The funny thing about Mihoyo's games is that they are one of the most profitable developers, but they could definitely pull more levers to incentivise people to spend even more money. Most gacha games have some sort of pay-to-win PvP and/or leaderboards built in their games, but in Mihoyo's games, having a top-tier team just means you have to oppertunity to get slightly more premium currency.

Why'd you disable right clicking and highlighting?

Edit: If you're not the author of the post, feel free to ignore :)

Read this and try to explain to me again how going free to play does not corrupt a game's design :)

Interesting take on Gacha game monetization, but I was more interested in the "mission statement" linked in the header of the blog: https://moonbearmusings.com/the-moron-filter-effect/

I’m not too familiar with gacha games, so I was intrigued. I thought the criticism of EA’s former CEO was funny. But the rest of the article felt like a lot of term-dropping and examples that aren't linked together into a cohesive theory, so I’m kind of disappointed. I think this industry talk about monetization (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNjI03CGkb4) and Tynan Sylvester’s book “Designing Games” were a lot more informative.

For example, the blog post says this but then doesn't really elaborate on what any of the clauses mean ("repeatable design levers", "without compromising the core gameplay experience"):

> A healthy long-term monetization system should therefore have repeatable design levers that can be used to reliably generate demand without compromising the core gameplay experience.

In contrast "Designing Games" has a whole section on fixed/variable reward schedules, e.g. (pg. 210):

> We can avoid such shelf moments by superimposing several fixed ratio schedules. Consider what happens when the player can get a dollar for every 10th chest, a diamond for every 10th rock mined, and an arrow for every 10th goblin killed. ... The player shifts focus back and forth between activities, never missing a dopamine-driven beat.

I asked some friends who play gacha games and they mentioned “stamina” mechanics as something that makes these game addictive. I’d never heard of it before, but apparently you’re limited to perform X number of actions per day. You can purchase some additional stamina/actions, but this creates FOMO if you don’t log in every day.

Pretty good read. Particularly the part about avoiding enshittification. I've never really thought about it, but there are in fact a few very valuable lessons that many of the world's biggest tech companies could learn from this chinese gacha company, as ridiculous as it sounds, because their leadership is clearly well above average.

Also, next time I see someone asking why they don't release more skins, I'm going to link them to this article because it provides a pretty clear explanation for that, too.

I can second the part about Genshin Impact being harder to monetize because you can "git gud".

Wow, that's a lot of jargon. Despite playing Genshin Impact a fair bit (my niece is into it), I didn't understand most of terms in this article. It's odd that they felt like they had to define "enshittification" which is everywhere and not terms like "dolphin" and "i-frames" which I had never heard of before.

Gacha games are basically glorified todo lists, all of them eventually devolve into the stage where your "progress" grinds to halt and you either put in the money to get over the next barrier or do tedious daily actions to slowly power up your team to get over the barrier eventually. The competitive aspects feed the FOMO and give advantage to players who were in from the start, a kind of pyramid scheme. Such disgusting game design patterns all around. When you step away from it and look at it, you realize there really isn't a game but a dopamine box designed to trap you.

What do you think the game's design is? Because I think it's a gorgeous open world single player ARPG. The story, character cast, literary inspiration, gameplay mechanics, and music, are all just incredible.

There are a thousand great things to say about Genshin before you even get anywhere near talking about the nonintrusive and ignorable monetization model. I think people hear "Gacha" and mentally lump it in with spammy 2d animated gif idle clicker games. But it's a better BOTW, and anything else misses the forest for the trees.

It's easy to say "F2P bad" or "live service bad", and I'm usually inclined to agree, but in this case, the entire game was carefully designed around the monetization model from the very start of development, to the point that it probably wouldn't work very well without it.

I've thought about what a non-live service, $60 one-time purchase version of Genshin Impact would look like, and I've come to the conclusion that it probably wouldn't be anywhere near as good. Even assuming it had the same amount of content it has now (which is quite a lot), the large and diverse roster of characters goes a long way in avoiding the feeling of repetitiveness and tedium that plagues most large open world games nowadays, and having to carefully pick and choose which characters you want to obtain and invest into (if you're not a whale, at least) and having to dedicate time to build up each one makes you care a lot more about them.

The game was designed to be free to play from the beginning, so any design decisions are fundamentally going to be geared towards making that work. The design could never be corrupted, because that implies it wasn't to begin with :)

I have no idea about Mihoyo (never even looked in their direction, save for looking up what it is), but gacha != F2P.

Valve, even though their games have lootboxes, they got it [mostly] right by trying their best to make sure there's no "pay to win" (save for accidental cosmetics' bugs, which are half of the time are "pay to lose" and either way are typically fixed promptly) and all game mechanics are equally accessible to everyone from minute zero, with lootboxes being purely cosmetic.

There's a big implication in the article itself that the monetization structure of such gacha goes at odds with the fundamentals of game design. The only real benefit is that

1. some huge giga spends are more or less subsidizing your experience so you can play this game for no cost. This is obviously a boon in low income countries where a console game can be an extreme luxury to buy new.

2. The game can provide an RPG experience that will continually update for years, compared to a traditional RPG that is either one and done (possibly rushing out the last third and never following up on plot threads) or needs to sequel bait for the next entry in 3-4 years (on the most generous side).

so it really comes down to your personal situation on if this is liberating or a bastardization of the genre.

You'd be completely correct, the last 20 years of MMORPGs (which Genshin takes heavily from) have shown that alternative business models are always going to lead to perverse incentives in gameplay.

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.

>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.