Genshin Impact made more money in its first year than any other game
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But on the other, it's a fabulously beautiful and well crafted open world with tons of things to do and explore, offered completely for free, no strings attached. It's almost entirely single-player so there's no competitive pressure, money is only needed if you don't have enough in-game currency to snag a character you want.
I've played happily on and off for months and only experimentally paid $5 to see if it was worth it. I have more characters and resources than I know what to do with and have had a great time.
But the business model is definitely predatory on people who are willing to pay hundreds or thousands to score a character or optimal item. Of course we've seen that happen with in-app purchases of crystals and smurfberries for years. The model works, which is the best and worst you can say of it.
At this point so many busnisses exploit unreasonableness of some of their customers. Aren't people being sold this season's handbag for few thousands of dollars exploited?
By the time you realize the thing you wanted was actually $600 (which you wouldn't have spent upfront) but you've already spent $500 without getting it, it feels unavoidable to go and spend another hundred. And then the cycle happens again and again, making you feel very much like you have a sickness.
Many people can effectively avoid all of this and be very happy not spending a dime and not feel any pressure at all, but the problem is the large, very large, sometimes underage, base of vulnerable people who are spending money they can't really afford on these games.
This business practice is pure dogshit. Especially given how much it targets children and those with gambling addictions.
I'm a pretty frugal player and not competitive at all, but I still feel a little spark when I see the fancy, expensive cards.
IMO There's a balance. People are responsible for themselves, but that doesn't necessarily remove culpability from the seller. I think it's easy to assume that everyone is a perfectly rational agent capable of avoiding bad deals through reason alone, but desire is a funny thing. The most extreme example is the drug dealer (or the cartel, or the US government, however high up you want to go on the chain) and there's definitely a gradient of moral responsibility from there.
Albeit, Genshin Impact's pity mechanics are less generous than other gacha. Usually it's about 80-90 pulls for a guaranteed on-banner pull. For Genshin Impact, it's 90 pulls for a guaranteed 50/50 chance at an on banner pull, but if you lose the 50/50 you will get an guaranteed on banner pull after the next 90 pulls. Both guarantees persist across banners.
When it comes to regulating what is effectively gambling, this is actually a pretty healthy set of rules more countries should follow.
(AFAIK there are no such regulations in the US, which is why lootboxes here usually do not come with drop rates, don't give you any way to view your pull history, and almost never have pity mechanisms)
This is true in theory, but the rapid rate of new characters being introduced means that re-runs are far less common than new "banners". Indeed, some characters released nearly a year ago have never had a rerun. This means that there is a strong sense of FOMO - if you don't have the gems to guarantee the character you want this time around you may have to wait a year or more to get another chance.
Genshin Impact also has a very poor gatcha "rate" compared to many gatcha games (0.6% to get a "5 star" character, and there's no guarantee it's the featured one until your second "5-star" roll).
Second, if we've learned anything from social media and other ML-optimized user experiences, it's that optimizing solely for profit (or engagement) isn't healthy for your users. Some of them will be more affected than others, but if you do it wrong, you're converting human suffering into profit. Some of the stories of gem-game whales are just awful.
Those aren't mutually exclusive. Making a good game is important for user retention and keeping them spending, and being too aggressive with monetization can alienate them and result in less revenue overall.
Genshin Impact could be far more aggressive with the monetization to put it on par with other gacha, but it's relatively subdued.
Apple Arcade is a good example of this. With the subscription, they have a bunch of games which used to be gem games, but had that part of the monetization removed. And all of the games are better for it - they removed a lot of the frustration, gambling, unnecessary delays, which had been added to push people to buy gems.
That said, I don't have a problem with cosmetic-only purchases. It's really the gambling and other dark patterns that are the problem.
Gamblers and stock traders beg to differ.
Maybe they are poor, they can't afford the skin, and feel poor because they are poor and reality reflects it.
>according to a damning report on gaming habits
Reads like another moral panic from fake news they blow out of proportion and citing "some kids" to sample bias only from anyone who already agrees, like saying "Kids love Linux" with only interviews of Linux loving preteens.
