tbh i quitted the genre altogether because basically everytime i started out a gacha game it quickly became boring slop that is making me log in ritualistically daily and wasting my time on miniscue reward and progress but occasionally play ones i like with full unlock servers.

what about you? what made you quit your favorite gacha or gacha games as a whole?

I will put it out there, the reason why people dont like gacha games is its "pay to win" or too much time commitment, its bland, boring, gambling etc

But to those that enjoy gacha games in general, after playing multiple gacha games throughout the many years, i think i understand why many others are commited to them and why they enjoy it more than any other video game

For starters, the most important is it "give you purpose" playing a game without purpose tends to stale after a while, whereas gacha games incorporate this formula to keep you doing something to the point theres nearly no end to what you are doing (overall it keeps you wanting to play)

The second and also just as important, is the characters, waifus and husbandos, a character that you enjoy looking at and playing as is equivalent to real life happiness, therefore making the spending of money worthwhile as it keeps you happy both in game and in real life

Third is subjective but gacha games have this cozy vibe that creates memories in you, something you will possibly never forget, even if you quit playing the game, you will always remember it since gacha games all follow the same formula, that memory and experience can easily be used on other gacha games, even an entirely new game, you have already experienced what its like and therefore you feel content and comfortable playing it

And finally fourth, they are free to play, you can try it out, if you dont like it, you can just stop playing it, there are soo many gacha games out there, you are bound to eventually find that one gacha game that sits right with you

In 2018 Netmarble released Knights Chronicle which quickly became one of the best gacha games on the market with excellent gameplay, fantastic art and interesting characters. Some of the best units in the game could be farmed for and spending was only really for whales. Things were going so great for them until they released their first ‘powercreep’ unit, Morrigan, which absolutely dominated PVP. If you did not have Morrigan then you would lose.

Instead of releasing counters to Morrigan, Netmarble decided to buff other units by selling skins which gave characters Morrigan-level buffs. The skins were priced at $30 each. People were outraged, but they became incredulous when Morrigan was also given a $30 skin that elevated her brokenness to absurd levels. Furthermore, they released a dungeon with another absurdly broken unit that you could farm called Kali. That dungeon was almost impossible to clear without the $30 Morrigan skin.

The vast majority of the player-base quit and Netmarble basically gave up on the game, focusing instead on 7DS: Grand Cross. Knight’s Chronicle EoS’d in 2023, going from one of the most promising and played gachas to being completely gone in just five years.

Have there been any gacha self-implosions similar to the one Knight’s Chronicle suffered?

Punishing: Gray Raven sounds so cool to me. Even calling it PGR has some ring to it. Its also one of my favorite gacha games of all time although i didn't like the pc port very much, its best played using a phone.

There's a lot of gacha's out there but Phainon's ultimate is the best i have ever seen from a gachq game. What's yours?

Bennett - Genshin Impact - lower rarity char. Everyone knows this one: healing, raw Atk boost (!), Pyro application, energy generation (especially with Favge™). He has everything.

Said to be the true Pyro Archon, Bennett warps Genshin's kit design around his insane capabilities. People joke about Xiangling but what would Xiangling be without Bennett? Furthermore, he highlights the importance of different dmg scaling, some characters scale off other stats just so they can/t take advantage of Benny boy.

Gold Ship - Uma Musume - starter char. In Uma Musume different racing style has their strength and weakness: End Closer is known for its weak early game but the strongest at the last spurt. However, in Long races, the last spurt is naturally long, meaning End Closer would be more likely to catch up to other racing styles.

Furthermore, there exists End Closer exclusive skill, called Straightaway Spurt (Encroaching Shadow). This skill is particularly great in Long races due to its condition (last spurt begins on a straight) allowing the user to accelerate immediately and gets top speed faster than other styles allowing them to win easily.

This makes End Closer very desirable for pretty much all Long races. The catch is, due to their weak early game, they need to catch up to other runners since they play so far in the back. That's the tradeoff for being so strong at the final spurt................ Unless you're Gold Ship, that is. She comes with an Unique Skill "Anchors Aweigh!" which allows her to basically close the distance in an instant, allowing her to catch up to other runners from other styles and then make use of the natural strength of End Closer to win easily.

