This is difficult to judge either way, since on one hand Genshin is a deplorable gacha-style addiction machine and the worst of what gaming has to offer. Gambling-powered GaaS is a pretty scary combo.
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.
I have two main problems with the freemium model. First is that it necessarily compromises the game design. Instead of optimizing for fun, or a memorable experience, or an artistic vision, you are optimizing for profit, which compromises those other things.
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.
You’re missing a key fact, which is that the best way to increase profits is to have more players playing. How do you do that? By making a game that people actually enjoy playing and tell their friends about.
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)
Optimizing for player base is at odds with optimizing for paying player base. I am a "whale" as a consumer - I really enjoy video games, but my time is at a premium. I have more money than time, and I am happy to use it to accelerate my access to free to play games, especially for cases where I am playing games with my family, who generally have more free time than me.
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.
The resources that are spent on cosmetic purchases could instead have been spent elsewhere, possibly providing a better overall gameplay experience.
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.
By making a game that people actually enjoy playing and tell their friends about.
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.
> You’re missing a key fact, which is that the best way to increase profits is to have more players playing. How do you do that? By making a game that people actually enjoy playing and tell their friends about.
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.
It's a paid game, but EA/DICE are certainly sacrificing some existing gameplay elements (and story) in order to push Battlefield 2042's "Specialists" as a vehicle for in-game purchases.
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.
> 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.
I don't think he's saying that there were no people of Japanese descent on the western front, I think he's saying that no members of the Japanese Imperial Army, and potentially specifically infantry, that were deployed on the western front. I don't have enough historical knowledge to know if that is true or not, but I could believe that.
Yeah sorry wasn't specific enough. AFAIK there were no Japanese imperial soldiers dressed in Pacific front gear fighting in the snow at Narvik Norway. Nor for that matter American pilots in bomber jackets.
Oh cool TIL. Yeah I didn't describe it well. The most egregious examples are: characters speaking Japanese while wearing Imperial Pacific uniforms and American pilots wearing aviators+bomber jackets, while fighting in the snowy mountains of Narvik, Norway.
Some somebody who put hundreds of hours into BF4:
Nobody, and I mean nobody identified their foes based on outfit.
Specialists are take the “generic nameless soldier” aspect out of it, and I think that’s a step backwards, but not fake breaking. Yet.
Yeah I played those only.
And you know what, you’re 100% correct.
In my mind was I was thinking the different models used for specialties, not IFF applications.
Cosmetic-only in-game purchases are great. I'm also not against one-time upgrades or subscriptions.
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.
This is it. You want to make the game at least a little fun at first, but at some point you have to make your users feel dissatisfied in order to get them to spend. Much like Facebook needs to keep their users angry and depressed to keep them coming back. Hyper-optimizing anything for profit is never about creating an experience your customers will love, in my experience.
Sure, I played Lost Ark for it's PvP recently and paid $5 to skip leveling my second character. I definitely both paid to skip content and enjoyed playing.
Rightly or wrongly, the big players believe the way is to have more whales playing. However, I agree with you that Fortnite is the gold standard of how to do freemium.
yes, the game that uses fomo and artificially creates scarcity of collectibles to exploit people into spending cash via gambling is the gold standard and every one else is copying it
The model of the game seems to be to have steep prices, but then give something like $100 of premium currency monthly in exchange for playing the game. This will generate engagement even if the content is mediocre. How many players would do dailies for fun if they did not come with what's effectively a $1 coupon?
Is that true about Fortnite? You don't get any competitive advantage anywhere from spending money? People are paying billions just to get different clothes on their character?
No. Fortnite battle pass is a bundle of cosmetic items within a season, most of which you will need to unlock through gameplay after you purchase. Players are essentially signalling they’ve paid the fee and spent enough hours to unlock some skin or emote.
Battle passes in most games just give you a series of exclusive cosmetics to grind. And are time limited to urge you buy it sooner, and play more to grind it before it's over. Or you can spend more money to skip the grind.
> I have two main problems with the freemium model. First is that it necessarily compromises the game design. Instead of optimizing for fun, or a memorable experience, or an artistic vision, you are optimizing for profit, which compromises those other things.
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.