>Another is quoted as saying: "Sometimes if you are wearing the default skin you can get bullied."
You get bullied for losing or making mistakes, but you don't hear articles about:
"Kids who play Fortnite say they get bullied and shamed if they are killed in the game, according to a damning report on gaming habits"
IMO Genshin Impact has the right balance which is rare for gacha. Content is not balanced around the assumption that players spend real money (the game itself is relatively easy too).
> Apple Arcade is a good example of this. With the subscription, they have a bunch of games which used to be gem games, but had that part of the monetization removed.
So there's a funny of example of that with the Castlevania game recently released for Apple Arcade. They 5x-ed the earnings of the formerly paid-for currency to compensate for the lack of payment...
...and it's still far more difficult and grindy to get anything worthwhile than in Genshin Impact.
I had to do two weeks worth of time manipulation to get something useful that could actually end up finishing the current content.
This ignores the fact there aren't unlimited resources to develop and maintain a game. Not requiring people to buy gems would improve some areas of the game for sure, but making less money is certain to impact other areas of the game - you always need to give up something in order to fit things in budget.
This is half-true, at least for the ones I tried on Apple Arcade. Example, the Castlevania game. All the stupid gem gacha bullshit addiction-driving stuff is still in the game, it's just that you no longer buy the gems, the game just absolutely throws gems at you for free while you play. But you've still got all the stupid mobile game addiction driving stuff like daily quests, 'pulls' to randomly get items, a tedious and complex system of upgrades for weapons/characters that's completely unnecessary (except it is necessary because the difficulty's tuned such that you'll never get through the game without engaging with it all), all that stuff. The Star Trek game was similar IIRC.
The games are still worse despite not wanting money, the (originally) monetization-driven game design poisons it anyway. For me this was one of the most disappointing parts of Apple Arcade, I'd thought the point was to pay for access to _quality_ games, not bullshit mobile games with the IAP hastily ripped out.
The number of parameters you can optimize for is limited (to one, in my opinion).
While a premium game might also be attempting to optimize for profit, there is a greater distance between theory and data about what will achieve the highest profit.
Therefore, we game developers (the individuals making the game), who may be more motivated by making a quality game than profit per se, are able/allowed to push harder on creating a fun experience. It is more difficult for business interests to require compromising gameplay for profit when not armed with the data that freemium games provide.
I have loved working on premium video games (~20 year career, mostly RPGs and RTSs). I expect I would find it soul-crushing to work on a freemium game where I had to compromise player experience for the sake of profit.
(I do not disagree with your later point that freemium games can be fun (and still must be, to some degree) and I cannot comment on Genshin Impact specifically.)
Edit: I suppose I'm also attempting to point out that there can be a significant difference between what is motivating the corporate entity funding the game and the people who are actually creating it.
It's a difficult question with no single answer.
On top of that, many games have only cosmetic purchases. Fortnite is an obvious example of this model. Saying Fortnite is “optimized for profit” makes very little sense, since nothing you can do in the game requires purchases at all.
It’s just a good game that a ton of people enjoy playing, which is really all you need to make a profitable free-to-play game these days.
(the other route to getting more players is advertising, which is a whole other thing)
Hacker News strongly underestimates the appeal of cosmetics.
If it's not compromising the game design, and it's not so addictive that people are spending more than they have, I don't have a problem. I'm not against monetization, as long as the games steer away from the dark patterns / don't make casinos for children.
How so? As far as I'm aware, the free-to-play version of Fortnite never sold loot boxes.
I don't think anyone is arguing that freemium games can't be fun or that some microtransaction models are more player-beneficial than others. But, like with any feature, if you include microtransactions than some other aspect received less attention (assuming a fixed budget, which I realize is also a consideration as game X might never have been made without the freemium component to propel the business decision).
Edit: Also, as others have said here, most freemium developers focus on extracting revenue from the "whales," not the players who play for free or pay little.
