Gacha Game Hate Thread

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With the amount of gacha games that get shut down, how often do those gaming companies go bust?
a lot more than you think.

There was this gacha game called "Victory Belles" that started out via Kickstarter back in 2023, and then in October of 2025 the servers shut down due to "financial problems". The game itself is ok (WW2 boats shaped as anime chicks fighting other anime chick boats) but the problem is that it was a VERY grindy game where if you were a free player, it would feel like you were making zero progress at all because the later routes/countries needed higher levels and you would only get tiny amounts of XP. Even unlocking new boats was a crapshoot because you needed to grind the same region for a while and the luck rate was piss poor. Then you go to the store and that's when you realize where the rest of the game went to.

Or you'll have situations where a gacha game will all of a sudden switch publishers out of nowhere, sometimes under a completely different name, sometimes in only one language. The gacha scene is pretty fucked, as there's really only a few diamonds in the rough, but they all haven't learned the lesson of "sticking most of your game behind a paywall is FUCKING BAD!!!". Whales are gonna whale, but they are part of the problem too... like was it really worth draining your wallet over something that you can't own anymore? Plus how does anyone know the devs just shat out a game just for a "get rich quick" scheme and then pulled the plug when they finally had enough money?

Hell, even BIG named companies like SNK have gachas where they just decided to pull the plug. KOF All Stars was one of them, and everyone fucking loved that game and was super pissed they were closing down. Instead it got replaced with something called KOF AFK and nobody fucking likes it.
 
The reason i like Blue Archive is because its very free to play friendly. You always feel like you making progress in the game and the devs themselves always seem to give you stuff for free (i like how you get pyroxs, the main currency, every time there is a maintenance update). Alot of the stuff you simply get for playing the game and reading the story. The Cash shops dose exist but rarely dose the deals look worth it, and they limit you how much you can spend on it.
 
Plus how does anyone know the devs just shat out a game just for a "get rich quick" scheme and then pulled the plug when they finally had enough money?
I think that mostly happens because big companies see Gacha games as a safe bet, so if they make a profit or break even then they keep them around, but if they don't then the company just announces an EOS to cut their losses. The RGG/Yakuza franchise has had a gacha game since 2018, albeit only in Japan, whereas Nier Reincarnation didn't last more than 3 years. It's a market everyone wants to get in on, but because of it the competition is very fierce.

You have to offer something that sets you aside from the rest. Hoyoverse games succeed because they're effectively pc games that you can play on your phone, Blue Archive is carried heavily by its story and characters, Uma Musume by the fact that it's a big multimedia franchise and it's easy to get into, et cetera. Games that rely on a single gimmick or a fairly obscure IP, or chase trends set by other games cannot successfully compete, because why would you play them instead of the originals?
 
IMHO of the few/only decent gacha titles is Gundam Battle Operation (2 currently). Predominantly skills based and more-than playable against cashies who barely know how to use their buff horses on average. The main, awful, and non-addressed issue there was lack of in-game voice chat and lack of being able to queue up for ranked matches with your friends/make squads to lobby hop. You'd almost always end up playing with all randos and most of whom absolutely fucking sucked at the game.
 
a lot more than you think.

There was this gacha game called "Victory Belles" that started out via Kickstarter back in 2023, and then in October of 2025 the servers shut down due to "financial problems". The game itself is ok (WW2 boats shaped as anime chicks fighting other anime chick boats) but the problem is that it was a VERY grindy game where if you were a free player, it would feel like you were making zero progress at all because the later routes/countries needed higher levels and you would only get tiny amounts of XP. Even unlocking new boats was a crapshoot because you needed to grind the same region for a while and the luck rate was piss poor. Then you go to the store and that's when you realize where the rest of the game went to.

Or you'll have situations where a gacha game will all of a sudden switch publishers out of nowhere, sometimes under a completely different name, sometimes in only one language. The gacha scene is pretty fucked, as there's really only a few diamonds in the rough, but they all haven't learned the lesson of "sticking most of your game behind a paywall is FUCKING BAD!!!". Whales are gonna whale, but they are part of the problem too... like was it really worth draining your wallet over something that you can't own anymore? Plus how does anyone know the devs just shat out a game just for a "get rich quick" scheme and then pulled the plug when they finally had enough money?

