Pulling the plug on Gacha's

Our World's Worst Gacha to be destroyed!?

In a decision bound to cause severe upset,  Linden Lab has blogged that the immensely popular Gacha systems used by thousands of  content creators, will cease to be allowed beyond August 31st.

Gacha's really took off when the gaming rules became much stricter, preventing 'games of chance'.

Arguably, although a prize is won every time, some are or more value than others, making Gacha's a game of chance too.

Being the mainstay of so many shopping events, it is inconceivable that this news could possibly be received well by the community and this is bound to be a very interesting thread to follow.

The post reads:

Due to a changing regulatory climate, we’ve had to make the difficult decision to sunset a very popular sales mechanism for content in Second Life.  It’s widely known as "gacha", and is defined by a chance-based outcome as a result of a payment.  

We know that creators plan their content releases far in advance and will need to re-tool their products, so to mitigate the impact to those affected, we are giving a 30-day grace period, until midnight SLT on August 31.  After that time, selling content via gacha machines will no longer be permitted in Second Life.  Enforcement won’t start until September 1; after that date an Abuse Report for “Gaming Policy Violation” will be the preferred method of reporting this content to Linden Lab.  

We will continue to allow any sales where a payment is given for a known item, which means that items that had been purchased as “gacha” will be allowed to be re-sold as long as the buyer knows in advance the item and quantity they will receive. We will, of course, still allow fatpacks, and any other currently-allowed distribution mechanisms. 

We did not make this decision lightly and we understand that it will impact creators as well as event organizers and certainly the shoppers! We look forward to fun creative ways of engagement that will come instead. 

We realize that this announcement may leave the community with questions.  This forum thread is going to be monitored and we will answer any related questions in there.

Click the link above to see the post on the Lab's blog.