Those resources would not have existed had it not been for the sales of cosmetics.
Earlier Battlefields had generic soldiers per side that were identifiable by weapon class and customizable by camouflage but retained a clear distinction between the two large teams. This helped players to distinguish friend v foe and to optimize their attack/defend strategy based on the class of their opponent.
Things started going downhill with Battlefield V (WW2). It has "Elites" that can be played on both sides, so it's possible to have a Japanese soldier fighting in an early battle on the Western Front. This is not great for immersion in a game realistically themed around a serious subject.
From what I know about BF2042, because it's in the future, DICE's story is that there is a mercenary war (instead of country vs country). So now DICE can allow players to use their favorite Specialist and cosmetic on either team, which completely ruins friend v foe. And the Specialists can use any weapon which eliminates some of the strategy used when attacking/defending.
Premium cosmetics are certainly harder to pull off in some game types than others. I guess EA/DICE figured the in-game purchases will more than offset any popularity losses from these gameplay sacrifices. But hopefully DICE will be able to find a sweet spot if they are willing refine their current approach.
If you can't identify someone based on uniform and coloring, you're in for some nasty team kills.
This reminds me how much I still love BF4
The 442nd regiment composed mostly of Japanese Americans was deployed in Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/442nd_Infantry_Regiment_(Unite...
So what's breaking the immersion? Are they wearing the wrong uniforms?
If you're willing to pay money to experience less gameplay, are you really enjoying the game?
That's only true till the baseline. After that point, you need to focus on specific players, or you will risk compromising your game by catering for too many tastes, making it generic and bland. Ultimately you will drive people away anyway with your decisions, so there is no real harm in focusing on the money-pots, as long as you stay about the baseline of fun.
Unfortunately in many of the games that my kids enjoy, I have noticed that the optimization path for the freemium model includes increasing the time sink required for access to game mechanics and content, and increasing the rewards for paying actual money for access to mechanics and contents.
There are some free to play games that find a good tension between this early on, but longer term, I find that the games because less enjoyable because it is too time consuming for others to keep up with my "pay to play" approach to skipping the time intensive portions of the games.
> Saying Fortnite is “optimized for profit” makes very little sense, since nothing you can do in the game requires purchases at all.
Sure, from a mechanical perspective. My son uses a portion of his allowance to keep current on his emotes and skins because his friends apply social pressure by teasing the kids that don't have them. It's been a great opportunity to teach him about peer pressure, and the relatively harmless of this version of it, in contrast to more harmful ones related to drugs, alcohol, or risky behavior for teenagers.
I think the thing that people miss in their discussions of video games is that “enjoyability” or “fun” are not 1-dimensional quantities. In fact, there are many different ways to evaluate a game: meaningfulness, emotional range, decision complexity, flow state, educational/pedagogical value, literary value, societal/social impact, etc etc etc.
Furthermore, many of these criteria can be good at multiple ends of their range depending on individual taste and/or mood. For example, sometimes I’m in the mood for complex decisions to really sink my teeth into. Maybe a Zachtronics programming game or engineering game like Factorio or perhaps a challenging roguelike such as NetHack or Slay the Spire will scratch that itch for me. Other times I’m really burned out from work/studying and I’m just looking to unwind so a super relaxing, simple, flow state game like Stardew Valley is better for me.
By pursuing the free to play model, games like Genshin Impact are incentivizing their developers to optimize the game for two things only: engagement and gambling-like rewards. That is very bad. These games are the junk food of the game industry. Even worse. They’re casinos as well.
But this has always been true of games based on whatever market pressures optimized revenue.
In the 80s arcade games, many of the classics we love today, were optimized around you feeding as many quarters as possible into a machine in order to beat it. There's even a joke about this in Wayne's World https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4tmzwrdTmY
The 90s home console market has some classics but every 90s kid remembers awful games with great cover art or movie licensing.
Early 2000s is probably the peak of quality gaming: we were online enough to allow things like easy to access reviews to have a major impact on purchase decisions, while not online enough to make constant updates feasible.