But could you make a better game if you didn't need to funnel people into buying gems at all? The answer is always yes - you always need to give up something to make people buy gems.
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.
> 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.
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.
> But could you make a better game if you didn't need to funnel people into buying gems at all? The answer is always yes - you always need to give up something to make people buy gems.
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.
> But could you make a better game if you didn't need to funnel people into buying gems at all? The answer is always yes - you always need to give up something to make people buy gems.
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.
Why is it always yes? Games with cosmetics you can buy don’t change the core gameplay at all. Answer this question: what are players who don’t buy cosmetics giving up in gameplay?
>Kids who play the massively popular free game Fortnite say that paid skins are a major status symbol, and that they get "scorned" and feel "poor" if they stick with the default free skin.
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"
Maybe this is just semantics, but I disagree with your mention that the goals aren't mutually exclusive.
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.
The balance between "what's more fulfilling for software developers" and "how does software generate the most revenue" isn't limited to gaming, and it's a topic that pops up on Hacker News frequently.
> Instead of optimizing for fun, or a memorable experience, or an artistic vision, you are optimizing for profit, which compromises those other things.
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.
>But on the other, it's a fabulously beautiful and well crafted open world with tons of things to do and explore
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.
I disagree that the gameplay is particularly shallow. The end game requires both mechanics and tactics. That said, the end game may or may not be _rewarding_ as it's very grindy and there's a good question (for many of these sort of games) of what you're grinding _for_. But the gameplay mechanics get deeper than what you seem to have experienced.
The gameplay really isn't shallow. If you want to be a casual and not get too much into it, it is. Otherwise, there is a lot of depth you can get into. It's just that in your first 5 hours there is not much incentive, which is fine, at that point you haven't even unlocked half of the map.
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...
Honestly I feel the opposite. Genshin is what BOTW should've been graphics/gameplay/art-wise. Given that I paid $60 for BOTW I feel it would be fair to pay a similar amount into Genshin's store given how much more enjoyment I got out of it.
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).
Well... I don't really know anymore. I'm with you on the ethics of gambling mechanics. But I'm less certain about the predatory part than I used to be.
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.
Enjoy? Not particularly, but isn't that just reality? There's always a bigger fish.
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.
> Enjoy? Not particularly, but isn't that just reality?
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.
Post scarcity is physically impossible as it assumes infinite energy, infinite space-time, and no entropy generation. Whereas in reality its the opposite, the most energy, resources, and thermodynamic headroom mankind can ever have access to is based on the co-moving light cone centred on Earth.
We’re already a post scarcity society by the way an ancient peasant would measure it
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
By that standard, we’re already living in a fantastical utopia by the way an ancient peasant would measure it, yet lots of folks in this thread are dissatisfied. Why do you think that is?
I disagree. One of the largest industries right now is creating demand. People being content with what they have is an economic problem. A significant amount of consumption is simply socio-economic signaling and zero-sum games that have little correlation to the finite nature of resources.
There is little the average person truly wants that we cannot provide.
What if more than half the people want to be above average? By definition it’s impossible to fulfill that, now or a billion years in the future. Let alone all the other intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and materialistic desires that will inevitably grow.
You are assuming people have fixed minds, and wants never expand to fill the available resources.
I talked about that. People who want to be above average aren't looking for resources, they're looking for social signifiers. There is zero reason these signifiers have to actually use a lot of resources. It's easy to set it up that way, but it doesn't have to.
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.
‘ It's easy to set it up that way, but it doesn't have to.’
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.
With the rise of professional gaming it's foolish to think you could beat anyone else in the world. Unless you're a professional gamer.
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.
> offered completely for free, no strings attached
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.
You don't have to - you can use an Android Emulator. But it will suck.
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.
Being online and unnecessarily punishing makes the game feel more real to people
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
Absolutely untrue for Steam. A game on Steam might require kernel anti-cheat, but you're obviously not obligated to buy or play those games just by installing 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.
> But the business model is definitely predatory on people who are willing to pay hundreds or thousands to score a character or optimal item.
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?
The difference is how they manipulate you psychologically to not realize how much you're spending. You can't just buy the thing, you need to buy a particular currency, and possibly do some in-game work, and also gamble with loot boxes where you're not very aware of the odds.
