Gacha Club

Gacha Club is a misleadingly named game that’s about customization, roleplaying, and sharing stories. Use a 100% free character creator to make the chibi avatar of your dreams and use your character in videos, pictures, minigames, and more.

Gacha Club is one of several similar games made by Chicago-based developer Lunime. These games all prominently feature the word “Gacha” in their names and branding, utilize small anime characters with big heads, and center around customization and community. One of the biggest draws to all of these games is the so-called Gacha Studio, a fully-featured editor that allows you to customize characters, place them in scenes, and take screenshots or movies.A very basic scene in the in-game editor

Not a Gacha Game

In most contexts, the word “gacha” refers to a game with prevalent gambling mechanics. Gacha games force players to purchase tickets in in-game lotteries in order to have a chance to assemble rare and powerful in-game items. These systems are designed in order to entice players to gradually spend increasing amounts of real-life money in order to acquire advantages within the game.

By most metrics, Gacha Club does not fit this model. The biggest difference between a traditional gacha-style game and Gacha Club is that Gacha Club does not have a shop that allows you to spend real money. While it does have in-game currencies that you can exchange for gacha-style pulls, you earn these currencies by playing games and watching ads. A “pull” within Gacha Club. Remember, these are free!

More importantly, Gacha Club isn’t really about the minigames and modes that these randomized pulls and in-game currencies are used for. Instead, the game serves as a hub for a community that enjoys creating content with the Gacha Studio. The minigames and other game modes see some play, of course, and there are some players who care a lot about the characters that they purchase with in-game currency, but for many players, it’s not the focus of the game.

Community Driven

Lunime’s Gacha Studio games have been an internet sensation for years. The studio’s ability to export pictures and videos (complete with narration, text, and more) has paved the way for “GachaTubers” to use the games to tell stories and make friends over the internet. These creators use the freedom provided by Gacha Studio to make just about every kind of content you can think of. You can find livestreams, YouTube videos, images, subreddits, Facebook groups, and more all devoted to the game. A lot of these communities are made up of young people who have turned to Gacha Studio as a way to express themselves socially in recent years.One of 33 pages of backgrounds available to creators