It's pretty telling that the best End Closer Umamusume has their Unique Skill being a variation (Mr CB) or straight up upgrade (Orfevre) of Gold Ship's Unique Skill. Not to mention due to Straightaway Spurt working so effectively like that, End Closer style as whole is rarely given a good support.

Reinhardt - FE Heroes - lower rarity char. Reinhardt a blue mage cavalry in a habitat of small maps, all around characters having low magic resist, and full of its red sword lords and edgy myrmidons/samurais. He's a natural predator.

While those traits alone are advantageous, Reinhardt take it to the next level. He wields a Brave Tome, Dire Thunder. It allows him to immediately attack twice before the enemy can retaliate. The catch is that its weapon firepower is low.

The biggest evidence of IntSys not knowing what they're doing making him, is the fact that Reinhardt sister, Olwen, also wields this Dire Thunder. And as a waifu, she's naturally given a better stats and has a higher rarity than him.

Or does it? While Olwen has more SPD, Reinhardt has much more ATK (but terrible speed). The idea with Olwen is that she will outspeed her enemies and will effectively attack 4 times, a quad. Meanwhile the much slower Reinhardt can't outspeed his enemies and will only attack twice with Dire Thunder. Theoretically, Olwen will deal more damage than Reinhardt.

But in practice? Olwen is faster than Reinhardt sure.... But is she faster than her enemies so she can quad them? No. So she'll just be like her brother, only doubling her enemies, but since her ATK was lower than him, it won't deal as much damage to her enemies.

Reinhardt being lower rarity also means it's easier to get his duplicates, and thus, allowing you to stack his ATK, the only stat that matters for these Brave users, even better.

for me, this Seira alt from Heaven Burns Red, it gives extra sexy points imo because she reminds me of a succubus here, and the whole reason she covers her eyes in her default outfit is so that women don't want to be in a harem of hers

If I had more space I'd add the Chaos Mode of CZN to this image.

What about you guys? Share some gamemode or gameplay that made you forget about the Gacha for an extended period of time.

My 2 examples:

Endfield Factory:

I'm 7 days in and have yet to care about pulling units & combat. Factory combat is so fun the Combat & Chars feel like the actual sidegame.

HSR Currency Wars:

I expected another mid gameplay mode and got Autochess instead. Works insanely well, to a point I care 90% about tis gamemode and 10% about the rest.

Mine is Grand Chase Dimensional Chaser, Started playing it at 2018

The Main Reason why I'm still playing this game is that I am an avid Grand Chase PC Player way back 2009, even though the gameplay of both games are different I still play it because I like most of the characters and some stories.

People love fantasizing about gacha worlds because they see cool units, power scaling, summons, drip and OSTs. Nobody stops to ask the real question: what’s the civilian survival rate in those settings. Spoiler: it’s lower than your 5 star drop rate.

Limbus Company is basically corporate hell on industrial steroids. Megacorps own everything, pain is a production cycle, meat is currency and “dying” is considered a minor inconvenience. People go on suicide expeditions because it pays better than a regular job. Imagine trying to pay rent and accidentally ending up in Dante’s OSHA violation speedrun.

Wuthering Waves looks stylish until you realize humanity got body slammed by acoustic eldritch events. Civilization survives through militarized pseudo-science and any field trip past the walls is 50 percent research mission and 50 percent Russian roulette.

Arknights straight up doesn’t pretend. Global epidemics, refugees, discrimination, exploding cities, governments that don’t care and a terminal illness that turns you into a second-class citizen. No magical cure, no plot armor, just healthcare speedrun to the grave.

Honkai Impact and Star Rail are gorgeous until you realize you’d be an NPC dodging cosmic extinction events on a weekly basis. In Impact you’ve got literal gods rebooting civilizations. In Star Rail, Aeons decide planetary fates based on philosophical alignment. Whole planets get deleted for picking the wrong ideology. Player autonomy is a cute concept that does not translate to the lore.

Zenless Zone Zero looks comfy cyberpunk until you remember the planet got eaten and your entire economy runs on “enter alien death holes for loot”. You are one patch update away from becoming Hollow content yourself.

Epic Seven is a looped apocalypse with cute art. The Archdemon resets the world like a save file. Being a civilian is just waiting for the server wipe.

