Mobile Games, Gacha, Android/IOS games

[jebacdrkac]

I found Ninja Arashi 1 & 2 to be pretty good time wasters

[Finarfin]

"Honkai Star Rail"

You and your weeb ****. What the hell does that even mean? Only two of those are real words and neither one has any meaning when used together with the other two.

This requires a little bit of a history lesson.

► A short history of Mihoyo

Liu Wei, Cai Haoyu, and Lu Yuhao. Now billionaires.

Mihoyo was founded by three college students: Liu Wei (aka Da Wei), Cai Haoyu, and Luo Yuhao. They named their first game engine Misato, after the character from Evangelion. They formed a company and decided to name it Hoyo, taken from the first letters of Haoyu and Yuhao's names. The O was added because many famous tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo had Os in their name. When they went to register their company, they found out Hoyo had already been taken, so they added Mi to it and named it Mihoyo.


Misato from Evangelion


Their first game was FlyMe2theMoon, named after the Evangelion ending song. Unfortunately, it was a buy to play game in China where piracy was rampant (for various reasons, namely that the CCP would alternate between banning and legalizing foreign consoles, and restricted the number of foreign games that could be published in China each year. So Chinese gamers had become accustomed to simply sidestepping this nonsense and just pirating), so it did not help Mihoyo very much. So their next game, Houkai Gakuen (themed after Highschool of the Dead) was made into a live service game so that it could not be pirated (pretty much what almost all of the other Chinese game devs were doing). Houkai in Japanese means "collapse" or "decay", and Gakuen means "academy" (because the devs were still students). The titular Houkai are the enemy mobs you fight and supernatural in nature, causing apocalypses. The game did well.




Mihoyo reinvested their money and made a better sequel, Houkai Gakuen 2, which did better. Then they reinvested their money again and made an even better game named Honkai Impact 3rd. Mihoyo dropped the Gakuen because they weren't students anymore. HI3 was Mihoyo's darling game, where they created characters that they fell in love with and have been creating rehashes/expies of those characters for their next games Genshin and HSR. Raiden Shogun and Yae Miko from Genshin, Acheron and Phainon from HSR, etc, are rehashes/expies/alternate universe versions of HI3 characters. Houkai was changed to Honkai. The Impact part is another Evangelion reference (that show takes place in the aftermath of a calamity called Second Impact, which was caused by supernatural beings and wiped out most of the Earth, and the imminent threat of a Third Impact).








Mihoyo's next game was Genshin Impact. Genshin means "original god". The immdiete plot of each arc has you interact with the "god" of that arc's region, called an Archon, and there is a greater overarching plot about overthrowing gods in the floating island of Celestia who are responsible for the state of the Genshin world. And Mihoyo carried over the "Impact" name from HI3 to retain continuity.

Then they made a fourth Houkai/Honkai game, Honkai Star Rail. Same story revolving around supernatural calamities (this time called Stellarons instead of Houkai). The "Star Rail" part refers to the main party's vehicle, the Astral Express (inspired by the Galaxy Express 999 anime). It appears that by default, most vessels in the HSR setting are incapable of interstellar travel. The Astral Express was created by a man who ascended and became a god named Akivili to discover new worlds, and open up tears in the fabric of space that allow people who follow in the Express' wake to travel to other worlds. This path is called the Star Rail. The first few arcs have you retrace the Astral Express' path to established worlds, but the current arc has you go off grid into uncharted territory to establish the Star Rail there.






In the background codex lore, Genshin and HSR actually all take place in the same overall universe of the Imaginary Tree in HI3. Alternate universe/rehashes of HI3 characters appear in Genshin and HSR. HSR is also somewhat of a sequel to HI3, with an actual character (Welt) from HI3 having travelled across universes to HSR after the ending of HI3.

Mihoyo's latest game, Zenless Zone Zero, has been declared by Mihoyo to have zero connection to the Honkaiverse whatsoever. No similar names, no character rehashes/expies, no shared far background setting of the Imaginary Tree, etc. They do share the same overall story idea of the game taking place in the wake of an apocalypse.

[Valter]

"Honkai Star Rail"

You and your weeb ****. What the hell does that even mean? Only two of those are real words and neither one has any meaning when used together with the other two.

This requires a little bit of a history lesson.

► A short history of Mihoyo

Liu Wei, Cai Haoyu, and Lu Yuhao. Now billionaires.

Mihoyo was founded by three college students: Liu Wei (aka Da Wei), Cai Haoyu, and Luo Yuhao. They named their first game engine Misato, after the character from Evangelion. They formed a company and decided to name it Hoyo, taken from the first letters of Haoyu and Yuhao's names. The O was added because many famous tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo had Os in their name. When they went to register their company, they found out Hoyo had already been taken, so they added Mi to it and named it Mihoyo.


Misato from Evangelion


Their first game was FlyMe2theMoon, named after the Evangelion ending song. Unfortunately, it was a buy to play game in China where piracy was rampant (for various reasons, namely that the CCP would alternate between banning and legalizing foreign consoles, and restricted the number of foreign games that could be published in China each year. So Chinese gamers had become accustomed to simply sidestepping this nonsense and just pirating), so it did not help Mihoyo very much. So their next game, Houkai Gakuen (themed after Highschool of the Dead) was made into a live service game so that it could not be pirated (pretty much what almost all of the other Chinese game devs were doing). Houkai in Japanese means "collapse" or "decay", and Gakuen means "academy" (because the devs were still students). The titular Houkai are the enemy mobs you fight and supernatural in nature, causing apocalypses. The game did well.




