Show Us the Odds: How Korea, China, Japan and the US Tamed the Gacha

Spend a few minutes in any big mobile game and you will meet the same screen: a glowing button, a cost in gems, and the promise that this time, maybe, the character you want will appear. Behind that button sits one of the most profitable ideas in entertainment, and one of the most regulated.

Gacha, the random-reward system that funds games such as Genshin Impact, Fate/Grand Order and most Korean MMORPGs, now has to follow very different rules depending on where you live. In South Korea, publishers have been legally required since 22 March 2024 to publish the exact odds of every paid random item. China made the same demand back in 2017. Japan banned the most aggressive version outright in 2012. And in January 2025 the US Federal Trade Commission extracted a $20 million settlement from the maker of Genshin Impact. Here is how we got here.

Where the word comes from

"Gacha" is short for gachapon or gashapon, the capsule-toy vending machines found outside every Japanese convenience store. The name copies the sounds of the machine: gacha as you turn the crank, pon as the capsule drops. Toy maker Bandai launched its Gashapon brand in 1977, and for decades the idea stayed physical: you paid a coin and did not know which figure you would get.

In the 2000s, Asian online games moved that idea into software. Players in Japan bought tickets for digital capsule machines, and the "gacha" label stuck. By the 2010s, with smartphones in every pocket, gacha had become the main business model for free-to-play games across Japan, China and Korea.

Japan: the kompu gacha shock of 2012

The first big crackdown came in Japan. In the early 2010s social game platforms such as GREE and Mobage (run by DeNA) popularised kompu gacha, short for "complete gacha": collect every item in a random set and you unlocked an extra-rare prize. The last item in a set could be extremely rare, and stories spread of players, including children, running up huge bills chasing it.

In May 2012, Japan's Consumer Affairs Agency concluded that kompu gacha broke the country's law on misleading prizes and representations, and the ban took effect on 1 July 2012. Shares in GREE and DeNA fell sharply when the news broke. The industry then wrote its own guidelines, which later added voluntary odds disclosure. We tell the full story in our kompu gacha history.

China: odds on the screen since 2017

China moved next and went further. A Ministry of Culture notice, effective 1 May 2017, required online games to publish the names, contents and probabilities of items available through random draws. Games also had to show players what they had drawn. Since then, almost every game in China carries detailed odds tables, often several screens long.

China's rules have kept tightening, mostly in the name of protecting minors. Since 2021, players under 18 can play online games only for one hour on Fridays, weekends and public holidays, and spending by minors is capped. A December 2023 draft that proposed limits on in-game spending and rewards for everyone wiped billions off Chinese game stocks in a single day before it was shelved. Our China regulation explainer covers that saga.

Korea: from self-regulation to the 2024 law

Korea's path was the longest. From 2015, the industry ran a voluntary disclosure code through the Korea Association of Game Industry. Players did not trust it. Odds were often vague, some items were left out, and there was no penalty for getting them wrong.

Then came a string of scandals around "probability-type items", the Korean legal term for gacha. The biggest broke in 2021, when players discovered that MapleStory's "cube" upgrade items had not worked the way they seemed to. In January 2024, the Korea Fair Trade Commission fined Nexon 11.6 billion won for deceiving players about cube odds, the largest fine of its kind in Korea at the time.

By then lawmakers had already acted. An amendment to the Game Industry Promotion Act, passed in early 2023, took effect on 22 March 2024. It requires every game sold in Korea to disclose the type and exact probability of each paid random item, in the game itself, on its website and in advertising. The Game Rating and Administration Committee set up a monitoring team to check games, and companies that ignore correction orders face criminal penalties. In the first weeks of the law, several publishers, Korean and foreign, quietly corrected odds tables that turned out to be wrong.

The platforms and the US step in

App stores added their own rules. In December 2017, Apple updated its App Store guidelines so that apps offering loot boxes must disclose the odds of each item before purchase. Google Play added a similar requirement in 2019.

The United States has no federal gacha law, but in January 2025 the Federal Trade Commission announced a settlement with Cognosphere, the Singapore-based company that publishes Genshin Impact as HoYoverse. The FTC alleged that the game had marketed loot boxes to children and misled players about odds and costs. The company agreed to pay $20 million, to stop selling loot boxes to teens under 16 without parental consent, and to disclose odds and the real-money exchange rates of its virtual currencies. Our HoYoverse profile has more on the company.

In Europe, approaches vary. Belgium's gaming authority concluded in 2018 that some paid loot boxes counted as illegal gambling, and several publishers removed or changed them there. Other countries have chosen consumer-protection rules rather than gambling bans.

What the rules have changed

Odds disclosure did not end gacha, and it was never meant to. What it changed is the conversation. Players now compare published rates, track their own pulls and call out games when the numbers do not match. Publishers compete on generosity: clearer guarantees, pity counters that promise a prize after a set number of pulls, and "sparks" that let you pick a reward outright. Our pity explainer breaks those systems down.

It also changed who gets punished. Before 2024, a Korean game that misreported its odds faced mainly anger on forums. Now it faces a regulator with a monitoring team.

By the numbers

• 1977: Bandai's Gashapon brand launches, and Japan bans "card matching" prizes
• 1 July 2012: Japan's kompu gacha ban takes effect
• 1 May 2017: China's odds disclosure rule takes effect
• December 2017: Apple requires loot box odds on the App Store
• 11.6 billion won: Korea's January 2024 fine on Nexon over MapleStory cubes
• 22 March 2024: Korea's mandatory disclosure law takes effect
• $20 million: the FTC's 2025 settlement with Genshin Impact's publisher

What to watch

The next fights are about enforcement and money. Korean lawmakers and consumer groups keep pushing for easier compensation when odds are wrong, and regulators in several countries are studying whether minors should be allowed to buy random items at all. For players, the practical advice has never changed: read the odds, know the pity rules, set a budget before you pull, and remember that the house always does the maths first.