The Policy Prohibiting Gacha Transactions of September 2021, also known as "the Gacha policy", states rather clearly:
> The use of the term “gacha” or “lootbox” to describe the sale of content is also prohibited.
Now, this particular point is problematic, since it clearly hasn't been enforced.
Precisely a year later after this policy was announced, as described on the talk page for that policy, there were still 1,563,099 items for sale on the SL Marketplace which were listed as "gacha".
In early May 2024, there were still 654,565 items listed as "gacha" (and over 15,000 listed as "lootbox").
"Gacha" is still a category under which items can be classified by merchants on the SL Marketplace.
Here is the overall problem: the original policy was put in place because, allegedly, some jurisdictions considered the concept of gacha — a sort of instant raffle system, where one pays to get one of a set of items, picked randomly by the system — a form of unlicensed, unskilled gambling. Therefore, to protect both Linden Lab as well as its Second Life residents, the policy was put in place. Allegedly, most so-called in-world "gacha machines" were rendered inoperative as this policy was enacted in 2021, but, of course, there is still a black market — openly announced! — where residents can trade their gacha items with others.
However, the word "gacha" gained a certain level of independence from the concept itself. It is used to essentially describe second-hand resales of transferable content, and, as such, it does
not
violate any policies (or real-world laws).
In other words: although there
is
a category for "Used content"; although there is the concept of "reselling non-original content" in limited quantities (usually, just one item); although there is a small market for second-hand content; all of which are perfectly legal, mirroring similar transactions in the real world — the truth is that this kind of content is
not
sold as "used", or "resale", or "non-original content", or "second-hand content".
It is, instead, labeled as "Gacha" — and categorised as such.
But that's not all. A quick search on the SL Marketplace shows how such content is being packaged and presented. While I haven't tested those (there are far too many to test, some of which very expensive, see the Wiki's talk page for a comparison of price ranges for gachas), their description conveys the notion that such items are, indeed, "sold as gacha". They get labeled according to their rarity. There will often be an image showing the several possibilities of items that
might
get sold through this item — thus, potential consumers know which items are explicitly included in the transaction. The merchant will also clearly state that buyers will only get
one
of the items depicted on the image.
There are obvious exceptions to the above paragraph. Some items, indeed, have been acquired pre-2021 via a gacha mechanism, but the seller explains that they don't want it any longer, so they're reselling it — what essentially is simply a second-hand content sale (and perfectly compliant in that regard). Nevertheless, they use the word "gacha" profusely to advertise the content and explain that this is "a gacha item" (and that they are
not
the original content creators) and what level of "rarity" it has (or had).
While I certainly haven't gone through the vast amount of items being offered using this mechanism, and it is possible (or even highly likely!) that almost all of the content being offered for sale is merely second-hand, resold content (i.e., non-original content), it's also unquestionable that these re-sellers are more than eager to use the word "gacha" to describe their items.
And why? Because "gacha", in effect, had its
meaning
changed. These days, it tends to describe second-hand, non-original content being resold
in some way
. It borrows the aesthetics and the wording of the original gacha systems, while offering second-hand content using a reputable mechanism (the SL Marketplace).
Indeed, for someone who became a resident of Second Life
after
2021, when asking what "gacha" means, the most likely answer will be "oh, that's just cheap, second-hand items, that people resell because they don't want them any longer".
Clearly, whatever the good intentions of the Policy Prohibiting Gacha Transactions (2021) had in forbidding the usage of the word(s) in promoting sales, it has been consistently violated.
I believe that there are many reasons for that. The first one is the aforementioned aesthetics. The item is packaged, labeled, and described "as if" it were a gacha. This continues to appeal to certain customers, who are not fond of buying "previously used" content, but are happy to engage in gacha-hunts. There is a collector's appeal to gacha items — for instance, the ability to brag about how cheap a "rare" item from merchant X was. There is also the possibility for content creators to repackage older content "as if" it were a gacha, and, within the limitations clearly set by the Gacha Policy, offer these items for sale as part of their own promotions.
The main reason, I would claim, is that residents have simply replaced, in their minds, the word "gacha" with "second-hand content". Some might even think that this is what the word actually was supposed to
mean
. The "gambling" appeal might not even be there, although I can imagine that raffle-like sales are always popular. For instance, just consider the ubiquitous "first letter chairs" present in many creator's shops, where a letter is randomly picked in a period of time, and if your own name matches that letter, by sitting on the chair, you get the item for free. The creator's intent is, of course, to get people to visit their shops and
stay
there, eagerly waiting for their own letter to appear. Since this transaction establishes very clearly what item(s) will be received, it's not really a "gambling game" — more like a "waiting game" — and, in any case, the participant doesn't spend any money to enter the draw. They just need to wait. And this doesn't violate the "camping chair" policies, either, so it's a win-win situation which is perfectly legal and legitimate.