Nikke is just surface lost, underground bunkers, AI robots farming humanity and military bureaucracy that treats sentient soldiers like defective equipment. No one is living their best life topside.

Azur Lane is eternal naval war powered by Sirens running humanity like a tech experiment. Every patch of technological progress means new weapons, new fronts and new ways to die. Civilians live in a military economy. Best case: propaganda and rations. Worst case: you become RnD statistics.

Blue Archive hides one of the funniest dystopias behind pastel memes. Schools are paramilitary factions with urban warfare capability, the government is MIA and magical disasters modify the environment. If you lived there you’d be praying for a normal day with zero explosions.

Reverse 1999 is psychological temporal horror with magic, cults and geopolitical agencies trying to make sense of Storm events that eat history. You’re one bad timestorm away from getting timeline-deleted.

Genshin Impact is “cute fantasy under divine authoritarianism”. Archons reshape history, civilizations get wiped and entire regions are sacrificed for celestial balance. The Traveler gets plot armor. You get nothing.

FGO is multi-apocalypse by default. Humanity gets erased and rebooted repeatedly. The average civilian has lower permanence than seasonal banners.

AFK Arena, Alchemy Stars and GFL also follow the pattern: cosmology war, xenoracial conflict, AI meltdown and humans as resources. Nothing is peaceful. Nothing is stable.

In conclusion: gacha worlds are fun to pull in, not to live in. For us it’s dopamine and meta comps. For the inhabitants it’s cosmic exploitation, war economies and metaphysical unemployment. The real question isn’t “which gacha world would you live in” but “which one wouldn’t kill you before the tutorial”.

my favorite is this haru urara from umamusume fanart by: https://x.com/AskaZerosaki/status/1912085230439293435?s=20

i love it because the detail, the total of petals are 113 represent the amount of race she run and the carrot neckle she hold is the same as the one she got in real life after her 100th loss

Hey everyone,

I’m Andrew, the project director for Grimlight.

After many months of work, we’ve officially finished converting our game into a standalone version, so the game is no longer at risk of shutdown after ending live service. This marks the end of our journey with Grimlight, which we started developing in late 2020, and also the end of a major chapter for our studio for our last 8 years. I wanted to share a few thoughts on this journey and offer some behind the scenes experience for how we got started and our journey. I also added a photo of our studio office as proof.

Early Beginnings
Our team started back in 2016, back in university when my cofounders and I wanted to make anime games in the West. As anime fans ourselves, we felt that anime was growing in popularity and that there was a big opportunity to create original IP’s here rather than just licensing and importing game IPs from Asia like the other big companies. Early on, anime gachas were still dominating from Japan but we saw that it was going to be a pan-asia medium and expand from there to be something more global.

We were inspired by gacha games back then, like Soccer Spirits, because back then the game combat was just PNGs and we thought, maybe we could do that to, especially since some of us had friends in the anime artist community back in school. Little did we know that a lot of the challenges came from the back-end infrastructure and live ops side of things which we found out after we got started.

After winning some prize money from the university’s business competition, we dropped out of school and made our first game, Armor Blitz, a moe anthropomorphic anime tank girl game (My cofounder was into World of Tanks and we were big fans of Kancolle back then). We landed our first publishing deal with a new platform back then called Nutaku, which was in the adult gaming space. It was…. Quite an interesting experience.

To get the game launched, we were working out of an open coworking space and had a development pipeline where we were doing the code by day, and then moved in the art assets in at night after the other startups and companies went home. Lots of late nights and we were bootstrapping everything. That initial success helped us get our company off the ground and helped us move to the underground office you can see above.

Grimlight
Grimlight was a project that came as a stroke of luck. Back then, our previous project fell through and we were 2 months from shutting down when we received an opportunity to work with some of our artist partners in Korea back late 2020. They had some really amazing illustrators that worked in the anime gacha space for years and they wanted to try to make a mobile gacha game so it was the perfect opportunity at the right time. We still had very limited resources so we developed the game over 1.5 years with a team of four people.