After that we also saw the rise of extremely addictive MMORPGs that not only consumed people's wallets but their lives.
In the grand scheme of things I rather enjoy gacha games. Like most HNers I'm often in a position of having more money then time, and it's surprising how many relatively crappy gachas will evolve into pretty fun, well designed games over time.
I spent some time a few years ago playing some of the multiplayer "strategy" mobile games (FF, GoT, etc). I only ever sunk about $100 into any of them, the fun part for me was the politics and the intrigue on each server and that was roughly the ticket to entry. Got to know some of the whales a little - people who drop $5K-$10K+ on the game without a second thought. No real life names, just some conversations here and there. One was a VC, another a race car driver, lots of people from Kuwait for some reason...
My point is that I'm having trouble applying the "predatory" label when it's high net worth individuals throwing around sums that are ridiculous to me but trivial to them. I probably spend way more on some of my hobbies as a percentage of my income than they do on these games.
Now lower down on the scale, the people spending $100, $200, $500 on these games... that's where I get more uncomfortable.
In-game I had no illusions about personally competing or winning given that those games are purely pay-to-win, as I said I just enjoyed watching the server dynamics and the drama. I felt I got enough value out of, say, the $100 spread out over a few months until I got bored with the game.
That's kind of the disappointing thing about all this. In retrospect "classic" (as opposed to gacha) games are somewhat egalitarian. It didn't matter how much money you had, if you could master the gameplay and mechanics you could beat anyone else in the world.
It's a shame that the industry is turning so hard towards re-creating real world inequality in these fantasy spaces. This is an ironic reversal of imagined post-scarcity society from sci-fi like Star Trek - instead of creating post-scarcity in the real world we're artificially introducing scarcity to our virtual worlds.
Not everything imaginable is realizable.
We have so much food available that it’s a problem that poor people suffer from eating too much
It’s easier and more convenient to throw electronics, clothing, and furniture away than to bother repairing them
I wouldn’t bend over to pick up a quarter, even though it could buy me a day’s rice or flour
Once we’ve moved industry into space, we could well be ten or a hundred times as wealthy as this. Maybe employment will only be something for overachievers in that distant future
There is little the average person truly wants that we cannot provide.
You are assuming people have fixed minds, and wants never expand to fill the available resources.
I never assumed people have fixed minds. People have complex and ambitious minds. But largely these ambitions are social, and not material. Even "materialistic" desires are rarely about the actual material, they are almost always about the social significance of the material.
Regardless of how perfect the ‘setup’ the remaining materialistic desires will continue to expand as population and technological capacity grows. There is no known force that can completely extirpate such desires. Since there is no upper limit, all available mass-energy will inevitably be utilized given enough time. You are arguing that such a progression can be delayed, I agree. Perhaps a delay is possible up to millions of years but that’s just shifting the timeframe.
For example, I’m fairly certain I’ve encountered someone that genuinely wants an actual Star Trek like spaceship for their personal use, with a minimal social signalling component.
Even if there’s only 10000 such folks on Earth, that already represents vastly more industrial output than real policy makers can even dream of realizing. Let along the current and future desires of everyone else.
When it comes to those of us with a 9-5 job, there's usually no practical difference between facing off against people being paid to play a game vs people paying to be good in a game.
The issue is gambling VERY easily moves underground.
Gaming people to do things of nonsense utility is about all humans have to do after basic life supporting logistics.
Seems like mining fake objects, while power consuming, is less literally damaging than rocket ships and garages full of cars, boats, and 5 mansions that never get used.
It’s not outside the realm of possibility pretend loot is what the masses have to look forward to “owning” aside from basics down the line.
There is no intentional sunk cost fallacy or gambler's fallacy at play.
What you've posted would be valid if the topic of discussion were NFTs or skins where a person gets exactly what they pay for, no more or no less.