Those content creators who do original content, laboriously crafting their 3D meshed items for hours or days, to finally place them on the SL Marketplace for sale, may find that the Marketplace is already crammed full of old copies of
their
(old, pre-2021) content, and potentially interested customers may find that the original brand name is buried under the heavy weight of 600,000+ gacha items, which, naturally, must explain who the original content owner was, and therefore use
their
brand name (with the appropriate disclaimer). Since "brand names", as mentioned elsewhere, are not guaranteed any special protection inside SL (if they're trademarked in a real-world notary, their owners may litigate, but that's to be settled in court
outside
Second Life), and the search engine cannot know who is the "original creator" and who just happens to be mentioning them, the searches are biased towards the so-called "gacha resellers", who often are able to place many more single-sale items using (technically) the
same
brand as the original creator.
And even some attempts at "fixing" all of the above sometimes provoke some hiccups on the SL Marketplace which require rethinking/replanning afterwards.
It's not easy, and I perfectly understand that there are several parties in eternal conflict around this issue:
  1. The consumer
    . Consumers expect items to be correctly labeled, visible, and understand what is inside them; in other words, they expect a certain degree of consumer protection. When searching for a specific item for a specific brand/merchant/store, they expect the SL Marketplace to present them with
    that
    item — not a re-packaged gacha from long ago, an outdated version of a current item. They also expect the Gacha Policy to be in effect, and that the SL Marketplace is not used as a "gacha replacement machine" in a way (thus violating LL's own policy). Clarity and transparency — what is being offered, for how much — are the keys to the success of online shopping!
  2. The original content creator
    . Obviously, the original content creator, who spent uncountable hours in developing their content, and meticulously packaging it to be sold, not to mention the investment in advertising and the many forms of promotion, expect their sales to be at the very least equivalent to the effort they put into it. Most might have no issue with their "old" content being resold — they have already gotten their money once — but naturally enough they want a fair share of the recognition of their original work. Something made 4 years ago took as long (or possibly longer!) to create as today; that effort was repaid by having sales of thousands of copies; now all these copies are being resold, swamping the marketplace with thousands of individual entries (all tagged with the original content creator's name/brand/store name somewhere in their descriptions), thus making
    contemporary
    content difficult to search for, which, in turn, means sales lost — ironically, sales lost to content they might have made years ago, but which get sold by someone else instead!
  3. The former gacha operators
    . In order to feed their gacha delivery machines, they bought
    a lot
    of content back then, which they cannot use any longer due to the policy change; now, naturally, and with all legitimacy, they want to get rid of that content and recoup at least part of their original investment. There continues to be a huge market for "gacha-labelled" content, and, as such,
    forbidding
    the use of the word "gacha" would be severely detrimental to those former operators. It is even conceivable that many might continue their former business model by pushing second-hand content and labelling it as "gacha", merely because their
    own
    gacha brand has acquired a positive reputation. And it's possible (although unlikely) that some content creators are even willing to do a promotion of their
    old
    content by redistributing it, either directly, or via one of the reputable former gacha operators. Whatever the reasons — the former gacha operators contribute to a substantial share of the SL Marketplace revenue which should not be disdained. And, indirectly, they are promoting existing content creators, by crediting them properly, and allowing consumers to get something very cheap which they could not afford, four years ago (and which the content creator might have long removed from the SL Marketplace, so it's not even being offered for sale right now), and allowing consumers to take a look at the quality of a certain content creator by buying a fully-functional (albeit dated!) example — and not a limited-functionality demo! — thus promoting that content creator's own products. While that effect is hard to measure, I believe that some have anecdotal evidence that this has happened indeed in the past (I certainly have heard that claim being made in-world!).
  4. Other second-hand/used content sellers
    . While I have absolutely no idea on how big the market for used content is, it must not be "zero", since the SL Marketplace has had, for a long time, a "Used" category — which means that there most be a few stores for used content (and enough customers willing to buy such content). Now these second-hand stores have a problem. They might either have preceded the "gacha boom" and avoided it (for many reasons); or they might be former gacha machine operators who use the designation "used content" to avoid the now-forbidden word "gacha". But this means that there are now many types of merchants selling the same content, categorised differently: former gacha operators continue to use the word "gacha" to describe their products, as if the Gacha Policy didn't forbid the name; others resell used content, but found out that labelling such content as "gacha" and moving it from the "Used" to the "Gacha" category results in more sales: and finally, the group of merchants who has been on the SL Marketplace for several years
    only
    reselling second-hand content, which now are confused by the usage of the word "gacha" to drive sales up... since neither these products are "gacha" in the now-forbidden sense of a quasi-gambling activity, nor is the word "gacha"
    allowed
    to be used to describe such content. There is no level playing field for two types of merchants essentially competing in the same market, one group adhering to the policy changes, the other group pretending that the policy changes do not affect
    their
    way of advertising their second-hand products.