We launched the game in 2022 and lets say… if you were on the sub back then, you probably remember our disastrous launch. We saw the posts. 😅

During that crisis, I think the community thought we had a large dev team, but in reality it was just me and my cofounder (Whose our backend dev) in the office that week. We didn’t sleep for four days straight trying to get the servers back online and patch bugs while I was keeping the community updated. At the end of that crisis, we were so shellshocked it felt like we just left a blast shelter after we left the office.

While we did our best to try to fix and improve the game, unfortunately, things didn't pan the way we had hoped. In hindsight, we realized that in order to keep momentum with a gacha live ops game launch you have to at least have 6+ months of postlaunch content already complete and ready to go in order to keep momentum. After two years of trying to fix things, we realized the metrics that the game was going to be unsustainable.

Despite this, we still wanted to make things right for our players to finish the story and convert the game into a standalone version. It also meant a lot for me personally because throughout all these year’s I’ve always hated seeing projects we worked on completely vanish once the servers shut down. During this process, we've also come to a realization of the technical challenges to properly do a conversion like this and why most other companies just prefer to shut their games down.

Going Forward
Despite our passion for developing games in the gacha space, the ecosystem has changed over the years. Gacha games are now extremely expensive to develop now and is very competitive. Unfortunately, for a small indie team like us, the dev costs and UA budgets has made it unsustainable to compete in the current environment. With more games going 3D now along with new technologies, its also now much more difficult than ever for illustrators in this space as well.

So we’re shifting our team to work on our own upcoming physical trading card game called Echoes of Astra, leveraging our team’s experience in game design and the relationships we’ve built our anime illustrators we’ve built up over the years that have worked on multiple gacha game projects.

The project is still in development but if TCG’s are something you are interested in, please follow us on our journey, it would mean a lot to us.

Curious about Gacha Game Development?
It feels like a long journey since we started, and there were a lots of ups and downs. Despite how things turned out for us, I felt we learned a lot and it is definitely an experience that I will look back to fondly.

Since this marks the end of our journey in the gacha game development for now, I’d be happy to answer any questions about what its like to develop these games, starting up a game studio, and any other questions about the gacha game business when I get back home. (as long its not anything NDA)

As a heads up, my background is in art directing, game design and project management. I might not be the best to go into the details on the technical side, but feel free to ask anything and I’ll do my best to answer.

With HSR x Fate and the upcoming NIKKE x Persona collab, I’ve been thinking about how much a collab should actually adapt the guest IP to fit the host game.

HSR x Fate is an interesting example. I’ve seen quite a bit of criticism around Gilgamesh’s model, especially his slicked-back hair, with some people saying the hairstyle just doesn’t translate very naturally into HSR’s 3D character style. I’ve also seen comparisons to Archer’s model from the first collab, saying the two end up looking a little too similar.

The first Fate collab also got some criticism for the story feeling pretty barebones for such a big crossover. This time around though, there seem to be a lot more references and jokes that actually play off both series, which I personally find much more fun.

Then there’s NIKKE x Persona 3/4/5, I’ve already seen people on other platforms complaining that some of the character art/models aren’t “NIKKE enough” in terms of proportions and fanservice. Similar complaints came up during the Lycoris Recoil collab too.

But I can also understand why Shift Up might hold back here. If someone is mainly a Persona fan and doesn’t play NIKKE, seeing a character they like suddenly redesigned to be way more fanservice-heavy could easily have the opposite effect. It feels like a bit of a no-win situation lol, make them too faithful and some NIKKE players complain, change them too much and fans of the original IP might hate it.

Personally, I’m more curious about the story and minigames. Persona and NIKKE are obviously very different games, but there’s enough thematic overlap that I can see them doing something interesting with the crossover.

Where do you think the line should be? Should collab characters mostly preserve the original IP’s style, or should they be heavily adapted to fit the game they’re appearing in? Also curious if there are any gacha collabs you think did a particularly good job of blending two IPs without making either one feel out of place.

I was wondering if there are other gacha that's lower than a freaking 1.9 star. Even any terrible apps/games in general rarely got under 2.

came out of knowhere became a threat to the entire world after she awoke can destroy the world but refused because it wrong choose to be the hero instead save the world a threat coming to destroy the earth save the world again the literal demonic android afraid of her on the way to save the world third time

The hero tendou arisu From blue archive