The funny thing about Mihoyo's games is that they are one of the most profitable developers, but they could definitely pull more levers to incentivise people to spend even more money. Most gacha games have some sort of pay-to-win PvP and/or leaderboards built in their games, but in Mihoyo's games, having a top-tier team just means you have to oppertunity to get slightly more premium currency.
At some point, adding mechanics like that turns people off from the game. Those things are good for games that have limited shelf life and want to get people to dump money into it while the game is popular, but things like leaderboards actually get people to quit playing once they realize that they can't get ever get on it because too many other people are willing to pay more. miHoYo games are intended to get people playing for a long time rather than trying to milk a group of players for a month or two and then moving on.
Honkai Impact 3rd does have pay2win ladder. It's pretty hardcore too, even as a whale it can be quite rough to get to the top. There's a LOT of top tier whales in that game and you need some pixel perfect timings to utilize it at the top level.
Waifu monetization model, more profitable to milk a lot of horny folks a little for a long time. I still can't get over Mihoyo built a tokamak reactor IRL.
Please do not milk the horny folk. ;) Well, they invested in one, and they also invested in a SpaceX competitor, Orienspace, too. It was a little jarring seeing their logo alongside all the ~serious companies.
Where they really get you is the FOMO factor when a banner is about to expire and you have lost your 50/50. I wonder how much of their revenue comes from the final 24 hrs of that countdown.
Probably some, but I think it works more like the crowdfunding model. The first few days of the banner has the biggest spenders go hard, and then it cools down and ramps up slightly by the end. The former is going to include a lot of spenders going for 6 copies, so they are much less elastic in how to optimally spend on the banner.
PVP and leaderboards attract a different audience than normal gacha players which is why it tends to be rare-ish in gacha games. (Almost none of the popular ones focus on it).
Most of the time, the social aspect of gacha is to show off your "collection" rather than to show off your "skills", so adding PvP and leaderboards doesn't do much for most players.
Instead, gacha games tend to have "social" features that do let you show off your "collection" in some way, like profile cards with character showcases, "supports" mechanisms that let friends and strangers borrow your characters, or sometimes just blatantly a score for your gallery completion %.
Also FWIW, Genshin actually has PvP, it's just that it's only present in the card battle mini-game. And my impression (could be inaccurate though) of that is most players are not particularly "into" that mode.
Very perplexed about this too. The only reason I can come up with is to prevent people from copying the content?
But that doesn't make much sense either TBH. The page's content is not obfuscated, so this does nothing to stop a content scraper script. Plus, even a not particularly technical user can just turn on reading mode and get at the text anyways...
oncontextmenu and ondragstart are preventDefault'ed _unless_ you are in a input/textarea e.g. leaving a reply. Truly bizarre and pointless. I've done something similar in a nonsense corporate context to stop people copying certain sensitive date, but at least I knew it was pointless.
In Firefox you can shift+rightclick to bypass that (disables the event), or completely disable the event by changing "dom.event.contextmenu.enabled" in about:config.
They also somehow broke scrolling via the scroll bar, swipe to go back, and jumping to text search results on iOS! This is the first site that I’ve seen break so many browser features.
What do you think the game's design is? Because I think it's a gorgeous open world single player ARPG. The story, character cast, literary inspiration, gameplay mechanics, and music, are all just incredible.
There are a thousand great things to say about Genshin before you even get anywhere near talking about the nonintrusive and ignorable monetization model. I think people hear "Gacha" and mentally lump it in with spammy 2d animated gif idle clicker games. But it's a better BOTW, and anything else misses the forest for the trees.
When I started playing Genshin Impact, one thing that seemed a little cheap compared to Breath of the Wild is that it has mechanics that they don't even try to justify in-world.
For example, having multiple characters that you can switch between by pressing a button, which are also somehow characters in the story. Nobody in-world ever says a thing about whichever character you're currently using. You can have characters talking to their own clone.
but in this case Genshin is heavily hindered by its gacha mechanics and its need to meter out content to keep people coming back. Some good examples of this are how the dialogue can be endless and pointless. You are often running from one place to the next to go through 20 minute un-skippable dialogues that have no real relevance to the story. On top of that, everything "fun" is time gated and restricted arbitrarily by a currency. The game is very much structured around pushing the user to log in for 15-20 minutes every day and anything more or less than that is painful
> There are a thousand great things to say about Genshin before you even get anywhere near talking about the nonintrusive and ignorable monetization model
> everything "fun" is time gated and restricted arbitrarily by a currency. The game is very much structured around pushing the user to log in for 15-20 minutes every day and anything more or less than that is painful
I suppose both of those things might be true. But #2 sounds like the primary issue that always prevents me from enjoying f2p games.
There's a big implication in the article itself that the monetization structure of such gacha goes at odds with the fundamentals of game design. The only real benefit is that
1. some huge giga spends are more or less subsidizing your experience so you can play this game for no cost. This is obviously a boon in low income countries where a console game can be an extreme luxury to buy new.