A gacha-style game operates differently from an NFT or car or house. It's not "If you pay $200 you get this digital item in the game", it's instead "If you pay $2, you get a 0.6% chance of getting the item." After you spend $100, the next chance is still 0.6%, and our human brains are really bad at realizing that. That's how it preys on us.
If the game were instead "Pay $200 and you get this digital item", I would consider it less predatory, and I bet it would also have far less profit.
Is it really though? Almost all aspects of it are cloned from other games/media.
Gameplay cloned from MMOs. World design cloned from BotW. Character designs cloned from the worst of anime.
It is the game equivalent of a street cart hotdog. They sell lot of them, but it is not innovative, good or a particularly thoughtful food/game.
It's a repetitive adventure game with shallow gameplay. I played it for about 5 hours waiting for it to become good before recognizing they copied the least interesting parts of BOTW and slapped a gacha-mechanic on it. At least the graphics are nice. I think gacha mechanics are bad because the random element means it's effectively gambling. The skinner box mechanic aims right for that sweet dopamine hit. The fact that Genshin Impact is so financially successful is deeply worrying.
The thing with Genshin that makes the mechanics rewarding durably is a consequence of the gacha for a free to play - each account is different. So you can't just use the same tactics as other people, you have to take what you get and make it work. In the process you have to learn the combat mechanics - animation cancelling, ICD, energy recharge, character switching, geo reactions and shields, crit-rate optimization, i-frames, stamina consumption, character grouping, resistances, swirling, elemental mastery, etc...
My main two concerns with the game are that there is the "Soylent is people" aspect where if you dig deeper you realize the game is funded by a small addicted minority. And second, I shudder to think what kind of 996 sweatshop that company must be given that I don't know a single western company that achieved this level of polish (and they are already known as cruel employers).
I would say that isn't really true. To play Genshin Impact on PC, you are required to install kernel-level always-online DRM on your computer. And the kernel anti-cheat (which exists solely to protect the integrity of their lootbox gambling monetization and has zero benefit to players) isn't even one of the usual ones like EAC or BattlEye (which I personally don't have much trust in either, for the record), but rather one developed in-house by the game's Chinese developers. And considering how involved the Chinese government is in the local game industry, that means you could effectively be giving the Chinese government kernel access to your computer in exchange for being able to play Genshin Impact. That's a pretty heavy price to pay in my books.
And of course, because the integrity of the gambling machine is the ultimate priority, things like modding and other popular single player pastimes are completely out of the picture as well. And because it's a live service game, every single penny you put into it will eventually be lost to the void as servers are shut down and nobody will ever be able to play the game again.
I'd be happy to pay for Genshin Impact as a regular single player game with no lootbox gambling mechanics that I could play offline without DRM and do whatever the hell I want with it after purchase without having to worry about a built-in killswitch disabling the game one day. But as that is not the reality we live in, I'm fairly certain I will never be installing the game on my computer, as the price is simply too high.
If you don't like it, it's not very hard to make Genshin single-player only. Most of the game is client-side, except for the spawning of enemies and resources. If you can figure out how to replicate it, you can get a 100% server-less Genshin Impact. I can definitely help with that if you want.
People have tried in the past to get the game running in single-player mode, and managed to get everything working except for mob spawns.
You'd also need to figure out some progression system to unlock characters, but that's not too hard.
If we could find some people to maintain the patch I'd be very willing to contribute to this too.
You may as well not bother.. people with self control and awareness will play non-toxic games, and people without it will avoid your patch since it’s not the real game to them
Certainly, if you make such patch you can't have it be too easy, it should be a challenge to get 5* characters and there should still be some RNG.
Really the biggest obstacle is that updates may happen and prevent new content from being available.
True of a lot of things, such as World of Warcraft and Steam.
And as mentioned, I don't put much trust in kernel anti-cheats in general, which is a big reason why I primarily play single player games. Which is why I'm extremely annoyed that a single player game that I might otherwise play comes with a kernel-level always-online DRM, all to protect the sanctity of predatory lootbox gambling monetization.
