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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. Gambli

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.

scotty79 5y ago
> 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?
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  Nonfunctional Jewelry has been around has been around since prehistoric times.
  - wizzwizz4 5y ago
    And it was, generally, valued. Last year's handbag is worthless, but next year's handbag? Priceless.
    - skhr0680 5y ago
      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.
- phreack 5y ago
  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.
- falcolas 5y ago
  That there are other exploitative businesses in no way justifies or ameliorates the impact of gambling mechanics in a videogame. This business practice is pure dogshit. Especially given how much it targets children and those with gambling addictions.
- overthemoon 5y ago
  I play Magic: The Gathering, and I think about this a lot: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/j38nv9/former_art_director_of_mtg_2_years_ago/ https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/j38nv9/former_art... 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.
  - GhettoComputers 5y ago
    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 https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Workstation
    - derivagral 5y ago
      does workstation do rules enforcement like xmage? http://xmage.de/ http://xmage.de/
      - GhettoComputers 5y ago
        Not when I used it, it was just a simple program that relied mostly on honesty (just like IRL).
searine 5y ago
> it's a fabulously beautiful and well crafted open world Is it really though? Almost all aspects of it are cloned from other games/media. Gameplay cloned from MMOs. World design cloned from BotW. Character designs cloned from the worst of anime. It is the game equivalent of a street cart hotdog. They sell lot of them, but it is not innovative, good or a particularly thoughtful food/game.
criley2 5y ago
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%
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
ricardobayes 5y ago
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.
- minimaxir 5y ago
  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.
  - jabbany 5y ago
    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)
    - AlexandrB 5y ago
      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.
- AlexandrB 5y ago
  > 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).
wheelie_boy 5y ago
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.
- dageshi 5y ago
  Fun is subjective. People actively complain when games don't have grindy tedious elements.
- minimaxir 5y ago
  > 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.
  - wheelie_boy 5y ago
    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.
    - 5y ago
crate_barre 5y ago
It’s particularly predatory on parents since it’s the cereal-aisle version of marketing to kids who in turn pressure their parents to buy them things.
alex_c 5y ago
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.
- throwuxiytayq 5y ago
  Do you often enjoy being cannon fodder for people who are already more influential/successful than you IRL?
  - alex_c 5y ago
    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.
    - AlexandrB 5y ago
      > 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.
billiam 5y ago
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.
- cogman10 5y ago
  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.
notTheAuth 5y ago
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.
- TheDong 5y ago
  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.
  - CDSlice 5y ago
    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.
emsy 5y ago
>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.
- jaaron 5y ago
  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.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  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...
- foobarian 5y ago
  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).
Daiz 5y ago
> 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.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  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.
  - VRay 5y ago
    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
puzzlingcaptcha 5y ago
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. I'd recommend watching one of their recent expansion previews with the developers talking about their process and influences: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8YXe7EkmoU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8YXe7EkmoU 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

scotty79 5y ago

> 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?

s1artibartfast 5y ago
Nonfunctional Jewelry has been around has been around since prehistoric times.
- wizzwizz4 5y ago
  And it was, generally, valued. Last year's handbag is worthless, but next year's handbag? Priceless.
  - skhr0680 5y ago
    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.
phreack 5y ago
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.
falcolas 5y ago
That there are other exploitative businesses in no way justifies or ameliorates the impact of gambling mechanics in a videogame. This business practice is pure dogshit. Especially given how much it targets children and those with gambling addictions.
overthemoon 5y ago
I play Magic: The Gathering, and I think about this a lot: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/j38nv9/former_art_director_of_mtg_2_years_ago/ https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/j38nv9/former_art... 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.
- GhettoComputers 5y ago
  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 https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Workstation
  - derivagral 5y ago
    does workstation do rules enforcement like xmage? http://xmage.de/ http://xmage.de/
    - GhettoComputers 5y ago
      Not when I used it, it was just a simple program that relied mostly on honesty (just like IRL).

searine 5y ago

> it's a fabulously beautiful and well crafted open world Is it really though? Almost all aspects of it are cloned from other games/media. Gameplay cloned from MMOs. World design cloned from BotW. Character designs cloned from the worst of anime. It is the game equivalent of a street cart hotdog. They sell lot of them, but it is not innovative, good or a particularly thoughtful food/game.

criley2 5y ago

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%

sudosysgen 5y ago
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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

ricardobayes 5y ago

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.

minimaxir 5y ago
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.
- jabbany 5y ago
  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)
  - AlexandrB 5y ago
    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.
AlexandrB 5y ago
> 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).

wheelie_boy 5y ago

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.

dageshi 5y ago
Fun is subjective. People actively complain when games don't have grindy tedious elements.
minimaxir 5y ago
> 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.
- wheelie_boy 5y ago
  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.
  - 5y ago

crate_barre 5y ago

It’s particularly predatory on parents since it’s the cereal-aisle version of marketing to kids who in turn pressure their parents to buy them things.

alex_c 5y ago

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.

throwuxiytayq 5y ago
Do you often enjoy being cannon fodder for people who are already more influential/successful than you IRL?
- alex_c 5y ago
  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.
  - AlexandrB 5y ago
    > 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.

billiam 5y ago

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.

cogman10 5y ago
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.

notTheAuth 5y ago

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.

TheDong 5y ago
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.
- CDSlice 5y ago
  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.

emsy 5y ago

>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.

jaaron 5y ago
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.
sudosysgen 5y ago
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...
foobarian 5y ago
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).

Daiz 5y ago

> 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.

sudosysgen 5y ago
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.
- VRay 5y ago
  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

puzzlingcaptcha 5y ago

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. I'd recommend watching one of their recent expansion previews with the developers talking about their process and influences: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8YXe7EkmoU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8YXe7EkmoU 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