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Free-to-play
The distribution model of nearly all gacha games, where the client costs nothing and revenue comes from optional purchases. F2P also names the player identity of spending nothing and budgeting earned currency.
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Free-to-play (F2P) is the distribution model of nearly every gacha game: the client is free, all content is nominally reachable without paying, and revenue comes from optional purchases, overwhelmingly premium currency for pulls. The model's scale is why the genre exists at all; a single F2P title can gross billions from a minority of paying players. [1]
In gacha communities the term does double duty as a player identity. "Playing F2P" means spending nothing and treating the earned-currency budget as the whole game: tracking login rewards, event payouts, and achievement gems, then planning pulls around pity math and banner schedules. Whether a game is "F2P friendly" is one of the most common evaluation questions players ask, and it usually decomposes into measurable parts: monthly earned-pull income, pity carry-over, spark accessibility, and how much power sits in dupes.
"F2P" and "low-spender" content is a large category of gacha media precisely because the math is tractable: with published rates and a known income rate, the expected wait for any character is computable. The pull probability article covers the arithmetic.
References
- Genshin Impact generates $2 billion on mobile in first year Sensor Tower. Accessed 2026-07-09. Third-party estimate illustrating the scale of the model.
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