How Mihoyo's monetization works
moonbearmusings.com
moonbearmusings.com
International Genshin players, however, do seem to embrace "shipping" (pairing two in-universe characters in relationships) instead, but these also have their own internal controversies - look up "shipping wars".
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.
Edit: If you're not the author of the post, feel free to ignore :)
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...
As to why this is done I have no idea. Especially since you can circumvent the disabling of these abilities. Although you have to resort to OCR when a site decides to render the text as an image.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
As much as you'd like to prove it's a different animal, the game's design was corrupted in that case as well.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 success of gacha games is not in overcoming those steps, rather in capturing a new market that doesn't care about such perverse mechanics. They're not playing for the same reason you are playing games, persistency is the key here as a virtual "job" they play after their real job.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The game is built to be played on a screen with your fingers blocking some elements after all.
You won't necessarily top timing challenges, but you won't die in any story content.
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.
Of course real capsule machines sell you an actual physical item of some sort, and their bins are of limited size. Traditionally they also require physical coins. Physical items can also be traded (or resold in secondary markets) - which enables the "trading" part of "trading card games" like Magic or Pokémon.