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.
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.
I used magic workstation, you just download MTG images and play against others online with your decks. There is nothing to buy and it can play the Warcraft TCG as well. https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Workstation
Nike somehow managed to f**k up sewing a piece of canvas to a piece of rubber and now a $40 pair of Converse sneakers is functionally equivalent to or worse than a $10 knock off. The only value in those shoes is literally the brand name.
People I know who play it say the 'pity' system works pretty well. How they explained to me if you save up your wishes in free to play, you are guaranteed to get the character you want after a while.
> How they explained to me if you save up your wishes in free to play, you are guaranteed to get the character you want after a while.
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).
That is correct. Pity mechanics are relatively new to gacha games due to complaints about having a deterministic way to get characters.
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.
Actually I think it's mostly regulatory pressure. Chinese market gacha/lootbox games are required by law to have pity mechanics, must disclose all drop rates, and even provide you with your pull history as well as purchase history. It really shows in the games that come out of there...
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)
It's pretty sad that "western" lawmakers seem to be mostly asleep at the wheel in regards to all this. The industry's self-regulation by the ESRB has mostly been a joke as well - amounting to a "may contain lootboxes" sticker.
Saying that sucking billions of dollars out of whales who are almost entirely people with a serious disease (gambling/attention addition) is balanced out by pretty graphics and all is like saying the packaging on the fentanyl pills justifies the cost. These games are created only to allow predatory behavior, and need to be regulated like gambling is regulated, at least.
At least in the US, the worst parts of gambling still exists. People still shit themselves playing poker or slots for 20 hours a day in Vegas. Those are the people every casino is trying to hook.
The issue is gambling VERY easily moves underground.
Yeah, it's easy to have a knee-jerk reaction and dismiss it as an exploitative Chinese mobile game, but in reality there is a lot of love put into the product.
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
You don't use real money for characters, you use real money to gamble on the chance of characters. And you need several copies of the same character to upgrade them. So you can play the slot machine many times and not get anything that you want. It's gambling 100%
Nah, you have a 100% chance of getting the character you want after a set amount of currency spent.
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.
How is this different than instigating demand for Lamborghinis and 30 room mansions?
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.
I think the main difference is that when buying a home or car, the person knows what they're getting and for how much money.
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.
Genshin (and many other gacha) are actually more like the second option since they feature a mechanic known as pity where after a certain number of pulls the chance to get the item goes up to 100%. In Genshin that is at 180 pulls but because they also ramp up the chance to a featured item as you pull more realistically it is more likely to happen at around 150-160 pulls. This is still crazy (especially if you buy all of these pulls with money because the dollar to pull exchange rate is absolutely ludicrous) but it does mean that an F2P player can guarantee that they will get a character they want after a couple of months of saving.
I hate that the gacha model (free game with millions of IAPs) is working. I refuse to play/buy them, and I worry that it's just the future.
Why would Sony spend so much making a single player offline game to get a one-time purchase when they can milk their customers tens of dollars a month for years.
Yeah, I feel like we're just being left behind. Voting with your wallet is way less effective when companies give a way for whales to outvote you many times compared to a single purchase game.
I feel like in 20 years I'm just going to be playing indie games and games that are then 25 years old.
Gacha model is the worst of F2P and not that prevalent on traditional gaming platforms.
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.
> Why would Sony spend so much making a single player offline game to get a one-time purchase when they can milk their customers tens of dollars a month for years.
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.
You don’t change any gameplay with skins from Fortnite, CS:GO, or TF2. What you’re describing though was why Kojima left Konami after they turned to gatcha games (including MGS) and Konami is focusing on pachinko.
Indie games have been for a long time. I havent played a new AAA game with a real interesting innovation or fun new mechanic in a long long time. Indiegames do all the time
> Why would Sony spend so much making a single player offline game to get a one-time purchase when they can milk their customers tens of dollars a month for years.
Probably because when those mobile casinos get regulated, Sony’s model will pull ahead.
I like playing gacha games when they're F2P friendly. It's a neat game mechanic. The resource conservation and gambling aspect is fun. But people who spend money on these games... are just so strange to me. The value of money spent is incredibly low. Genshin is one of the stingiest games. Yet on its recent first anniversary, people were surprised that they were, yet again, very stingy. The lack of self awareness of what they're playing on the gacha communities is so odd to me.