Hell, even BIG named companies like SNK have gachas where they just decided to pull the plug. KOF All Stars was one of them, and everyone fucking loved that game and was super pissed they were closing down. Instead it got replaced with something called KOF AFK and nobody fucking likes it.
I wonder how accurate are the monthly revenue postings. They may very well be pre tax and expenditures since those games live or die by audience opinion of how healthy they are. And even the games that do get few millions every month probably waste a ton of money on promotion so actual profit is very small.

The industry is very toxic, but unfortunately it's pretty much the only location today for JRPGs as the entire genre died post ps2.
 
A Chinese Gacha game, Snowbreak; Containment Zone, was recently brought back online after it had to temporarily go offline due to some sort of scandal in China. However, the gooner shit was heavily censored, and many Chinese are not happy about it:

1778381970640.png 1778381974662.png

Apparently, the game pissed off the CCP so hard that the developers had to go all-in on this censorship. The game was also going to have a sponsorship deal with a Chinese state mail company (I think it was China Post), that started this whole mess.

Or is Anita Sarkessian also working to destroy the Chinese gaming industry too, in the name of "protecting women, Womxn, Women+, and children"?
 
Última edición:
Apparently, the game pissed off the CCP so hard that the developers had to go all-in on this censorship. The game was also going to have a sponsorship deal with a Chinese state mail company (I think it was China Post), that started this whole mess.

Or is Anita Sarkessian also working to destroy the Chinese gaming industry too, in the name of "protecting women, Womxn, Women+, and children"?
Chinese feminists complained to the CCP about objectification and the usual things, and since the company isn't one of the big ones, they had to bend the knee and self-censor.

This is completely different to LADS, which contains animated sex scenes sans penetration, but is still allowed to continue because it brings in more money in yearly revenue than the entire Hoyoverse.
 
How insane are they compared to Korean and Western feminists?
To understand the different strains of feminism in these countries you need to first understand the relationship feminists have with power.

In the Western world, the current egalitarian system allows women to air out their grievances and demands, but they work within the framework of the current culture. That means, they can't be completely honest about their grievances because it will go against liberal values, so they have to either make blanket statements (all men are pigs), or find targets that fill some of the criteria and are socially acceptable targets (old white men). Someone versed in how women think understands that they don't actually mean all men or old white men, but they can't be open about it due to fear of repercussions. Of course there are also crazies who believe these things unironically, but they represent a small part of the whole thing.

In Korea, feminists are loud and obnoxious, but they don't really have any social power. Korean society is structured around Confucian ideas of the family, where women are just above children in the hierarchy, under men, who are under the elders. During the Japanese invasion in WW2, Koreans doubled down on their Confucian ideals and integrated them as the cornerstone of their society, as opposed to the Japanese who had developed a western-inspired Shintoism. All this to say that they are probably the least capable of applying pressure to Korean society, no matter how much of a noise they make.

China on the other hand has the opposite problem of Korea. The cultural revolution turned everything upside down. Confucianism was gone, women are equal to men in all things, in line with Communist principles. That is, in all things that don't have a direct impact on the state. They fill the middle manager position in Chinese society. Whereas the worker and the CEO are both men, the administration at the lower levels is in their hands. China is also facing an unprecedented demographics crisis, with roughly 50 Million more men than women, meaning that women are put at a higher value (Everyone wants to get married and have children, no?). What this effectively means is that they can exert pressure, be it as an ideological bloc, or as someone's girlfriend/wife, and the men who actually hold the power are forced to listen to them and cave in to some of their demands. They are not necessarily insane or radical, but they live in a society where their words have more weight than in the West or Korea.
 
Since Gacha Games usually have a lifespan of a 1-3 (?) years, how do players feel about the inevitable EoS to them, namely in East Asian countries like China and Japan? Do they just accept that their Gacha will expire eventually and just continue to pay and play them as one is replaced by the other? With Japanese being heavily anti-piracy, they would hate any attempt to preserve such games. I also notice that Gacha Games don't seem to be mentioned with the Stop Killing Games movement. Does that means that an SKG movement wouldn't get attention in East Asian countries, and wouldn't get attention for Gacha Games?
 
