I’ve seen a lot of discussion about the recent gacha stuff

I’m no expert on the subject but please read the whole post.

1. A lot of people who are defending this behavior either never played a gacha game or never paid attention to how monetization progressed in the games they did play.

Majority of gacha games get worse over time, there’s a few exceptions of course but let’s talk about how a gacha compares to rivals.

Adding randomized rewards is no different than loot boxes, loot boxes and gacha mechanics are similar but not the same. That said they both have huge issues with how they are normally implemented. For example the slow increase in price for in game cosmetics and the promise of getting more “good rewards” when spending more money.

So how does this premise affect a f2p game that has nothing to do with pay-to-win but purely cosmetic items? I’m glad you asked.

First of all you have to understand that the game revenue is not separated between where the revenue is coming from. They have analytics to see this but ultimately they look at total revenue for the game. Which means that if they see a huge spike in earning from “deal of the day” sales they will implement those more and that will become a priority for them.

Once they establish good faith with their deals they will start lowering the quality of cosmetics outside of those deals to incentivize people buying more of them. This HEAVILY leans into FOMO and lowers the overall quality of cosmetic releases. Because after a while it stops being about whether you like this new skin or not and more about whether you’re willing to miss out on it.

2. The history of gacha culture has always been a slippery slope of greed. Many many many many MANY games have died because they focused too much on profit leading to huge loss of casual players. Losing casual players results in loss of profits which leads to a game dying.

Now this probably won’t happen to Rivals because it is a f2p game and people probably won’t feel like they need to buy everything. Morally speaking it’s still scammy and people should fight it but it won’t make or break the game.

BUT if people have normalized scammy practices and predatory sales to the point where NetEase makes hella bank out of it, what makes you think they’ll stop at cosmetics ? We are seeing a lot of greedy practices fusing together to make this anniversary event. It’s not one or two it’s A LOT. So the fear is that it will lead to more gatekeeping, more forced purchases and worst case scenario locking new characters behind a pay wall. Which WILL lead to the game’s death.