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.
> It's like the MMORPG grind of enjoying the numbers going up from yesteryear, but somehow, even one step further removed than before.
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.
There's been a very strong homogenization of MMOs ever since World of Warcraft, towards mostly mindless loot grinds. Early pioneers ranging from Ultima Online to A Tale in the Desert have effectively been completely forgotten.
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.
> 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
What does this mean? Like paying people in game gold to carry you?
Yes that’s exactly what I’m talking about. It’s always been a thing in MMORPGs, but prior to MMO companies selling in-game currency themselves it was a lot less common and carried a stigma because those buying carries often bought illicit currency to do so because carries are expensive.
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.
That's super weird. It really recontextualizes the term pay to win. Traditionally it's meant "pay to get an unfair advantage", but now it's quite literally pay to become a winner of a non competitive experience. What mental gymnastics are required to make this seem rewarding? Would it be perceived differently if you were unable to pay other players but could pay NPCs to accommodate the same task; in which case it is a direct 1:1 exchange with the game company? Or if you could pay to just auto complete it, sans the experience of being carried? Bizarre.
It's at least partly because in WoW you oftentimes can't get into a raid unless you've already beat the raid. People can lookup your achievements online and/or ask you to link them before allowing you in. So for some it might simply be "pay (more) to play" rather than pay to win.
At least in WoW, I think a big part of it is that there are tons of spammers blasting out ads to escort you through dungeons and raids. It’s hard to find actual groups of normal people with all the noise
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
I have a theory that wiki sites are what killed the WoW MMO formula, rather than mechanics fatigue.
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.
I think that's probably correct. Perhaps the only way to combat such an effect is some combination of reducing the game's competitiveness (so being optimized isn't as important to begin with) and elements of nondeterminism in the game's combat systems, making it much more difficult or impossible to pin down a "most correct" build.
Players tend to hate randomness in PvP; they use the pejorative 'RNG'. PvE games increasingly monetize with social proofing, but this can create a sense of PvP even in PvE content. E.g. players get mad that the wizard class isn't as viable as the rogue class.
Your first strategy might explain the emerging success of sandbox games and battle royale games.
Of course, this is just an anecdotal observation, but I think what changed weren't the games, but the players.
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.
Some people will spend a few dollars here and there because they feel they got value from it due to the amount of time spent playing. Compare that to a $60 single player game that you complete in 20 hours and never touch again.
When I was younger I had both aesthetic disgust and strong moral intuitions against monetization being driven by whales. These days, am far less sure of both.
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.)
While some whales are definitely high-earning professionals who can afford it, not all of them are. I'd be curious to see research on what the split is. It's hard not to notice, however, that gacha games heavily rely on the same kind of skinner-box gambling systems as actual gambling uses with little of the regulation around payouts, transparency, and age restrictions. People who have problems with gambling, report having problems with gacha as well. See also this video of some testimonials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S-DGTBZU14
I'd rather spend $60 on a 20h game I love than spend $0.01 on a game that doesn't require it. I don't understand whales, but I definitely don't understand people paying for cosmetic things in a game either.
I find paying for cosmetic things in a video game disgusting. They used to be a reward for playing and enjoying the game, something that would be part of the experience, allowing you to customize your play. Now I'm supposed to pay $15 to make my gun a different color?
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
This view doesn't make much sense to me. Epic's game is free. Non loot box, Non pay to win, purely aesthetic optional purchases feels like the least offensive monetization scheme possible. You say you used to be able to unlock the content in game, but that was predicated on your paying money to buy the game already.
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.
In college I would pirate everything and think paying for in game items was stupid. Now I will happily spend $1-5 for a few hours of fun in a well balanced game, e.g. hearthstone. But when I tried to get into Genshin Impact I quickly gave up after realizing I would have to spend at least $50 if not hundreds to roll a good team, or just stick with a completely f2p grind (which I don’t have time for anymore).
Isn't Hearthstone one of the most spendy games, though? I haven't touched it in a few years, but back then, if you wanted to have a deck with any sort of competitiveness, you'd have to spend €50-100 or more on packs every extension (2x/year).
