[HN Gopher] How Mihoyo's monetization works
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How Mihoyo's monetization works
Author : future10se
Score : 72 points
Date : 2024-07-26 16:14 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (moonbearmusings.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (moonbearmusings.com)
| notamy wrote:
| https://archive.is/8tjfz
| savanaly wrote:
| Interesting take on Gacha game monetization, but I was more
| interested in the "mission statement" linked in the header of the
| blog: https://moonbearmusings.com/the-moron-filter-effect/
| nottorp wrote:
| Read this and try to explain to me again how going free to play
| does not corrupt a game's design :)
| sunrunner wrote:
| The game was designed to be free to play from the beginning, so
| any design decisions are fundamentally going to be geared
| towards making that work. The design could never be corrupted,
| because that implies it wasn't to begin with :)
| bakugo wrote:
| It's easy to say "F2P bad" or "live service bad", and I'm
| usually inclined to agree, but in this case, the entire game
| was carefully designed around the monetization model from the
| very start of development, to the point that it probably
| wouldn't work very well without it.
|
| I've thought about what a non-live service, $60 one-time
| purchase version of Genshin Impact would look like, and I've
| come to the conclusion that it probably wouldn't be anywhere
| near as good. Even assuming it had the same amount of content
| it has now (which is quite a lot), the large and diverse roster
| of characters goes a long way in avoiding the feeling of
| repetitiveness and tedium that plagues most large open world
| games nowadays, and having to carefully pick and choose which
| characters you want to obtain and invest into (if you're not a
| whale, at least) and having to dedicate time to build up each
| one makes you care a lot more about them.
| nottorp wrote:
| Yes, every game based on a multiplayer grinding treadmill
| would be a shitty game if you made it single player.
|
| > the large and diverse roster of characters goes a long way
| in avoiding the feeling of repetitiveness and tedium
|
| It's just the same tedium but you change the combos every
| 10000 repeats?
|
| > that plagues most large open world games nowadays
|
| Open world games have grown too large for their own good, but
| that's a different discussion. The worst is when some title
| is succesful and they get money and they make a sequel that's
| thrice as big.
|
| Horizon Zero Dawn: perfect length if you ask me. Horizon
| Forbidden West: could have been 50% smaller for the same
| enjoyment.
|
| Even Witcher 3 and Elden Ring, which are great non repetitive
| open world games, could have been smaller for the same effect
| if you ask me.
| acheong08 wrote:
| Even if "live service bad", Genshin Impact has been reverse
| engineered to death; you can run your own server, mod the
| game to get all the cosmetics, and do just about whatever you
| want.
| drdaeman wrote:
| I have no idea about Mihoyo (never even looked in their
| direction, save for looking up what it is), but gacha != F2P.
|
| Valve, even though their games have lootboxes, they got it
| [mostly] right by trying their best to make sure there's no
| "pay to win" (save for accidental cosmetics' bugs, which are
| half of the time are "pay to lose" and either way are typically
| fixed promptly) and all game mechanics are equally accessible
| to everyone from minute zero, with lootboxes being purely
| cosmetic.
| waveBidder wrote:
| Valve has a money printing machine and is thus under far less
| pressure to follow the incentive gradient.
| drdaeman wrote:
| I think it's more because Valve has (from what I heard) a
| very principled founder, and that they never went public
| (and probably won't) so they don't have any shareholders to
| please with "growth".
| nottorp wrote:
| And here they come... the usual defenders of F2P "for
| cosmetic items only" :)
|
| As much as you'd like to prove it's a different animal, the
| game's design was corrupted in that case as well.
| mappu wrote:
| What do you think the game's design is? Because I think it's a
| gorgeous open world single player ARPG. The story, character
| cast, literary inspiration, gameplay mechanics, and music, are
| all just incredible.
|
| There are a thousand great things to say about Genshin before
| you even get anywhere near talking about the nonintrusive and
| ignorable monetization model. I think people hear "Gacha" and
| mentally lump it in with spammy 2d animated gif idle clicker
| games. But it's a better BOTW, and anything else misses the
| forest for the trees.