2. The game can provide an RPG experience that will continually update for years, compared to a traditional RPG that is either one and done (possibly rushing out the last third and never following up on plot threads) or needs to sequel bait for the next entry in 3-4 years (on the most generous side).
so it really comes down to your personal situation on if this is liberating or a bastardization of the genre.
The game was designed to be free to play from the beginning, so any design decisions are fundamentally going to be geared towards making that work. The design could never be corrupted, because that implies it wasn't to begin with :)
I have no idea about Mihoyo (never even looked in their direction, save for looking up what it is), but gacha != F2P.
Valve, even though their games have lootboxes, they got it [mostly] right by trying their best to make sure there's no "pay to win" (save for accidental cosmetics' bugs, which are half of the time are "pay to lose" and either way are typically fixed promptly) and all game mechanics are equally accessible to everyone from minute zero, with lootboxes being purely cosmetic.
I think it's more because Valve has (from what I heard) a very principled founder, and that they never went public (and probably won't) so they don't have any shareholders to please with "growth".
it varies immensely, and honestly there's no consensus among gacha players what f2p even truly means. It could mean that you can experience all content and eventually pulled some desired characters without paying (e.g. no paywalled characters nor features save cosmetics). It could be more based on a vague metric on how competitive a free player can be in the game (e.g. obviously not going to be top 100 in most games, but maybe top 1000 for a player who plans). It could mean you get a lot of pulls and can grab most of the roster without spending (with whales going for dupes to make money). etc.
People will probably argue about it until the end of time, and I dont particular care to give my take on it. Just wanted to share a few other perspectives.
It's easy to say "F2P bad" or "live service bad", and I'm usually inclined to agree, but in this case, the entire game was carefully designed around the monetization model from the very start of development, to the point that it probably wouldn't work very well without it.
I've thought about what a non-live service, $60 one-time purchase version of Genshin Impact would look like, and I've come to the conclusion that it probably wouldn't be anywhere near as good. Even assuming it had the same amount of content it has now (which is quite a lot), the large and diverse roster of characters goes a long way in avoiding the feeling of repetitiveness and tedium that plagues most large open world games nowadays, and having to carefully pick and choose which characters you want to obtain and invest into (if you're not a whale, at least) and having to dedicate time to build up each one makes you care a lot more about them.
Yes, every game based on a multiplayer grinding treadmill would be a shitty game if you made it single player.
> the large and diverse roster of characters goes a long way in avoiding the feeling of repetitiveness and tedium
It's just the same tedium but you change the combos every 10000 repeats?
> that plagues most large open world games nowadays
Open world games have grown too large for their own good, but that's a different discussion. The worst is when some title is succesful and they get money and they make a sequel that's thrice as big.
Horizon Zero Dawn: perfect length if you ask me. Horizon Forbidden West: could have been 50% smaller for the same enjoyment.
Even Witcher 3 and Elden Ring, which are great non repetitive open world games, could have been smaller for the same effect if you ask me.
>It's just the same tedium but you change the combos every 10000 repeats?
if you're going to reduce it to that, we ultimately can go back to the 90's and consider all video games as a useless waste of time that corrupts the mind.
Ultimately, you figure out why games are fun for yourself and focus in on that, be it gameplay, story, charactters, art direction, or simply comfort (I'm sure I can find a few friends who easily threw X000 hours into Stardew Valley). I don't like competitive FPS, but people have made friends, professions, and entertainment just around watching other people play those games. Let alone their own personal experience.
>The worst is when some title is succesful and they get money and they make a sequel that's thrice as big.
that's simply consumer demand, and despite that meme most people are not asking for shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less. Fortunately, games are diverse and you can definitely tailor to your needs unless you must have AAA graphics for your presentation. There are thousands of indies released yearly, but maybe a hundred AAA on a good year spread across a dozen genres.
Even if “live service bad”, Genshin Impact has been reverse engineered to death; you can run your own server, mod the game to get all the cosmetics, and do just about whatever you want.
Wow, that's a lot of jargon. Despite playing Genshin Impact a fair bit (my niece is into it), I didn't understand most of terms in this article. It's odd that they felt like they had to define "enshittification" which is everywhere and not terms like "dolphin" and "i-frames" which I had never heard of before.
I know that gamers exist on a spectrum but this reminds me of the time my coworker after learning I played World of Warcraft asked me what level I was (several months into and expansion). I tried to quickly change the subject before I was exposed.
Dolphin is a play on a whale, a medium spender vs a big spender or a free-to-play (F2P) user.
I don't know where i-frames came from originally, but it's abbreviated from invincibility frames, and is usually the part of an animation where your character won't take damage. I think Dark Souls/Elden Ring would be the most well known example of that mechanics.
yeah, mobile gamers are a whole other audience with very different expectations from the console/PC market. Star Rail is a popular example, but also doesn't really help with the Jargon since it's one of those games that insists on inventing 50 new terms to describe what are probably common features. Simulated Universe => rouge-lite mode, Paths => roles, light cones/relics => gear, etc.