  5. Linden Lab
    . Since LL takes a small fee from the proceedings, the more content is sold through the SL Marketplace, the more profitable LL becomes. As such, imposing measures that somehow
    limit
    the number of items being offered for sale
    will
    have an impact in LL's own accounting. As such, in an ideal world, LL wants to get content being bought and sold as much as possible via the SL Marketplace, and, from a purely detached and uninterested point of view, how exactly things are sold is irrelevant, what matters is merely
    more sales
    . Therefore, it's in LL's own corporate interest to keep all those groups of different people happy, and make them
    all
    participate, either as original content creators, or as legitimate second-hand merchants, and, most importantly perhaps, as eager shoppers of
    all
    content types.
Thus my request for clarification :)
I'm aware that there is not a "best" solution out there — i.e., one that costs LL nothing (in development) and benefits
all
involved parties in a fair, equalitarian way.
Here are, therefore, a few suggestions...
  1. Enforce the prohibition of using the word "gacha"
    . This means removing the category altogether, and automatically searching & replacing the entries in the Marketplace to use the expression "used content" instead, possibly giving merchants a period of time to voluntarily change their descriptions first. (Note that this search & replace would have to take into consideration product descriptions in different languages.) This would make gacha fans — consumers
    and
    merchants — angry, but, at least, the content would remain on the marketplace for sale, just harder to find.
  2. Provide a new field for the product description, which would point to the original creator
    . When flagging an item as "used content", the Marketplace backoffice would automatically add a
    mandatory
    new field to list the original content creator (and possibly their store on the Marketplace as well, assuming they have one — easy to check for automatically). 'Mandatory' means, in this case, that the field
    has
    to be filled in — if it's correctly filled in or not, well, that's probably hard to tell (at best, the Marketplace engine could list all avatar names in the content being offered, and see if they matched; if none matched, it could just give a warning before saving, e.g. "That resident is not listed as the original creator of this content; are you sure you have the correct name?").
This would immediately allow original content creators to get some extra attribution. But it would also allow, eventually, in a future redesign of the SL Marketplace, to correlate second-hand items with the original ones, and showing both when a customer searches for the item's name, for instance (again, all these options should be opt-in, e.g. "Should second-hand resales of this item be shown on query results together with your other items? Y/N").
  1. Allow the word "gacha" to be employed in a carefully redacted way
    . This is more of a
    policy
    than something effectively requiring some programming. All second-hand content resellers would be required, from now on, to formally describe the items they're offering according to a pre-defined template, something like this:
  • Name of the original item being offered for re-sale (ideally, the name of the original item as
  • Link where the original item can be bought on the SL Marketplace, if this is the case.
  • Name of the original content creator (with the before mentioned automatically generated link to the creator's avatar profile and/or Marketplace store, if they have one);
  • Automatic generation of the date of purchase, if such information is present in the object and/or the asset server's database (probably not) — this would, for instance, show if an item had been purchased while the "Gacha Policy" was
    not yet
    in effect (and possibly visually flagged as such);
  • Disclaimer that the item has no warrantee and/or technical support — not even the warrantee that the original creator will give any support for a second-hand item!
  • If this
    was
    acquired via a gacha machine: add an explanation that the item was "formerly acquired using a gacha machine" before September 2021 and being resold as such; but that there is no raffle/luck element present, etc. (such wording would be automatically generated to keep consistency across merchants).
This would make it easier to report a non-compliant description, either by the content creator themselves, or by anyone else.
  1. Reword "gacha" into "collectables"
    . Because, in a sense, that's what they are: "old" content with a tag regarding its rarity, and being sold in a specially-packaged way. This would mark a clearer separation between "used" content and, well, "collection items". Everybody who is familiar with the "gacha" model will easily enough adapt to "collectables" instead, and this would also mean that Linden Lab would be fully compliant with whatever jurisdiction that restricts the usage of the "gacha" model.
  2. All (or some) of the above
    . Not all the options are mutually exclusive :)
At the end of the day, though, everything can be 'fixed' simply by clarifying what that sentence published actually
means
;)