How Mihoyo's monetization works

it varies immensely, and honestly there's no consensus among gacha players what f2p even truly means. It could mean that you can experience all content and eventually pulled some desired characters without paying (e.g. no paywalled characters nor features save cosmetics). It could be more based on a vague metric on how competitive a free player can be in the game (e.g. obviously not going to be top 100 in most games, but maybe top 1000 for a player who plans). It could mean you get a lot of pulls and can grab most of the roster without spending (with whales going for dupes to make money). etc.

People will probably argue about it until the end of time, and I dont particular care to give my take on it. Just wanted to share a few other perspectives.

if you're going to reduce it to that, we ultimately can go back to the 90's and consider all video games as a useless waste of time that corrupts the mind.

Ultimately, you figure out why games are fun for yourself and focus in on that, be it gameplay, story, charactters, art direction, or simply comfort (I'm sure I can find a few friends who easily threw X000 hours into Stardew Valley). I don't like competitive FPS, but people have made friends, professions, and entertainment just around watching other people play those games. Let alone their own personal experience.

>The worst is when some title is succesful and they get money and they make a sequel that's thrice as big.

that's simply consumer demand, and despite that meme most people are not asking for shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less. Fortunately, games are diverse and you can definitely tailor to your needs unless you must have AAA graphics for your presentation. There are thousands of indies released yearly, but maybe a hundred AAA on a good year spread across a dozen genres.

yeah, stamina is a mixed bag. The downside is that it limits how much you play and forces you to play X amount if you don't want to waste it. the "upside" is that it equalizes out most player progress. If you aren't someone who spends a ton of money to buy more stamina (and few gacha bank on this as their revenue. It's 90% about the character releases) you'll probably have similar progression to your other friends, or if someone jumps in 1-2 months later they won't be completely in the dust to players who played day 1.

I think the other final straw is macro abuse. You don't limit stamina and the sweatiest gamers will simply automate the process and go beyond human limits of how much you can play. I think this is why even the few games I know that tried a stamina-less system end up implementing stamina. Similar to using captcha to limit web crawlers from the huge minority of those abusing it.

I should note though that modern gacha don't really "limit" your casual progress that much compared to western games. By the time stamina is a scarcity, you are probably finished with the story content and are simply grinding some form of gear, similar to an MMO. Stamina in modern gacha is there to limit that grind, not wall off playing the story.

To explain to non-mobile players: "alts" are basically copies of usually poopular characters, but packaged as a new character. New lines, new skills, maybe a different element/role as a whole. It may or may not be used as a way to reuse assets depending on the quality of the game.

The success of gacha games is not in overcoming those steps, rather in capturing a new market that doesn't care about such perverse mechanics. They're not playing for the same reason you are playing games, persistency is the key here as a virtual "job" they play after their real job.