I still agree it's predatory. But it's not true that you can play the machine many times and get nothing you want. The constellation mechanism really really sucks. But thanks to regulation it's a lot better now than it used to.
I'd recommend watching one of their recent expansion previews with the developers talking about their process and influences: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8YXe7EkmoU
3:29 introduction by the CEO 9:57 dev team introductions, combat design 20:57 concept / writing lead 47:30 environment art direction 57:58 music production
I feel like in 20 years I'm just going to be playing indie games and games that are then 25 years old.
Probably because when those mobile casinos get regulated, Sony’s model will pull ahead.
Because releasing a game with a games-as-a-service model is a massive technical and logistical challenge if you want to retain players and isn't free money. A good recent example is The Avengers, which was sunk from the forced-GaaS model.
Also, after EA released Anthem and Star Wars: Battlefront II which had massive backlash due to their flawed GaaS, EA released Jedi: Fallen Order as a single-player game with no gimmicks, and it sold incredibly well.
EA is on track to make something like $1.75 billion this year from FIFA Ultimate Team microtransactions alone.
It is what it is, but EA and their investors know exactly where the profits are coming from
Most console & PC games are offering a mix of cosmetics, DLC, and battle passes which are incredibly straightforward about what you get for your money. Battle passes are just subscriptions rebranded with the auto-renew turned off.
I also think the success of Genshin will dampen gacha in the future. You now need a triple-A game budget to command the gacha prices Genshin asks for. In the past, you could make that money selling pngs in a mobile game.
If anything, I think F2P has been improving its value proposition over time.
Current-gen gamedev is so expensive it's not worth taking the risk anymore for triple-A studios.
I'd say indie games are truly the frontier of game design at this point.
I'm not super familiar with genshin specifically, but in a lot of these games, players don't really play the game. Like, they'll just lookup pre made team setups that allow them to win with no skill or input. This is the strangest thing to me. Why do people like just following along a game if they're not going to take any accountability. It's like the MMORPG grind of enjoying the numbers going up from yesteryear, but somehow, even one step further removed than before.
Whales on the other hand I will never understand.
There are always underground account transfer markets for these kind of games. It becomes an investment if you know what you are doing.
Some people say it's to "pay for server costs blah blah blah" but one look at Epic or EA's balance sheet will show you how bullshit that is
Server costs and ongoing dev costs are totally a thing, but I'm not sure why it's so problematic that they make a profit on top of that.
Another way to phrase this is that free in game currency for F2P players often represents several hundred dollars of the equivalents you can purchase with actual cash. So if you want to have twice as much resources/units/weapons/whatever as a F2P player you need to be spending a lot of money. A few bucks won't move the needle at all.
$60/20 hours is $3 for an hour of entertainment. That's pretty great.
One of the claims which Kongegate’s CEO made, repeatedly, in presentations is that they actually got their whales on the phone and they were simply professionals who liked to spend money on their hobby. That has become increasingly plausible to me as I’ve grown older and have more money than time.
I spent $X00 on Genshin in something like 6 weeks. I quit because of the time “commitment” and because I had gotten through most of the interesting bits, but if I had kept up habits, I would have played less than typical American watches TV and spent $X,000 a year. Which… does not strike me as unreasonable for what would have been my main hobby, given comparables like e.g. golf.
It’s a great game in a lot of ways. I don’t regret either time played or money spent. (The first one would have been untrue in a year, hence stopping.)
Indeed.
The anniversary controversy was due to the rewards being unusually stingy to the point where the initial rewards were worse than the typical biweekly event, whereas in every other gacha anniversary events offer substantially better rewards than usual.
If they had included the bonus 1600 Primogem reward initially it wouldn't have been as much of a mess.
Winning gives you a dopamine hit. Regardless of what it took to win.
Entire videogame genres (colloquially known as soshage in Japan) are built around giving this dopamine hit to 1) people who play a lot ("alot" here is on the order of unemployed people playing constantly) and 2) people who pay. They quite intentionally don't allow people to win if they don't pay or play extensively. Losing to those people pushes them to pay so they can win.