I’m not too familiar with gacha games, so I was intrigued. I thought the criticism of EA’s former CEO was funny. But the rest of the article felt like a lot of term-dropping and examples that aren't linked together into a cohesive theory, so I’m kind of disappointed. I think this industry talk about monetization (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNjI03CGkb4) and Tynan Sylvester’s book “Designing Games” were a lot more informative.
For example, the blog post says this but then doesn't really elaborate on what any of the clauses mean ("repeatable design levers", "without compromising the core gameplay experience"):
> A healthy long-term monetization system should therefore have repeatable design levers that can be used to reliably generate demand without compromising the core gameplay experience.
In contrast "Designing Games" has a whole section on fixed/variable reward schedules, e.g. (pg. 210):
> We can avoid such shelf moments by superimposing several fixed ratio schedules. Consider what happens when the player can get a dollar for every 10th chest, a diamond for every 10th rock mined, and an arrow for every 10th goblin killed. ... The player shifts focus back and forth between activities, never missing a dopamine-driven beat.
I asked some friends who play gacha games and they mentioned “stamina” mechanics as something that makes these game addictive. I’d never heard of it before, but apparently you’re limited to perform X number of actions per day. You can purchase some additional stamina/actions, but this creates FOMO if you don’t log in every day.
>I asked some friends who play gacha games and they mentioned “stamina” mechanics as something that makes these game addictive. I’d never heard of it before, but apparently you’re limited to perform X number of actions per day. You can purchase some additional stamina/actions, but this creates FOMO if you don’t log in every day.
yeah, stamina is a mixed bag. The downside is that it limits how much you play and forces you to play X amount if you don't want to waste it. the "upside" is that it equalizes out most player progress. If you aren't someone who spends a ton of money to buy more stamina (and few gacha bank on this as their revenue. It's 90% about the character releases) you'll probably have similar progression to your other friends, or if someone jumps in 1-2 months later they won't be completely in the dust to players who played day 1.
I think the other final straw is macro abuse. You don't limit stamina and the sweatiest gamers will simply automate the process and go beyond human limits of how much you can play. I think this is why even the few games I know that tried a stamina-less system end up implementing stamina. Similar to using captcha to limit web crawlers from the huge minority of those abusing it.
I should note though that modern gacha don't really "limit" your casual progress that much compared to western games. By the time stamina is a scarcity, you are probably finished with the story content and are simply grinding some form of gear, similar to an MMO. Stamina in modern gacha is there to limit that grind, not wall off playing the story.
Any suggestions? I've been a mobile player for the longest so never (could) use i-frames/animation cancelling etc. Do you have any suggestions on what to do or learn from? TIA!
With these games your macro strategy is a lot more important than doing any kind of hair trigger reaction. Like your 3rd move in a 5 move sequence might come with iframes or a gap creator, so you need to keep track of where you are in the moveset and try to time it with the boss's actions. However, you are never asked for highly precise inputs.
The game is built to be played on a screen with your fingers blocking some elements after all.
Pretty good read. Particularly the part about avoiding enshittification. I've never really thought about it, but there are in fact a few very valuable lessons that many of the world's biggest tech companies could learn from this chinese gacha company, as ridiculous as it sounds, because their leadership is clearly well above average.
Also, next time I see someone asking why they don't release more skins, I'm going to link them to this article because it provides a pretty clear explanation for that, too.
What drew me into this game was the art-heavy design. I appreciate how much they invest into assets in and out of the game; for example the original soundtracks, or sponsoring the philharmonic orchestras - they didn't have to do that.
They've moved far from it now, but before they became Hoyoverse their mantra was simply "Tech Otakus save the world!". You see their earliest games (most which never left china) and you definitely get that vibe that this simply started as a few gamers wanting to just make something for themselves. I'm sure the payoff 10 years later was beyond their wildest dreams.
I wonder if they could do it the other way - Fate's gacha has free skins, but if you want to unlock and use them you then need to roll the character. This seems to turn around the audience problem, where the skin becomes bait for a characters 3rd or 4th rerun banner, etc.
It could possibly work, but generally the default skin and character itself is appealing enough. They don't really need another reason on top of that to pull.
Also, Fate can simply make a bunch of alts with new kits for that 1st banner revenue.
To explain to non-mobile players: "alts" are basically copies of usually poopular characters, but packaged as a new character. New lines, new skills, maybe a different element/role as a whole. It may or may not be used as a way to reuse assets depending on the quality of the game.
Gacha games are basically glorified todo lists, all of them eventually devolve into the stage where your "progress" grinds to halt and you either put in the money to get over the next barrier or do tedious daily actions to slowly power up your team to get over the barrier eventually. The competitive aspects feed the FOMO and give advantage to players who were in from the start, a kind of pyramid scheme. Such disgusting game design patterns all around. When you step away from it and look at it, you realize there really isn't a game but a dopamine box designed to trap you.
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