In my experience gacha games will sometimes hold events where you're guaranteed to get something useful for $15 or so, but otherwise you're getting maybe a single digit chance of getting something useful for ~$20 payments. Some games require you to get duplicates of to make them maximally good, so it's more like go big or go home. If you're truly spending "a few dollars" here and there you're pretty much just throwing money into a fire, even conditioned on you thinking that the possible winnings are potentially useful.
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.
> Like, they'll just lookup pre made team setups that allow them to win with no skill or input.
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.
That's serving a different niche. And fewer people find tolerating frustration to find dopamine hit to be worth it.
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.
The thing about F2P games is that the vast majority of revenue is made from a tiny majority of players. In reality you'll find that the majority of players did not spend any money, a certain portion spends some money but around as much as Dark Souls costs, and a small minority spends massive amounts of money which makes up most of the revenue.
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.
dark souls isn't a good comparison. It's dark and broody, and unappealing to casual players. Many people won't enjoy it. There are many significantly more successful titles that are not pay to win and are challenging to their target audience.
> Yet on its recent first anniversary, people were surprised that they were, yet again, very stingy.
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.
Genshin is very hard optimized on using the right team-combinations. To the point that it becomes impossible to solve tasks if you don't have the matching elements for it. But of course this only comes into play on later levels, when people have become addicted.
While this is true they also give you a character of every element (anemo, pyro, cyro, hydro, electro, and geo) for free so you aren’t actually locked out of any of the content or puzzles. In fact there is a famous Genshin YouTuber bwaap who has completed the game using only the 4 starter characters to prove that you can. It’s not the easiest task but it also isn’t super hard, especially since some of the free units they give you are comparable to the top tier 5 stars you can wish for. In fact one of the strongest teams in the game is made up of only 4 stars which are really easy to get since the rate for them is much higher than 5 stars.
It seemed like Genshin went from zero to 100 in absolutely no time. Like they came out of nowhere, and suddenly all of reddit was full of fanart and they're making more money than anyother game.
Are there any good articles on how the game started, how it got funded and built its now enormous fanbase?
Sponsored promotional fanart is a thing, and the sponsor often can have the artists post the stuff at specific date with specific captions, which creates a feeling of a surge in popularity for bystanders. Once the tag/keyword becomes trendy, many artist wanna-bes would (have to) draw fanarts either out of affection/because they actually enjoy the game, or simply to ride on the popularity and attract followers for themselves - I'm not trying to badmouth this, and I feel for the rising artists, but this has been a pattern that I obvserved over and over again.
Personally I absolutely hate this game for both the gatcha aspect and the blatant plagiarism.
Mobile, PC, and console all at once, as I recall. They really marketed the crap out of it and were on the necessary platforms to capitalize on it, too.
And with a game that had not only polished content, but plenty of it at launch.
I'm sure I'll get a lot of hate for bringing this up, but it's also worth noting that they definitely rode on the coattails of Zelda's success. So much of that game's identity is lifted wholesale from Breath of the Wild that it can almost be hard to tell the two apart in side-by-side screenshots. Again, none of this is particularly bad, but it definitely contributed to it's meteoric popularity.
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.
It wasn't really out of nowhere. They had other successful games already and good fanbase, as also communicated the development of Genshin for some time already before release. But for Western PC-Gamers, they definitely came from a niche not many people followed at the time. They were more on Mobile and in Asia known.
I noticed that the EA Sports titles aren't on the list. The FIFA franchise pulls in at least $2b every year (31 million units sold[1] which is $1.5b at roughly $50 per unit plus a likely majority of the $1.6b of EA's annual Ultimate Team revenue[2]) If each yearly CoD release counts as a new game for this metric, I'm not sure why the yearly FIFA releases wouldn't.
I started to feel like I needed a spreadsheet to keep track of all the currencies and make sure characters were getting the right leveled gear and stopped immediately after that. It's very easy to talk yourself into the value you are getting when there are 3-4 levels of indirection between the actual dollars spent and the on game reward. I normally don't mind some level of "accounting" work in rpgs but the fact that the layers of currency could start with real dollars kinda made the whole experience feel like a trap to conceal the actual cost of playing the game a certain way. I think this is a very dark pattern.
