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The Impact Of Gacha Games On the MMORPG Scene | MMORPG.com
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The Impact Of Gacha Games On the MMORPG Scene | MMORPG.com
No matter what your favorite game is or how long you've been gaming for, chances are that you've got an opinion on gacha games and mechanics. Em explores the origin of the mechanics that power some of the most popular microtransactions in the gaming industry.
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Many governments are looking at the casino gameplay we now find in gaming. But they have tended to focus just on one element like "loot boxes". Now though they are starting to look at the wider context across gameplay.
I had sort of assumed this was another case of Eastern preferences making their way west, much in the same way that F2P was popular in the East and then made it's way west. And just like F2P, the majority of people hate it, some like it, but because it's profitable for developers we're stuck with it.
If they were strictly free with no monetization option (ie: Xenoblade 2), I don't think I'd mind them, and they could even be used to increase replay value. But they'd also have to be balanced a lot better than Xenoblade 2, with no junk rolls or dupes. Just "randomized recruitment order" really.
The games that are completely rng with no pity system are the worst. I don't even waste my money on them anymore cause you can spend thousands of dollars and not even get what you wanted.
The fact that you accepted that it's okay as long as their is a pity system is disheartening, and I believe this is just the general consensus of all gatcha players.
They release a new character, 100 bucks to get to their 'pity' system to get that character, then you get MORE power if you get more versions of that same character in pulls, incentivizing you to buy them to get to full power.
It's disheartening because people are getting more and more okay with the spiked dildo getting shoved into their rectums.
You can pay 70 bucks for a fantastic triple A experience (like Spider-Man 2 or something), or potentially 100+ bucks for a single character in a gatcha game.
Over time, companies are just gonna move more and more to this line of bullshit live-service because of the contentment and it's a real bummer.
The amount spent per character still has potential massive variance, that still compounds over many copies of each character to make them actually effective.
And again, even if we remove gambling, which is still is, we're reducing it down to a particularly extreme form of pay to win. Which is still really bad.
That said, not all gachas are terrible. For example, Monmusu Gladiator is a single-player, buy to play game that costs $5. The only other monetization of the game at all is that you can optionally buy the soundtrack. It has a gacha in game, but the currency for it is earned exclusively by playing the game. Rather than structuring your permanent loot as random mob drops or a chest at the end of a dungeon, it's structured as a gacha, but substantially similar in effect to more traditional mob drops.
It's also possible to do unorthodox things with gachas. People often look at the gachas in Uncharted Waters Origin, conclude that it's blatantly pay to win, and rage quit. And the gachas do look very pay to win. But they paid really only there to give whales willing to drop thousands of dollars of dollars on the game something to buy. No one else is supposed to buy the gachas--not even players willing to spend in the low hundreds of dollars per month.
There is one permanent "Superior Mate Gacha" that costs money, as well as a variety of temporary ones, with a new one about every week or so on average. The paid gachas offer mates of grades B, A, and S. There is also a normal "Mate Gacha" that can be bought with ducats (the normal, in-game currency), and you can earn a lot of tickets for it just by playing the game. The normal mate gacha offers mates of grades C, B, and A, but no S, and even A are pretty rare, as a given ticket has about a 0.9% chance of drawing an A-grade mate.
So you might think that the normal mate gacha is junk, or some weak mates to get you started, as it would be in a lot of other gacha games. But that is completely wrong. The normal mate gacha is the most imporant one, even for players willing to spend anything up to the low hundreds of dollars per month.
Draw the same C-grade mate enough times and you can train him up to S-grade. The training materials are somewhat scarce, but you get enough for about two more S-grade mates per month from events alone, in addition to some from other sources. Furthermore, because you'll rank him up to rank 5 and have training point bonuses, the natural C-grade mate trained up to S-grade is actually stronger than a natural S-grade mate that you might draw from a lucky gacha pull.
To train a natural S-grade mate up to rank 5, you'd have to draw the same mate six times, and that's probably going to cost a little shy of a thousand dollars for the featured mate in a temporary gacha. It will also cost considerably more of the scarce training materials than it would take to train a natural C-grade mate up to S-grade.
Does making a C-grade mate from the free gacha eventually stronger than natural S-grade mates from the paid gachas sound like something that a gacha game would never do? I have trained up 16 mates to S-grade so far, including one who was natural B-grade, and two that I have subsequently promoted to SS-grade. For comparison, there are only 9 natural S-grade mates in the superior mate gacha, and the game has no natural SS-grade mates at all. I've even had to move many of my natural A-grade mates out of my primary fleet to make room for natural C-grade mates trained up to S-grade.
The blue whale thus doesn't get stronger mates than the free player. The blue whale just gets strong mates sooner, and the free player catches up eventually. Red gem admirals (loosely, major content packs) are the main way that the game is monetized, not gachas.
Let's take Everquest 2. Originally a Subs-Only game with a yearly Box Price and the occasional content pack purchase. Fast forward to 2024 and they have Heritage Crates which are extremely beneficial to keeping yourself currently viable in top end content. Familiar potions, merc potions, guild status items...you also have Mercenary Crates which can give some REALLY OP mercs...or you pull duds and you just wasted anywhere from 11 to 34 USD. This is also combined with other NON-RNG monetization to make it extremely painful at times if you don't swipe your credit card or have friends you play with regularly that don't mind you lagging behind a bit. You absolutely CAN play without Gacha shenanigans, but it will hurt. Or you're shelling out more money in other areas (Buying collectors EDs at exorbitant prices to get the CE mount/familiar/mercenary)
Genshin is kind of the middle ground here. You definitely need to whale a bit to do EVERYTHING, because you will need max star weapons and characters to keep up with some of the challenges painlessly. But you can do a hell of a lot as a Free Player with smart usage of items you earn that can cover the costs. It's also less competitive so there's that.
I do think we need to move away from the Gacha model in MMOs if the game demands a Box Price and "Very Heavily Suggests" or requires a Subscription, though. Subscriptions and Box Prices are the way players support these games, and if they are pulling the support it is usually entirely a content problem - NOT a "I need more FOMO Boxes" problem.
IE: Combine 4 Mini Whine Pumpkins to make a Mini Blue Pumpkin. Combine 4 Mini Blue Pumpkins to make a Mini Red Pumpkin, etc.
But thing here is that you can only get the first tier and have to build up from there
But since Mini's are totally worthless, have zero function at all, and I often do not use them, I never really thought of them as a Gacha mechanic which typically is driven by desire for more rare drops that provide some kind of direct power boost or desirable ability
But it seems that this collect / combine / build mechanic does exist, but it does not have to something that is downright predatory and awful, like it is in a lot of games that have it.
Just to clarify what I mean is that you can save up primogems like in genshin by going events, daily activities, web events and promo codes. Other games don't even have a system like that where you can get that kind of reward consistently without having to spend money.
Don't even bring up a single player games you pay $70 for a game that don't even have more free content. lol You play it for a few months and move on to never play it again. When genshin been out for 3 years and still adding content.
Okay - in that case, PoE. Valorant, League of Legends, Warframe, Runescape, even Final Fantasy has over 200+ hours of free content (that they even keep adding to) - and all these are just off the top of my head. All without gatcha mechanics you gotta wait for events for to gain power/have more fun. lol.
All free to play, by the way.