| sweeter wrote:
| but in this case Genshin is heavily hindered by its gacha
| mechanics and its need to meter out content to keep people
| coming back. Some good examples of this are how the dialogue
| can be endless and pointless. You are often running from one
| place to the next to go through 20 minute un-skippable
| dialogues that have no real relevance to the story. On top of
| that, everything "fun" is time gated and restricted
| arbitrarily by a currency. The game is very much structured
| around pushing the user to log in for 15-20 minutes every day
| and anything more or less than that is painful
| musicale wrote:
| > There are a thousand great things to say about Genshin
| before you even get anywhere near talking about the
| nonintrusive and ignorable monetization model
|
| > everything "fun" is time gated and restricted arbitrarily
| by a currency. The game is very much structured around
| pushing the user to log in for 15-20 minutes every day and
| anything more or less than that is painful
|
| I suppose both of those things might be true. But #2 sounds
| like the primary issue that always prevents me from
| enjoying f2p games.
| minimaxir wrote:
| The funny thing about Mihoyo's games is that they are one of the
| most profitable developers, but they could definitely pull more
| levers to incentivise people to spend even more money. Most gacha
| games have some sort of pay-to-win PvP and/or leaderboards built
| in their games, but in Mihoyo's games, having a top-tier team
| just means you have to oppertunity to get _slightly_ more premium
| currency.
| lilyball wrote:
| At some point, adding mechanics like that turns people off from
| the game. Those things are good for games that have limited
| shelf life and want to get people to dump money into it while
| the game is popular, but things like leaderboards actually get
| people to quit playing once they realize that they can't get
| ever get on it because too many other people are willing to pay
| more. miHoYo games are intended to get people playing for a
| long time rather than trying to milk a group of players for a
| month or two and then moving on.
| maxglute wrote:
| Waifu monetization model, more profitable to milk a lot of
| horny folks a little for a long time. I still can't get over
| Mihoyo built a tokamak reactor IRL.
| carbotaniuman wrote:
| Sadly they're just an investor in that company -
| misinformation travels quickly. The era of anime dystopian
| megacorps is not upon us yet thankfully.
| hooverd wrote:
| Please do not milk the horny folk. ;) Well, they invested in
| one, and they also invested in a SpaceX competitor,
| Orienspace, too. It was a little jarring seeing their logo
| alongside all the ~serious companies.
| joseda-hg wrote:
| I'm confident they could be more aggresive with their
| monetization, less so on if it would be more beneficial long
| term
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| Where they really get you is the FOMO factor when a banner is
| about to expire and you have lost your 50/50. I wonder how much
| of their revenue comes from the final 24 hrs of that countdown.
| shados wrote:
| Honkai Impact 3rd does have pay2win ladder. It's pretty
| hardcore too, even as a whale it can be quite rough to get to
| the top. There's a LOT of top tier whales in that game and you
| need some pixel perfect timings to utilize it at the top level.
| jabbany wrote:
| PVP and leaderboards attract a different audience than normal
| gacha players which is why it tends to be rare-ish in gacha
| games. (Almost none of the popular ones focus on it).
|
| Most of the time, the social aspect of gacha is to show off
| your "collection" rather than to show off your "skills", so
| adding PvP and leaderboards doesn't do much for most players.
| Instead, gacha games tend to have "social" features that do let
| you show off your "collection" in some way, like profile cards
| with character showcases, "supports" mechanisms that let
| friends and strangers borrow your characters, or sometimes just
| blatantly a score for your gallery completion %.
|
| Also FWIW, Genshin actually has PvP, it's just that it's only
| present in the card battle mini-game. And my impression (could
| be inaccurate though) of that is most players are not
| particularly "into" that mode.
| hooverd wrote:
| I can second the part about Genshin Impact being harder to
| monetize because you can "git gud".
| user_7832 wrote:
| Any suggestions? I've been a mobile player for the longest so
| never (could) use i-frames/animation cancelling etc. Do you
| have any suggestions on what to do or learn from? TIA!
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| With these games your macro strategy is a lot more important
| than doing any kind of hair trigger reaction. Like your 3rd
| move in a 5 move sequence might come with iframes or a gap
| creator, so you need to keep track of where you are in the
| moveset and try to time it with the boss's actions. However,
| you are never asked for highly precise inputs.
|
| The game is built to be played on a screen with your fingers
| blocking some elements after all.
| hooverd wrote:
| Hmm, I'm a PC player, but for me it was mostly getting the
| animation timings down so I could consistently dodge.
| bakugo wrote:
| Pretty good read. Particularly the part about avoiding
| enshittification. I've never really thought about it, but there
| are in fact a few very valuable lessons that many of the world's
| biggest tech companies could learn from this chinese gacha
| company, as ridiculous as it sounds, because their leadership is
| clearly well above average.
|
| Also, next time I see someone asking why they don't release more
| skins, I'm going to link them to this article because it provides
| a pretty clear explanation for that, too.