Genshin Impact is an evolution on this game model.
Comparing Dark Souls sales numbers and its ilk gacha games and their ilk shows that the number of people willing to tolerate the frustration is much lower than those willing to buy their way through it.
So indeed, most people that do play Genshin Impact do find the frustration worth it. I'd say a fair few of those find that the frustration makes it better.
That's a hell of a conclusion from assumptions that have a shaky base.
As per [1] below, the "tiny minority" of players typically accounts for over 20% of the playerbase.
And per [2], the average amount spent by a mobile player in F2P games is over $85.
And I bet Genshin Impact does better than this - they have better marketing, better art, and lots of experience milking players for money.
[1] A developer sharing his revenue breakdown per player: https://medium.com/building-the-metaverse/game-economics-par...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20160913155032/https://intellige...
Speaking of MMORPGs, the mentality has spread there too. Lots of players don’t ever experiment with different builds for their character or just play the way they like, instead following an online guide for achieving hyperoptimization. Even questioning that way of playing gets you marked as a bad player.
It’s also become much more normal to pay significant sums of money for in-game currency that is then used to buy high end competitive content runs from other well geared players for gear and achievements. This especially seems entirely pointless to me… what good is the gear obtained this way? It’s not being used for anything that calls for it so at best it’s a trophy for your character to wear that you didn’t even earn yourself.
It’s so far divorced from the seemingly endless font of exploration, discovery, and character progression that defined seamless open world MMORPGs back in the early-mid 2000s.
What does this mean? Like paying people in game gold to carry you?
Now that there’s no friction on the path between a player’s wallet and those offering carry services, carry purchases have exploded in popularity.
Particularly if you’re just one guy applying to random groups, the last few slots get applications from tons of insanely-powerful characters. You can sit there trying to join a group as a new player for hours and not get anywhere unless you apply to mostly-empty groups or start your own with a friend or two
If you don’t know that, it’s easy to think you’ll need to pay for achievements and loot in order to have a shot at getting a group
Hey, so long as I’m mentioning WoW here: That game is still taking in 200 million dollars a year or more, but it’s only getting a small fraction of that reinvested. I think the market is ripe for an actual WoW-killer. Gather a team, make a polished AAA version of WoW, and rake in the dough
It's wild because if you discard your preconceived notions, the possibilities of what you can do with a massively multiplayer persistent world are absolutely vast. There's this huge unexplored territory and 99% of MMOs are stuck in this one tiny corner.
Players descend like locusts, then optimize and share their builds until they discover some emergent tug of war or rock paper scissors meta.
What remains is a cat & mouse game between players and developers, to find the reductive meta and then patch the game to shake it up. The players are highly coordinated thanks to wikis, and they consume content quicker than devs can create it. So the business model is no longer viable.
Your first strategy might explain the emerging success of sandbox games and battle royale games.
I was playing Dark Age of Camelot back in the day and we'd spend hours just waiting around, chatting, meeting new people, trying to group up and try to clear a dungeon. Of course, our compositions were less than ideal but we'd try to make it work. Hey we have no one durable but if we take little Timmy's mercenary here and put some high armor gear on him and dual wield shields maybe it would work. Of course someone would go to bed or to dinner and then off to find a new player we go. Trying to make it work was the name of the game. With time, you'd amass a big friend list of reliable people you know you could call on a moment's need if they were online and most of the time they would be happy to help.
Modern players are borderline obsessed with time. No one wants to waste time experimenting with content so they look for guides to clear as fast as possible. Getting wiped immediately results in remarks of "you're wasting my time". The human aspect of the MMO has been stripped away by bots, fast travel, people generally being rude and the mumble/teamspeak server or discord group chat. Somehow, it feels like the MMO is a reflection of our current society.
Are there any good articles on how the game started, how it got funded and built its now enormous fanbase?
It didn't and currently doesn't do the external marketing tricks/growth hacks freemium games are notorious for.
And with a game that had not only polished content, but plenty of it at launch.