Since Gacha Games usually have a lifespan of a 1-3 (?) years, how do players feel about the inevitable EoS to them, namely in East Asian countries like China and Japan? Do they just accept that their Gacha will expire eventually and just continue to pay and play them as one is replaced by the other?

That's simple. You don't invest in anything other than the biggest gachas.

The business practices of Japanese gacha companies poisoned the customer's behaviors. Especially Square Enix which was infamous for churning out quick cashgrab gachas only to EOS them a couple years later. When Arknights launched, Hypergryph and Yostar poured a LOT of money into an extremely aggressive and expensive marketing campaign trying to persuade people that their game was big and that it was therefore safe to invest in it, and it worked. Mihoyo likewise did the same thing with Genshin and continued to have a gargantuan marketing budget for advertising and conventions even years after launch and people had stopped joining Genshin en masse: it is to help instill confidence into the current players and make them feel that they were right for sticking with Genshin and should continue to do so.

Mihoyo has also continued to maintain the service for Honkai Impact 3rd even after its story ended, so that instills confidence in people that Genshin/HSR/ZZZ/etc will still be around a long time and that it's okay to spend on them. That is the rationale for why FF11 and GW1 are still operating even though their sequels have released and most of the development efforts are in that.

This has made it difficult for new gachas to break in that do not have an enormous marketing budget, and thus struggle to instill confidence in people that it's going to stick around and not just evaporate quickly. Tribe Nine had the production values but not the marketing budget and EOSed within a year of launch. Though that also has to do with how the gacha space is no longer a blue ocean and the customer pool is not growing anymore, so everybody is fighting over the same customers. Mihoyo created two more gachas not to grab new customers but to try to better retain their current customers. When HSR released, Genshin's revenue halved with half of that going to HSR, but regardless of which game they are playing it still all goes to Mihoyo in the end instead of a different company.


With Japanese being heavily anti-piracy, they would hate any attempt to preserve such games. I also notice that Gacha Games don't seem to be mentioned with the Stop Killing Games movement. Does that means that an SKG movement wouldn't get attention in East Asian countries, and wouldn't get attention for Gacha Games?

When the Sakura Revolution gacha EOSed, players did preserve the game assets like the images and the music tracks and uploaded them to the internet archive, though the code is rather difficult since game actions are resolved on the company servers which players do not have access to.

The Tribe Nine devs published the script for the rest of the story patches they had written after the game EOSed.

There have also been a couple gachas that have been repackaged as offline box purchase games. Octopath Champions of the Continent launched a few months ago on Steam as Octopath Traveller Zero. The Atelier Reselrina gacha.

There are offline private server emulators for Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail where you can just get everything for free, though they are usually several patches behind the current official version. Genshin and HSR are the most popular gachas, though. Other gachas are less likely to have enough people with the skills and interest and time available to attempt that.

As for the SKG movement, gachas are overall ignored/not recognized by the mainstream "gamer" audience that typically dominates the conversation in the West. Anime games have also always been on treated as that thing on the periphery, especially after the games journalists ostracized anime and JRPGs in the 2000s. The two spheres of mainstream gaming and anime/JRPGs/VNs/gachas/etc don't overlap and talk to each other that much.
 
As for the SKG movement, gachas are overall ignored/not recognized by the mainstream "gamer" audience that typically dominates the conversation in the West. Anime games have also always been on treated as that thing on the periphery, especially after the games journalists ostracized anime and JRPGs in the 2000s. The two spheres of mainstream gaming and anime/JRPGs/VNs/gachas/etc don't overlap and talk to each other that much.

So anime/gacha games would be even less likely to support SKG, compared to even Concordverse games, since Concord (and later Highguard) wasn't brought up at all when SKG started? Granted, Concord players did attempt to create private servers for the game, but Sony DMCA'd them.
 
So anime/gacha games would be even less likely to support SKG, compared to even Concordverse games, since Concord (and later Highguard) wasn't brought up at all when SKG started? Granted, Concord players did attempt to create private servers for the game, but Sony DMCA'd them.