| nemomarx wrote:
| I wonder if they could do it the other way - Fate's gacha has
| free skins, but if you want to unlock and use them you then
| need to roll the character. This seems to turn around the
| audience problem, where the skin becomes bait for a characters
| 3rd or 4th rerun banner, etc.
| foobarian wrote:
| What drew me into this game was the art-heavy design. I
| appreciate how much they invest into assets in and out of the
| game; for example the original soundtracks, or sponsoring the
| philharmonic orchestras - they didn't have to do that.
| diabeetusman wrote:
| Why'd you disable right clicking and highlighting?
|
| Edit: If you're not the author of the post, feel free to ignore
| :)
| jonathanyc wrote:
| They also somehow broke scrolling via the scroll bar, swipe to
| go back, and jumping to text search results on iOS! This is the
| first site that I've seen break so many browser features.
| mbb70 wrote:
| oncontextmenu and ondragstart are preventDefault'ed _unless_
| you are in a input/textarea e.g. leaving a reply. Truly bizarre
| and pointless. I've done something similar in a nonsense
| corporate context to stop people copying certain sensitive
| date, but at least I knew it was pointless.
| jabbany wrote:
| Very perplexed about this too. The only reason I can come up
| with is to prevent people from copying the content?
|
| But that doesn't make much sense either TBH. The page's content
| is not obfuscated, so this does nothing to stop a content
| scraper script. Plus, even a not particularly technical user
| can just turn on reading mode and get at the text anyways...
| Panzer04 wrote:
| I also had the page load very slowly, and it actually reloaded
| 3x while I was trying to read it. Something is off about that
| website :(
| jonathanyc wrote:
| I'm not too familiar with gacha games, so I was intrigued. I
| thought the criticism of EA's former CEO was funny. But the rest
| of the article felt like a lot of term-dropping and examples that
| aren't linked together into a cohesive theory, so I'm kind of
| disappointed. I think this industry talk about monetization
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNjI03CGkb4) and Tynan
| Sylvester's book "Designing Games" were a lot more informative.
|
| For example, the blog post says this but then doesn't really
| elaborate on what any of the clauses mean ("repeatable design
| levers", "without compromising the core gameplay experience"):
|
| > A healthy long-term monetization system should therefore have
| repeatable design levers that can be used to reliably generate
| demand without compromising the core gameplay experience.
|
| In contrast "Designing Games" has a whole section on
| fixed/variable reward schedules, e.g. (pg. 210):
|
| > We can avoid such shelf moments by superimposing several fixed
| ratio schedules. Consider what happens when the player can get a
| dollar for every 10th chest, a diamond for every 10th rock mined,
| and an arrow for every 10th goblin killed. ... The player shifts
| focus back and forth between activities, never missing a
| dopamine-driven beat.
|
| I asked some friends who play gacha games and they mentioned
| "stamina" mechanics as something that makes these game addictive.
| I'd never heard of it before, but apparently you're limited to
| perform X number of actions per day. You can purchase some
| additional stamina/actions, but this creates FOMO if you don't
| log in every day.
| skybrian wrote:
| Wow, that's a lot of jargon. Despite playing Genshin Impact a
| fair bit (my niece is into it), I didn't understand most of terms
| in this article. It's odd that they felt like they had to define
| "enshittification" which is everywhere and not terms like
| "dolphin" and "i-frames" which I had never heard of before.
| hooverd wrote:
| Dolphin is a play on a whale, a medium spender vs a big spender
| or a free-to-play (F2P) user.
|
| I don't know where i-frames came from originally, but it's
| abbreviated from invincibility frames, and is usually the part
| of an animation where your character won't take damage. I think
| Dark Souls/Elden Ring would be the most well known example of
| that mechanics.
| valiant55 wrote:
| I know that gamers exist on a spectrum but this reminds me of
| the time my coworker after learning I played World of Warcraft
| asked me what level I was (several months into and expansion).
| I tried to quickly change the subject before I was exposed.
| Cloudef wrote:
| Gacha games are basically glorified todo lists, all of them
| eventually devolve into the stage where your "progress" grinds to
| halt and you either put in the money to get over the next barrier
| or do tedious daily actions to slowly power up your team to get
| over the barrier eventually. The competitive aspects feed the
| FOMO and give advantage to players who were in from the start, a
| kind of pyramid scheme. Such disgusting game design patterns all
| around. When you step away from it and look at it, you realize
| there really isn't a game but a dopamine box designed to trap
| you.
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