot machines so difficult to walk away from. We knew exactly what we were doing. We were good at it.

That day I made myself a promise. I would never work on a slot game.

Then the Industry Moved

For a while, that promise was easy to keep. I moved into different product work, different game types. I told myself I had drawn my line and that was enough.

But gacha was spreading everywhere. What started as a mechanic in Japanese mobile games had become the dominant monetization model across free-to-play. Randomized reward pulls, limited banners, variable drop rates. The psychological machinery was the same as what I had seen on that VIP call, just packaged differently. Dressed up in fantasy characters and progression systems and battle passes.

The ethical tensions were real and I felt all of them. When engagement veers into compulsion, where does entertainment end and exploitation begin? When platforms tailor drop rates to individual spending profiles, two players pulling on the same banner can face completely different odds. That is not chance. That is targeting. And as the WHO formally recognized gaming disorder as a behavioral addiction, the industry's pursuit of revenue was increasingly colliding with a genuine duty of care, especially toward younger players.

I knew all of this. And eventually I took a role where gacha was central to the product. I had to decide what my earlier vow actually meant now that the lines had blurred.

Was I being pragmatic? Compromising? Or had I just been naive to think a single promise made on a VIP call would hold forever in an industry moving this fast?

Finding the Framework: What Haas Taught Me About Leading With Values

I went back to school for my MBA at Haas while still working in the industry. One of the things that drew me there was its emphasis on ethical leadership, not as a lecture series you sit through, but as a genuine thread running through how you think about building organizations and making decisions under pressure.

What it gave me was language for something I had been wrestling with since that VIP call. Ethics in business is not about refusing to operate in imperfect systems. It is about the choices you make within them, and being honest with yourself about why you are making them.

The question I had been asking myself was wrong. I kept asking whether gacha was ethical. The more useful question was whether I was being ethical in how I built it.

Gacha is not going away. Free-to-play games are structurally dependent on a small percentage of players subsidizing the experience for everyone else, and randomized reward systems are the most efficient mechanism the industry has found to serve that model. I understand the economics well enough now to know that arguing against gacha entirely is arguing against the business model itself.

But there is a meaningful difference between a gacha system designed to give players genuine agency and one designed to exploit the psychology of people least equipped to say no. That difference lives in the decisions we make as product leaders. And every person in this industry has to find the line they are willing to draw.

Ethical Leadership in Action: What Drawing the Line Actually Looks Like

I am not a purist. I build monetization systems for a living and I intend to keep doing it. But reconciling that with what I felt on that VIP call meant getting very specific about what I would and would not do. Here is where I landed.

Pity systems with hard ceilings are non-negotiable. Guarantee the top reward within a defined number of pulls. It transforms gacha from an open-ended gamble into something expensive but bounded. That distinction matters psychologically, and it matters ethically.

Drop rates belong everywhere, not in the fine print. In the store. Before the purchase. In plain language. If you are not comfortable with players fully understanding the odds before they spend, sit with that discomfort. It is telling you something.

No dynamic odds targeting based on spend profiles. Two players pulling on the same banner should face the same odds. Personalized drop rates that penalize or reward based on spending history are not optimization. They are exploitation. That is a values decision, not a business one.

Build in natural pause points. Not friction that makes the game worse, but intentional moments that interrupt the compulsion cycle. A summary screen. A breath between pulls. These feel like small design choices. They are not small.

Minors are a protected class, not a revenue segment. Age-gated purchases, spending limits for verified minors, no escalating prompts. Belgium and the Netherlands have already legislated on this. The FTC's $245 million Fortnite settlement sent a clear signal about where regulators are headed. The rest of the world is catching up.

These are not industry best practices I found in a report. They are the line I drew after years of sitting with the tension between what the business needs and what I can look at myself in the mirror and defend.

Your line might be in a different place. That is okay. What matters is that you have one, that you drew it deliberately, and that you hold it when the pressure comes. Because it will come.

Turning Your Values into Player-Centric Power

Ethical design is not a checkbox. It is a catalyst for trust. When you embed your values, transparency, fairness, and genuine respect for your players, into the mechanics themselves, you stop treating ethics as a constraint and start treating it as a design tool.

That is what I had to learn the hard way. The vow I made after that VIP call was well-intentioned but incomplete. Staying away from slot games was not the same as knowing what I actually stood for. It took years of navigating the tension between business reality and my own gut to get to something more useful: a set of principles I could actually build with.

The regulatory pressure building across the EU, the UK, and the US is not going to slow down. The CJEU referral on loot boxes, the Digital Fairness Act, the FTC's $245 million Fortnite settlement. These are accelerants for conversations the industry should have been having internally for years. Use the external pressure as cover if you need it. But ideally you get there before you are forced to.

Every leader in games will face their own version of that VIP call. A mechanic that works too well. A spending pattern that makes you pause mid-review. A number that stops feeling abstract. When it happens, the question is not whether the system is ethical in the aggregate. The question is what you choose to do next.

Make your principles visible, measurable, and actionable. Let players experience your values as features in the game, not just promises in a press release. When your audience sees a genuine commitment to their welfare, you earn something that revenue numbers alone cannot capture.

Do that well, and trust becomes the most powerful loot you can offer.