I started playing a gacha-type Android game recently called Fate Grand Order.
To those who don't know, it's a kind of game where gambling is inherently built into the game itself, where you are... hmm... HEAVILY incentivized to P2W. In fact, it's so RNG and lootboxy that I can see why Valve themselves think they're being kinda tame. Because compared to gacha games, holy shit, they're tame as hell.
The reason I bring this up is simply to be thankful that while our PC games and Total War is infested with DLC these days... at least they're not gacha-game bad.
I'll use this specific game to illustrate why:
1. This game is about using RNG lootbox dropped characters to fight PVE battles. Free money is limited to low-tier characters while premium money gets you the good shit.
2. The game also dripfeeds you premium money so you can do rolls every once in awhile.
3. The drop rate for a 5-star character (the popular ones) is 1%.
4. This does not include the drop rate for your specific character that you want, which depends entirely on how many other characters of that rank are in the pool (aka, the longer you wait, the worse it gets).
5. What this means is that the game has an abysmally small chance of giving you shit you want and even if you pay for the rolls, the chance is still incredibly miniscule.
6. It costs US$15 for a set of 10 rolls.
So what ends up happening is you get a whole bunch of whales who pay $8500 or $7000 to get a single character. For a mobile game.
But you might think, meh, whales are whales. They can pay shittonnes of money so let them. But at the same time, you look at the Youtube lets plays of people playing and the online discussions and everything is just rife with people throwing shittonnes of money at the game. Hundreds of dollars each. Hundreds! People putting aside $50 a month to play this mobile game that honestly isn't even that good and is completely designed to be addictive in every single way. I could sorta understand it in MMOs, as there's shittonnes of content to update and stuff, but here... there's fucking nothing. It's just some 2D art with some good voice acting and nothing else.
It's nuts. Shit is crazy in mobile gaming land. How can people justify this? It's like watching drug addicts constantly throwing away money at completely no purpose. The people behind these gacha-games must laugh at their insane profit margins. Why would anyone want to make games for any other platform when you can make pseudo-gambling sites that don't even give you real money back like real-gambling sites and rake in millions.
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I only hope this kind of insanity does not enter our PC gaming world, even if Valve, 2K, and Square Enix really want it to be.
Can you imagine if you had to pay $3800 to have a 99% chance of being able to play Vlad von Carstein in Total War? (Also you need to throw in another 5x that amount as you need to roll him 5x to merge them and power him up to max level).
I'm also super addicted to this shit game. Someone pls help me before I pay money.