How this record works

A database is only worth as much as its stated method. Here is ours, including where it is thin.

What counts as a gacha game

A game qualifies when all three hold:

1. Randomized acquisition of characters, units, cards, or gameplay-affecting equipment.
2. That randomization is monetized, directly or through a purchasable premium currency.
3. The collection is persistent and materially affects progression.

The third condition is what keeps the boundary honest. Without it, every loot box ever shipped is in scope. With it, the line lands where the community already draws it, and it can be checked from documentation rather than argued from taste.

Rulings we have made

• Digital TCGs with paid random packs — in. They satisfy all three conditions. Excluding them because the word "gacha" is not used would be inconsistent.
• Sports team builders — in. Mechanically identical. This is the ruling nobody would make from taste, which is exactly why it belongs to a rules-based policy.
• Cosmetic-only loot boxes — out. They fail the third condition.
• Kompu-gacha-era browser and social games — in. They are the origin of the genre and most of this graveyard.
• Shovelware — in, if verifiable. There is no popularity floor. The floor is evidence: a title, an operator, and at least one date.

How records are built

• Status belongs to a regional service, not to a game. A title can be dead in the West and running in Japan. Both are recorded.
• Every date carries a precision. If a source says "end of March 2016", we store a month, not a fabricated day.
• Every non-trivial fact carries a source and a retrieval date. Where sources conflict, both values are kept and flagged.
• Null means unknown. An honest null beats a confident guess.
• Japanese titles stay canonical unless an attested English release name exists. Machine romanizations are stored as aliases and never presented as official names.

Where this is thin

Coverage is strongest for Japanese mobile and PC online titles, because that is where the surviving records are. Chinese, Korean and Western-only releases are underrepresented and being backfilled. Many bulk-imported records give their cause of death as undisclosed because the operator never stated one. Records carrying a bulk-screened note have not been individually verified beyond the sources listed on them.

Of 1,853 records, 1,775 have a recorded end date. The rest are known deaths with incomplete paperwork.

What this site does not do

No walkthroughs, tier lists, or pity calculators. Those are covered well elsewhere by people who publish within hours of every patch. No original reporting: the news wire aggregates and credits its sources. No reviews, no scores.

Corrections

If a date here is wrong and you have a source, that is the most useful thing you can send. Every record is a file with its citations attached, so corrections are cheap.

Using the data

The full dataset is published at /data/games.json, with per-game records at /games/{id}.json. Facts are not copyrightable and we would rather they spread; if you build on this, cite the record and the underlying source. A formal open licence is being decided and will be stated here.