Pachinko, Or Why Skill-Based Gambling Is A Great Idea
The East and the West are very, very different in numerous regards, be they cultural, linguistical, biological or others. It’s really far easier to count the similarities between them than it is to list the numerous differences. The one we’re most interested in currently, though, relates to gambling. As some of you may know already, especially if you indulge in popular cultures with a heavy Japanese presence, such as videogames and anime, gambling is very illegal in Japan. The process of how we got up to this point is complicated and not really relevant, so I’ll skip it and just get to the point – any game where you can bet money and expect real money in return is completely illegal. You can, however, earn various rewards from games, but the catch is that you can only earn those rewards from skill-based games. If you’ve been to an arcade in the past 5 years, you might have noticed that some arcade machines give tickets the better you do at them. For example, in a shooting game you might get a ticket for each person you shoot before you get killed, and those tickets can be exchanged for prices. You can’t, however, win tickets from, say, a slot machine.
The Japanese, however, would very much like a slice of the gambling pie, so through numerous (and I do mean numerous) loopholes in the law they managed to get it. Enter Pachinko machines. Their closest equivalent is the videogame Peggle, where you need to drop a ball from the top of the screen and have it jump around, hitting various obstacles along the way until it drops into an appropriate slot at the bottom. While there is some skill involved into precisely where and how you’ll drop the ball, for the most part it’s very much a luck-based game. Once the ball hits the bottom, you get a certain number of tickets depending on exactly where it landed, and you can exchange those tickets for prices which you can later sell in a pawn shop (typically located suspiciously close to the arcade). It is, by far, one of the biggest gaming businesses in Japan, to the point where several gigantic developers, such as Konami and SNK, have completely quit developing videogames and focused entirely on their pachinko divisions. Their success completely outmatches anything that the West has to offer.
What’s the secret? I have reasons to believe that it is precisely the skill-based element involved in the games. If you look at Western slots, you’ll notice that the most popular ones are almost always those with a certain amount of interactivity in them. Unfortunately, Western laws prohibit skill-based gambling in numerous countries and states. Certain movements have been started to lift the ban, but at this rate it’s unlikely that we’ll be seeing any big slots with a real skill involvement before the next decade. At this rate, we can do little else but wait and hope that we’ll soon be able to enjoy our own Pachinko action, Western-style.
