Speaking of MMORPGs, the mentality has spread there too. Lots of players don’t ever experiment with different builds for their character or just play the way they like, instead following an online guide for achieving hyperoptimization. Even questioning that way of playing gets you marked as a bad player.
It’s also become much more normal to pay significant sums of money for in-game currency that is then used to buy high end competitive content runs from other well geared players for gear and achievements. This especially seems entirely pointless to me… what good is the gear obtained this way? It’s not being used for anything that calls for it so at best it’s a trophy for your character to wear that you didn’t even earn yourself.
It’s so far divorced from the seemingly endless font of exploration, discovery, and character progression that defined seamless open world MMORPGs back in the early-mid 2000s.
It's wild because if you discard your preconceived notions, the possibilities of what you can do with a massively multiplayer persistent world are absolutely vast. There's this huge unexplored territory and 99% of MMOs are stuck in this one tiny corner.
What does this mean? Like paying people in game gold to carry you?
Now that there’s no friction on the path between a player’s wallet and those offering carry services, carry purchases have exploded in popularity.
Particularly if you’re just one guy applying to random groups, the last few slots get applications from tons of insanely-powerful characters. You can sit there trying to join a group as a new player for hours and not get anywhere unless you apply to mostly-empty groups or start your own with a friend or two
If you don’t know that, it’s easy to think you’ll need to pay for achievements and loot in order to have a shot at getting a group
Hey, so long as I’m mentioning WoW here: That game is still taking in 200 million dollars a year or more, but it’s only getting a small fraction of that reinvested. I think the market is ripe for an actual WoW-killer. Gather a team, make a polished AAA version of WoW, and rake in the dough
Players descend like locusts, then optimize and share their builds until they discover some emergent tug of war or rock paper scissors meta.
What remains is a cat & mouse game between players and developers, to find the reductive meta and then patch the game to shake it up. The players are highly coordinated thanks to wikis, and they consume content quicker than devs can create it. So the business model is no longer viable.
Your first strategy might explain the emerging success of sandbox games and battle royale games.
I was playing Dark Age of Camelot back in the day and we'd spend hours just waiting around, chatting, meeting new people, trying to group up and try to clear a dungeon. Of course, our compositions were less than ideal but we'd try to make it work. Hey we have no one durable but if we take little Timmy's mercenary here and put some high armor gear on him and dual wield shields maybe it would work. Of course someone would go to bed or to dinner and then off to find a new player we go. Trying to make it work was the name of the game. With time, you'd amass a big friend list of reliable people you know you could call on a moment's need if they were online and most of the time they would be happy to help.
Modern players are borderline obsessed with time. No one wants to waste time experimenting with content so they look for guides to clear as fast as possible. Getting wiped immediately results in remarks of "you're wasting my time". The human aspect of the MMO has been stripped away by bots, fast travel, people generally being rude and the mumble/teamspeak server or discord group chat. Somehow, it feels like the MMO is a reflection of our current society.
Whales on the other hand I will never understand.
One of the claims which Kongegate’s CEO made, repeatedly, in presentations is that they actually got their whales on the phone and they were simply professionals who liked to spend money on their hobby. That has become increasingly plausible to me as I’ve grown older and have more money than time.
I spent $X00 on Genshin in something like 6 weeks. I quit because of the time “commitment” and because I had gotten through most of the interesting bits, but if I had kept up habits, I would have played less than typical American watches TV and spent $X,000 a year. Which… does not strike me as unreasonable for what would have been my main hobby, given comparables like e.g. golf.
It’s a great game in a lot of ways. I don’t regret either time played or money spent. (The first one would have been untrue in a year, hence stopping.)
Indeed.
Some people say it's to "pay for server costs blah blah blah" but one look at Epic or EA's balance sheet will show you how bullshit that is
Server costs and ongoing dev costs are totally a thing, but I'm not sure why it's so problematic that they make a profit on top of that.
Another way to phrase this is that free in game currency for F2P players often represents several hundred dollars of the equivalents you can purchase with actual cash. So if you want to have twice as much resources/units/weapons/whatever as a F2P player you need to be spending a lot of money. A few bucks won't move the needle at all.
$60/20 hours is $3 for an hour of entertainment. That's pretty great.
There are always underground account transfer markets for these kind of games. It becomes an investment if you know what you are doing.
Winning gives you a dopamine hit. Regardless of what it took to win.
Entire videogame genres (colloquially known as soshage in Japan) are built around giving this dopamine hit to 1) people who play a lot ("alot" here is on the order of unemployed people playing constantly) and 2) people who pay. They quite intentionally don't allow people to win if they don't pay or play extensively. Losing to those people pushes them to pay so they can win.
Genshin Impact is an evolution on this game model.
Comparing Dark Souls sales numbers and its ilk gacha games and their ilk shows that the number of people willing to tolerate the frustration is much lower than those willing to buy their way through it.
So indeed, most people that do play Genshin Impact do find the frustration worth it. I'd say a fair few of those find that the frustration makes it better.
That's a hell of a conclusion from assumptions that have a shaky base.
As per [1] below, the "tiny minority" of players typically accounts for over 20% of the playerbase.
And per [2], the average amount spent by a mobile player in F2P games is over $85.
And I bet Genshin Impact does better than this - they have better marketing, better art, and lots of experience milking players for money.
[1] A developer sharing his revenue breakdown per player: https://medium.com/building-the-metaverse/game-economics-par...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20160913155032/https://intellige...
The anniversary controversy was due to the rewards being unusually stingy to the point where the initial rewards were worse than the typical biweekly event, whereas in every other gacha anniversary events offer substantially better rewards than usual.
If they had included the bonus 1600 Primogem reward initially it wouldn't have been as much of a mess.
I'm not super familiar with genshin specifically, but in a lot of these games, players don't really play the game. Like, they'll just lookup pre made team setups that allow them to win with no skill or input. This is the strangest thing to me. Why do people like just following along a game if they're not going to take any accountability. It's like the MMORPG grind of enjoying the numbers going up from yesteryear, but somehow, even one step further removed than before.