What exactly do you mean by "anime/gacha games would be even less likely to support SKG"? Are you referring to the Asian companies that produce the anime gacha games, or the fandoms?


If you mean by the companies, then it depends on the company. Four of the five major Chinese gacha game companies (Mihoyo, Hypergryph, Manuuu, Bluepoch) are privately owned (Tencent now owns the majority of Kuro Games), and the gachas they are run are their own wholly original IPs owned by that company. So it is really up to the company owners if they want to keep the lights running or to do an offline rerelease, and the company owners are very keyed into trying to please their fans. I could easily imagine them trying to make sure that people could keep playing Arknights or Reverse 1999 if the servers were shut down, though more than likely they would just try to keep the lights on indefinitely. Mihoyo and Hypergryph are already fabulously wealthy having made their gacha billions so that's not a question for them.

This is more of a problem with the Japanese gachas, which are usually not original IPs but are licensed, usually based on anime that are already owned by not one by several different companies due to the production committee model. You have Kadokawa or Shounen Jump who owns the original manga or light novel, you have the music company, etc. Lots of companies have partial ownership, except the actual animation studio. They almost never have any ownership. So you would have to get authorization not from one otaku but also from several boomer suits who don't care about fans and just making a quick buck or his next quarterly report. Octopath and Atelier did not originate as animes but as videogames, so that reduces the number of actors involved who all have to agree.

So you're having to go up against a corporate buercracy, and I just don't see them wanting to bother with this if it does not seem clearly profitable on paper. And they are not going to officially endorse private servers, so it would be up to invidiual game devs if they want to risk leaking files. A former Shadow of the Colossus dev was secretly leaking dev files until that caught some attention, and then he went dark for fear of repercussions, and that was a game from 20 years ago you would think no suits would care about anymore.



If you mean the fandoms, then they would only care about preserving a handful of games, usually the big Chinese ones, and maybe a couple of the bigger original Japanese ones like Granblue or F/GO. You don't see people expressing nostalgia over the game experience of licensed cashgrab gachas like dragonball or most of the old Final Fantasy gachas.

Another major issue is the gameplay, which is not uniformly great. Exploration tends to be fun, the event minigames are usually very entertaining, etc. But the combat is almost always a mixed bag. There are a lot of reasons for it, but in short the traditional gacha monetization model (aka your game is being kept afloat by the 1% of rich people who will casually throw thousands of dollars at you, you have to reward them somehow, usually by letting them pull for dupes that makes their characters way stronger), the live service mentality (they desperately want to habituate people and keep them logging in and thinking about the game every day, so there are stamina and RNG relic substant systems that comprise the gameplay progression), and having to be playable on phones (restricts how many buttons can be placed onscreen and thus how many abilities characters can have and the depth of the gameplay) constrains the gameplay experience. Aside from maybe ZZZ, the actual combat experience in these games is usually not as engaging as contemporary box purchase titles like Trails or Granblue Fantasy Relink. People usually like these games for the other aspects like the characters, the aesthetics, the soundtrack, the minigames, etc.

So that would somewhat diminish interest in preserving the games, though for the big ones they are overall of high enough quality that there would be a lot of sorrow if they stopped being available. But without server access, for a lot of them there would be just no hope for fans to preserve them on their own. Granblue Fantasy for example does not run on an app but in your web browser and CyGames' backend servers handle almost everything, sending you the images and voicelines to your web browser rather than having them download them to your phone or computer. If the plug were pulled, how do fans possibly make an offline version of that? Etc.
 
Since Gacha Games usually have a lifespan of a 1-3 (?) years, how do players feel about the inevitable EoS to them, namely in East Asian countries like China and Japan? Do they just accept that their Gacha will expire eventually and just continue to pay and play them as one is replaced by the other? With Japanese being heavily anti-piracy, they would hate any attempt to preserve such games. I also notice that Gacha Games don't seem to be mentioned with the Stop Killing Games movement. Does that means that an SKG movement wouldn't get attention in East Asian countries, and wouldn't get attention for Gacha Games?
From my knowledge of Asian mindset, I think that they'll actively be against the game preservation because of how much money they sunk into it. They'd rather the game be wiped from the earth than any Nigger downloading a pirated copy and owning their waifus that they paid money for.

