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Comment by spywaregorilla | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

Isn't this what this whole Metaverse business is about? Recapturing the goal of the '90s of net personas and virtual worlds?

> 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.

Whales on the other hand I will never understand.

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

> That has become increasingly plausible to me as I’ve grown older and have more money than time.

Indeed.

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.

It's like the slots in Vegas; gambling itself is addictive.

> Whales on the other hand I will never understand.

There are always underground account transfer markets for these kind of games. It becomes an investment if you know what you are doing.

To be honest 60 dollars for 20 hours is great value in my opinion.

As a non player (potato PC+phone -_-) I'm still happy they released free and excellent OSTs and orchestra.

> 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.

Imo I find the dopamine hit to figure out your own team comp and build to be much higher. And sometimes it's not possible to use the best teams.

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.

> most people that do play Genshin Impact do find the frustration worth it

That's a hell of a conclusion from assumptions that have a shaky base.

As per [1] below, the "tiny minority" of players typically accounts for over 20% of the playerbase.

And per [2], the average amount spent by a mobile player in F2P games is over $85.

And I bet Genshin Impact does better than this - they have better marketing, better art, and lots of experience milking players for money.

[1] A developer sharing his revenue breakdown per player: https://medium.com/building-the-metaverse/game-economics-par...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20160913155032/https://intellige...

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.

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