Is Gacha Gambling?

On the UK PlayStation Store, £87.99 buys 6,480 Genesis Crystals for Genshin Impact. Those crystals can be converted into Primogems and then into the Fates used to make Wishes. A Wish gives the player a random character or weapon.

If the player wants Furina, buying £87.99 of crystals does not buy Furina. It buys more chances of getting her.

Furina is one of Genshin's playable characters. She is used in combat rather than being a cosmetic skin.

She is also a five-star character and is not permanently available through the game's standard Wish. Characters such as Furina appear during particular Event Wishes. While one of those events is running, the player can make repeated Wishes but still cannot simply select the character and pay a fixed price.

Some of the currency needed for Wishes can be earned by playing, and players can also buy more with real money. Spending it gives them another random pull.

The term gacha comes from Japanese capsule-toy machines. Put money in, turn the handle and one capsule drops out. You know the collection inside the machine but not which toy you will receive. Video games adapted the idea for digital characters, weapons and other items.

Genshin also keeps track of some previous unsuccessful Wishes. After enough attempts, a player can move towards a guaranteed higher-rarity result. Players usually call this pity.

Getting a character once may not finish the process either. Genshin characters have six Constellation upgrades and duplicate copies can be used to unlock them. An account advertised as having C6 Furina has all six of Furina's Constellations unlocked.

Money can therefore fund repeated attempts at a random result. Some outcomes are much harder to obtain than others. A wanted character may only be available for a limited period and previous attempts can move the player closer to a guarantee.

The Gambling Commission's Advisory Board for Safer Gambling has made a similar comparison when looking at monetised loot boxes, describing money being spent on a random event for the chance of receiving items with different value to the player.

Under gambling law in Great Britain, though, Genshin's Wishes are not generally treated as gambling.

What the law says in Great Britain

Section 6 of the Gambling Act 2005 covers playing a game of chance for a prize. For these purposes, a prize means money or money's worth.

Genshin has no official market where players can sell the characters or weapons they obtain through Wishes.

HoYoverse's terms say its virtual currency and virtual goods have no monetary value, cannot be redeemed for real money and cannot be sold or transferred outside the uses allowed by the service.

The Gambling Commission has taken the same broad approach with virtual items. If an item can be exchanged for cash or traded for something with real-world value, it can amount to money or money's worth. If it stays inside the game and cannot be cashed out, it is much less likely to fall within gambling regulation.

The Government's 2022 review of loot boxes accepted that paid random rewards can share features with gambling but put considerable weight on whether the reward could legitimately be cashed out.

That view was repeated in Parliament in March 2026. The Department for Culture, Media and Sport said loot-box prizes which have no monetary value, cannot be cashed out and have value only within the game are not legally classified as gambling.

GamRight found no published Gambling Commission decision classifying Genshin's Wish system as gambling in Great Britain.

On the official version of the economy, Furina stays inside Genshin.

Outside it, people sell the accounts.

The account market

PlayerAuctions was showing 23,958 Genshin accounts when GamRight checked. Its filters included 2,776 Furina offers and 261 C6 offers.

PlayerAuctions is independent of HoYoverse and says it is not authorised or endorsed by the developers whose games appear on the marketplace.

Sellers advertise what is already on the account. Character names, Constellation levels, weapons, progress and unused resources all appear in listings.

One account we found advertised Furina at C6 alongside 59 unique five-star characters and 16 signature weapons for $550. Other C6 accounts were offered for less than $200, while some heavily developed accounts ran into several thousand dollars.

Those are asking prices, not completed sales. Nor can the price of an entire account be assigned to one character. The $550 account contained far more than Furina.

A buyer can still search specifically for an account containing Furina. Sellers put C6 in titles because buyers understand what it means.

HoYoverse prohibits account transfers as well as the sale of its virtual goods. Someone buying through PlayerAuctions is not receiving Furina through an official Genshin marketplace. They are taking control of the whole account, outside HoYoverse's rules.

The Government was already aware of these secondary markets when it reviewed loot boxes in 2022. Evidence submitted to the review included sales of whole accounts and trading in virtual items for money. Games companies argued that those transactions breached their terms.

The Government did not treat an unauthorised market as enough, by itself, to turn the original random-reward system into gambling. It did say that a prize which can readily be exchanged for cash may amount to money or money's worth.

With Genshin, the account sale is one step removed from the Wish. The game does not give Furina a cash price or provide a way to sell her. Someone outside the game may still be willing to pay for an account because she is already on it.

Beyond Genshin

Genshin is not unusual in using paid random rewards.

Honkai: Star Rail, also from HoYoverse, uses random draws called Warps for characters and equipment. Fate/Grand Order calls its characters Servants and its draws Summons. Some Summons use currency bought with real money.

Researchers have also looked at whether gacha spending is associated with gambling behaviour.

A 2022 study of 337 gacha players aged 18 to 25 in Hong Kong found that greater monthly gacha spending was associated with higher problem-gambling scores. The study was cross-sectional and relied on self-reported information, so it cannot show that gacha caused those problems.

The UK Government's 2022 review found an association between loot-box purchasing and problem gambling but said the evidence had not established the direction of causation.

For games such as Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail and Fate/Grand Order, the current legal answer in Great Britain is therefore generally no. Their random rewards normally stay inside the game and cannot legitimately be redeemed for money or money's worth.

Money can still fund repeated random attempts at something the player wants. Some results are much rarer than others, and previous attempts can count towards a later guarantee.

Genshin also has an unofficial account market where characters obtained through those random draws are used to help sell entire accounts. Gambling law in Great Britain currently treats that differently from a game which lets the player cash the random reward out directly.