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How Mihoyo's monetization works

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Re: How Mihoyo's monetization works

#41

Post by valiant55 »

skybrian wrote: post #20

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.

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.

Re: How Mihoyo's monetization works

#42

Post by Cloudef »

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.

Re: How Mihoyo's monetization works

#43

Post by musicale »

sweeter wrote: post #40
mappu wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

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…

> 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.

Re: How Mihoyo's monetization works

#44

Post by bakugo »

_lvbh wrote: post #32
bakugo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

True, but you mostly can't play quests or events on private servers, so they're pretty useless right now.

Re: How Mihoyo's monetization works

#45

Post by chmod775 »

diabeetusman wrote: post #10

Why'd you disable right clicking and highlighting? Edit: If you're not the author of the post, feel free to ignore :)

In Firefox you can shift+rightclick to bypass that (disables the event), or completely disable the event by changing "dom.event.contextmenu.enabled" in about:config.

Re: How Mihoyo's monetization works

#46

Post by skybrian »

mappu wrote: post #34
nottorp wrote: post #4

Read this and try to explain to me again how going free to play does not corrupt a game's design :)

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 s…

When I started playing Genshin Impact, one thing that seemed a little cheap compared to Breath of the Wild is that it has mechanics that they don't even try to justify in-world.

For example, having multiple characters that you can switch between by pressing a button, which are also somehow characters in the story. Nobody in-world ever says a thing about whichever character you're currently using. You can have characters talking to their own clone.

Re: How Mihoyo's monetization works

#47

Post by whateveracct »

hooverd wrote: post #30
skybrian wrote: post #20

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.

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.

idk if it originated it, but i-frames have been a term in fighting games for decades

Re: How Mihoyo's monetization works

#48

Post by hakfoo »

user_7832 wrote: post #22
hooverd wrote: post #7

I can second the part about Genshin Impact being harder to monetize because you can "git gud".

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!

Qiqi puts the game on easy mode, because her healing capacity overpowers everything except a very few instakill scenarios.

You won't necessarily top timing challenges, but you won't die in any story content.

Re: How Mihoyo's monetization works

#49

Post by johnnyanmac »

jabroni_salad wrote: post #24
minimaxir wrote: post #6

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.

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.

Probably some, but I think it works more like the crowdfunding model. The first few days of the banner has the biggest spenders go hard, and then it cools down and ramps up slightly by the end. The former is going to include a lot of spenders going for 6 copies, so they are much less elastic in how to optimally spend on the banner.

Re: How Mihoyo's monetization works

#50

Post by johnnyanmac »

nottorp wrote: post #4

Read this and try to explain to me again how going free to play does not corrupt a game's design :)

There's a big implication in the article itself that the monetization structure of such gacha goes at odds with the fundamentals of game design. The only real benefit is that

1. some huge giga spends are more or less subsidizing your experience so you can play this game for no cost. This is obviously a boon in low income countries where a console game can be an extreme luxury to buy new.

2. The game can provide an RPG experience that will continually update for years, compared to a traditional RPG that is either one and done (possibly rushing out the last third and never following up on plot threads) or needs to sequel bait for the next entry in 3-4 years (on the most generous side).

so it really comes down to your personal situation on if this is liberating or a bastardization of the genre.

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