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May 12th 2012 | TOKYO | from the print edition

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Zuckerberg’s rocket, readyfor lift-off 

»Gacha? Gotcha!

Marketplace of ideas

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Mobile gaming in Japan

Gacha? Gotcha!

Bureaucrats clamp down on a tech billionaire

NOT again. Just when another tousle-haired Japanese entrepreneur hoped it was safe t o

make a billion or two, along come the forces of law and order threatening to throw the

rule book at him: in this case, the Act Against Unjustified Premiums and Misleading

Representations. That, at least, is how some people viewed news this week that the

Consumer Affairs Agency was investigating a feature, popular on Japan’s ubiquitous

mobile-phone games, called a “complete gacha”, in which players collect sets of 

randomly generated tokens to swap for in-game rewards. Such games have madefortunes for several internet start-ups.

Agency officials, however, have expressed worries that complete gacha may be a form

of gambling (it sometimes involves real money), which can cause children and adults to

splurge beyond their means. They questioned its legality.

The retribution was swift. In three days the value of GREE, whose 35-year-old owner,

Yoshikazu Tanaka, has been called the youngest self-made billionaire after Facebook’s

Mark Zuckerberg, plunged by a third. DeNA, another social-games site, lost 22%.

To Yoshito Hori, a venture capitalist and former GREE backer,

the news recalled a pattern of crackdowns on alleged abuses

by start-ups in recent years that have discouraged the

Japanese from setting up new businesses. He urged the

government to seek a harmonious solution that protected

both consumers and entrepreneurs: “Killing GREE or DeNA is

like killing Sony or Matsushita (Panasonic) when they were

coming up after the war,” he said.

On May 9th GREE and DeNA gave ground. GREE said it would

stop the release of all new complete gacha games and phase

out existing ones. DeNA said it would also stop the practice.

Mr Hori said he expected they might be prepared to pay back

anyone who had overspent. It was not clear, though,

whether the authorities would let the matter rest there.

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