And you can forget those companies listening to western fans.

That's simple. You don't invest in anything other than the biggest gachas.
It's the safe way but people still try new gachas to get a new story and a new community since the old games eventually shit themselves in either story or power creep but will still be kept afloat by whales who spent too much to let go.

The business practices of Japanese gacha companies poisoned the customer's behaviors. Especially Square Enix which was infamous for churning out quick cashgrab gachas only to EOS them a couple years later. When Arknights launched, Hypergryph and Yostar poured a LOT of money into an extremely aggressive and expensive marketing campaign trying to persuade people that their game was big and that it was therefore safe to invest in it, and it worked. Mihoyo likewise did the same thing with Genshin and continued to have a gargantuan marketing budget for advertising and conventions even years after launch and people had stopped joining Genshin en masse: it is to help instill confidence into the current players and make them feel that they were right for sticking with Genshin and should continue to do so.
Japanese gacha died because they refused to innovate (and still does). They had billions of dollars of revenue but decided to keep sticking to a png game format because it's cheap. So when the chinks released Genshin with actual fucking graphics, the customers went to the game that could actually be actively played.
 
They had billions of dollars of revenue but decided to keep sticking to a png game format because it's cheap.

The Japanese did sink $30 million USD into developing and marketing a 3D gacha called Sakura Wars Kakumei in 2020. But it came out 3 months after Genshin had already come out and vacuumed up the market and dwarfed Kakumei's marketing.
 
The Japanese did sink $30 million USD into developing and marketing a 3D gacha called Sakura Wars Kakumei in 2020. But it came out 3 months after Genshin had already come out and vacuumed up the market and dwarfed Kakumei's marketing.
Sega fucking up their IPs is per the norm, but there are plenty of other companies there that could have beat Genshin. That being said, Japanese gamers ate up any shit the big companies released no matter how low effort it was. But imagine a world where Granblue was an actual game.
 
Sega fucking up their IPs is per the norm, but there are plenty of other companies there that could have beat Genshin. That being said, Japanese gamers ate up any shit the big companies released no matter how low effort it was. But imagine a world where Granblue was an actual game.

Relink is about the closest thing you'll ever get to that, and it's honestly very good, but Cygames knows that people forking over money for some $30 barely-animated jpegs nets a lot more than a traditional video game.

It's a shame, really. They already have more than enough story content to convert into a real game within the first 5 years of its existence.
 
From my knowledge of Asian mindset, I think that they'll actively be against the game preservation because of how much money they sunk into it. They'd rather the game be wiped from the earth than any Nigger downloading a pirated copy and owning their waifus that they paid money for.

And you can forget those companies listening to western fans.

Japanese fans did actually report an attempted Gacha Game revival project for Nier Reincarnation to Square Enix for copyright infringement:

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Also, about the part where they'll ignore Western fans, would Western fans mass reporting those Gacha companies to payment processors to try to debank them if they don't preserve EOS'd games make them change their minds, or would they just do the same thing like DLSite and DMM and disallow non-Japanese users from using Visa and MasterCard, or block non-Japanese players from playing their games outright, unless you use a VPN?

And didn't the Mihoyo CEO attempted stabbing incident occur because Honkai Star Rail (I think) had an event for a fanservice outfit that wasn't available for Chinese players, which led to that event being cancelled for other regions too? Gacha fans are insane fuckers indeed.
 
Also, about the part where they'll ignore Western fans, would Western fans mass reporting those Gacha companies to payment processors to try to debank them if they don't preserve EOS'd games make them change their minds, or would they just do the same thing like DLSite and DMM and disallow non-Japanese users from using Visa and MasterCard, or block non-Japanese players from playing their games outright, unless you use a VPN?
I don't think they would ever accept revivals, because they need you spending money in their new games now. As far as it goes in the west, gacha games didn't exist to the normie until Genshin in ~2020, I vividly remember it coming out on Ps4 and being bamboozled that it was free, entirely new concept to me. It hasn't been that long and states everywhere are cracking down hard on online gambling. We will all be connecting via VPN with crypto as the payment method by the 2030s I estimate
 
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