This game has one major selling point that I haven't seen anyone mention yet: It is full of attractive girls in revealing outfits. In addition to making the game more enjoyable, this pours rocket fuel onto distribution since it leads people to make fanart.
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.
Not only attractive girls, but attractive guys too! The majority of my Genshin-playing friends are female, for what it's worth. I'm sure that's definitely helped them, as many similar games are solely marketed towards teen guys. Big gap in the market, and they took it.
One of the worst things about the freemium model is that the games tend to be very grindy time suckers those who don't pay-to-play. Millions of souls spend hours each day just farming in-game treasure and it actually ends up being work rather than fun. So many of these people are missing out on the joy of crafting or farming actual things in the real world and selling them on eBay or Etsy or locally. These grindy games in particular end up preying on millions of kids who don't have wads of cash, but do have free time and get sucked in. This is perhaps why addiction to games like Genshin Impact has gotten so severe in China that authorities have taken action to limit play hours.
Nah. If you want to get a good team in Genshin you will grind. You can't buy the most cumbersome progress items. The actual hours of grind are the same no matter what.
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.
Wow, imagine if a few years ago a startup said its game would earn billions despite forcing whale players who pay a fortune to still have to grind a level 2000-3000 times if they wanted the best artifacts. How many of us would have invested? The craziest things in this world are making people filthy rich. I've just now been learning about the NFT madness....
It seems that you don't play Genshin impact game. You can't buy ascension materials with money. You pay for stronger characters with more versatile playstyles, but it won't make the game less grindy. You still have to fight for materials by yourself.
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.))
I don't see how these numbers are possible. $12B means you need to have 1.2B players paying $10 each, or 120M players $100 each. That just does not seem feasible--there are only so many people in the world and most are not going to play your game. And the nature of these games is that most people never pay anything.
Posting under a throwaway account. I have spent around $2000+ on the game. I'm a high net-worth individual (few mil), so that amount of money is ok with me as I'm being quite entertained.
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.
I want to thank you for responding and being honest. I understand there is a tail-centric distribution, I guess I am just surprised how tail-heavy it is. I think the media likes to write stories about people dropping 5- or 6-figures on a game. And while I am sure that does happen, I suspect their main revenue comes from the $100-$300 crowd.
Of course it's also possible I am underestimating the popularity and there really could be over 100 million players.
If you take a look at top Twitch streamers for Genshin Impact you'll see a lot of them dropping big money. They see it as an investment to get more viewers (not as many people want to watch you play with low level characters and equipment). Additionally, top end streamers make the money back in subscriptions and donations anyway.
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.
The numbers are crazy still, but I think it's probably something very top-heavy, like you have 50m players paying $200 each and 1m players paying 2,000 each. It is very easy to spend a _lot_ of money - see https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2021/09/07/what-spend...
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.
AFAIK, IAPs are not uniformly or normally distributed. The vast majority of players pay nothing or close to nothing, while a few "whales" pay a ton.
"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]
I read an article (or HN comment?) a bit ago with someone with insider knowledge and explained that some of the biggest whales are SA royalty kids who spend RIDICULOUS amounts to flash a skin in front of their friends. The cash means nothing to them. Some even give the companies money to get new things added to the game. 1-5% of their users are subsidizing the whole experience for everyone.
The scales for these games are heavily HEAVILY tilted by weak minded, vulnerable whales. They spend thousands of dollars a month because they are addicted.
It amuses me that Game Informer publishes something about Genshin Impact every month even though Gamestop, the parent company of Game Informer doesn't make a dime off it.
No, but it's a case study for how Gamestop is getting written out of the script for games in the 2020s.
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.
Interesting. I searched on their website and couldn't find any premium currency that other games like Fortnite and NBA 2K sells. I wonder why they don't make it purchasable in stores, and how they made so much money without a physical aspect.
I assume their main revenue is ads they run alongside the content, and so if people want to read genshin content and will do so alongside ads they are making money
I didn't realize this was a real game lol. I've seen it mentioned in the comments of practically every Instagram ad by people saying Genshin was better or how the advertised game is "like Genshin Impact"
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.
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.