But I absolutely remember tons of people saying how alike they were, so I think you're correct about them riding its coat-tails.
Personally I absolutely hate this game for both the gatcha aspect and the blatant plagiarism.
The plan of producing higher production quality games than most people expect on mobile, while also being cross-playable on PC due to Unity (nobody does that!) and cross-playable with friends on PS4 (pretty rare) worked for them.
[1] - https://www.earlygame.com/fifa/ea-fifa-21-most-succesful-all...
This is not a quirk of Genshin in particular, but a core feature of the genre, as evidenced by the huge number of gacha games on the app store that also have this feature. They may differ from Genshin in setting or core gameplay mechanics, but beautiful girls are a constant. People who play these games often say that it doesn't factor into their enjoyment ("I thought the story was unique, the endgame was engaging, etc"), but the download numbers say otherwise. Since my HN account is a pseudonym, I will readily admit that I considered getting into this genre, and my primary reason was the appearance of the girls in the promotional materials.
Unironically, I would consider this something of an innovation in game design. Western games never used this technique as openly as the gacha genre, and lately they have become even more conservative. As an example, compare League of Legends in its early days to the game today.
I think there is a huge opportunity in this space for any Western game company who borrows the wisdom of our Eastern counterparts.
Also as other said, different f2p games work differently. In Genshin, you can easily complete the main request with free characters. Most people (like me), just pay to pull for particular characters they love. (Just check Hu Tao's character demo from their official yt account and you may get a glimpse how the characters (regardless of strength) are attracting themselves.))
If you pay, you'll be able to farm for these items longer in a day. But it will still take the same amount of runs.
The longest grind are artifacts. To get the best artifacts for one character you will need to clear a level 2000-3000 times. That will take you 80-300 hours pretty much no matter what. Now those could be over 100 days or it could be in twenty days, but you'll have to run the level as many times.
Edit: the article seems to say that the number is actually 2.3 billion to $3.5 billion. So, at the low end of 2.3 billion you are looking at "just" 1m "whale" players paying 2,000 each, and 1-3m players paying a few dollars. Google search shows me estimates of about 8m-9m MAU, so this seems possible.
The curve for games like this is steep.
"Yet, only 5% of total app users make any in-app purchase (Sterling, 2016), and 70% of those in-app purchases appear to come from big spenders or ‘Whales' who account for only the top 10% of the paying users (Shaul, 2016)." [0]
0. What Causes Users’ Unwillingness to Spend Money for in-App Purchases in Mobile Games? a Structured Abstract; https://easychair.org/publications/preprint/HxVC
Maybe they have proportionally way more whales than other games?
(I strongly dislike the "whales" term. Is there a less condescending synonym?)
Then these streamers also actually prime their audience to spend more. If you see a streamer drop a couple thousand dollars on stream to get that cool new character, you might feel okay with dropping $100 to see if you can get lucky.
Streamers feed this kind of ecosystem, and keep it running. I suspect that a large percentage of the money that Genshin Impact makes goes back out into marketing and sponsoring streamers and YouTubers to keep the influencer engine running as well.
Yes, the game is predatory as you have to spend around $100-120 for a 50/50 chance of getting the banner character you want.
High powered weapons are another story. The chances are less than 50/50 and thus require more spend to obtain.
They made it that getting duplicates of the same character enhances it in powerful ways that incentivizes people to spend more for more power.
GI is not a play to win game since it is mainly a single player experience, but there are events with multiple plays cooperating with each other, and they can join your world but the quest interactions are limited.
Streamers will spend in the five digits to increase their viewership.
Of course it's also possible I am underestimating the popularity and there really could be over 100 million players.
I have been a fan of refurbished hardware and used games from Gamestop for a long time, but short of buying Valve it's hard to see what they can do to stay relevant.
The same has been going on all year with Appstore reviews
I don't download any of the games but I am on the lookout for something intruiging
Seems I am out of the loop, but also that I don't want to be in the loop of an IAP riddled freemium game.