Mihoyo reinvested their money and made a better sequel, Houkai Gakuen 2, which did better. Then they reinvested their money again and made an even better game named Honkai Impact 3rd. Mihoyo dropped the Gakuen because they weren't students anymore. HI3 was Mihoyo's darling game, where they created characters that they fell in love with and have been creating rehashes/expies of those characters for their next games Genshin and HSR. Raiden Shogun and Yae Miko from Genshin, Acheron and Phainon from HSR, etc, are rehashes/expies/alternate universe versions of HI3 characters. Houkai was changed to Honkai. The Impact part is another Evangelion reference (that show takes place in the aftermath of a calamity called Second Impact, which was caused by supernatural beings and wiped out most of the Earth, and the imminent threat of a Third Impact).








Mihoyo's next game was Genshin Impact. Genshin means "original god". The immdiete plot of each arc has you interact with the "god" of that arc's region, called an Archon, and there is a greater overarching plot about overthrowing gods in the floating island of Celestia who are responsible for the state of the Genshin world. And Mihoyo carried over the "Impact" name from HI3 to retain continuity.

Then they made a fourth Houkai/Honkai game, Honkai Star Rail. Same story revolving around supernatural calamities (this time called Stellarons instead of Houkai). The "Star Rail" part refers to the main party's vehicle, the Astral Express (inspired by the Galaxy Express 999 anime). It appears that by default, most vessels in the HSR setting are incapable of interstellar travel. The Astral Express was created by a man who ascended and became a god named Akivili to discover new worlds, and open up tears in the fabric of space that allow people who follow in the Express' wake to travel to other worlds. This path is called the Star Rail. The first few arcs have you retrace the Astral Express' path to established worlds, but the current arc has you go off grid into uncharted territory to establish the Star Rail there.






In the background codex lore, Genshin and HSR actually all take place in the same overall universe of the Imaginary Tree in HI3. Alternate universe/rehashes of HI3 characters appear in Genshin and HSR. HSR is also somewhat of a sequel to HI3, with an actual character (Welt) from HI3 having travelled across universes to HSR after the ending of HI3.

Mihoyo's latest game, Zenless Zone Zero, has been declared by Mihoyo to have zero connection to the Honkaiverse whatsoever. No similar names, no character rehashes/expies, no shared far background setting of the Imaginary Tree, etc. They do share the same overall story idea of the game taking place in the wake of an apocalypse.

Never watched Evangelion so had no idea about all the inspiration they took from it Interesting that it's the only collab Hoyo has ever agreed to with another franchise

[Val the Moofia Boss]

You and your weeb ****. What the hell does that even mean? Only two of those are real words and neither one has any meaning when used together with the other two.

This requires a little bit of a history lesson.

► A short history of Mihoyo

Liu Wei, Cai Haoyu, and Lu Yuhao. Now billionaires.

Mihoyo was founded by three college students: Liu Wei (aka Da Wei), Cai Haoyu, and Luo Yuhao. They named their first game engine Misato, after the character from Evangelion. They formed a company and decided to name it Hoyo, taken from the first letters of Haoyu and Yuhao's names. The O was added because many famous tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo had Os in their name. When they went to register their company, they found out Hoyo had already been taken, so they added Mi to it and named it Mihoyo.


Misato from Evangelion


Their first game was FlyMe2theMoon, named after the Evangelion ending song. Unfortunately, it was a buy to play game in China where piracy was rampant (for various reasons, namely that the CCP would alternate between banning and legalizing foreign consoles, and restricted the number of foreign games that could be published in China each year. So Chinese gamers had become accustomed to simply sidestepping this nonsense and just pirating), so it did not help Mihoyo very much. So their next game, Houkai Gakuen (themed after Highschool of the Dead) was made into a live service game so that it could not be pirated (pretty much what almost all of the other Chinese game devs were doing). Houkai in Japanese means "collapse" or "decay", and Gakuen means "academy" (because the devs were still students). The titular Houkai are the enemy mobs you fight and supernatural in nature, causing apocalypses. The game did well.




Mihoyo reinvested their money and made a better sequel, Houkai Gakuen 2, which did better. Then they reinvested their money again and made an even better game named Honkai Impact 3rd. Mihoyo dropped the Gakuen because they weren't students anymore. HI3 was Mihoyo's darling game, where they created characters that they fell in love with and have been creating rehashes/expies of those characters for their next games Genshin and HSR. Raiden Shogun and Yae Miko from Genshin, Acheron and Phainon from HSR, etc, are rehashes/expies/alternate universe versions of HI3 characters. Houkai was changed to Honkai. The Impact part is another Evangelion reference (that show takes place in the aftermath of a calamity called Second Impact, which was caused by supernatural beings and wiped out most of the Earth, and the imminent threat of a Third Impact).








Mihoyo's next game was Genshin Impact. Genshin means "original god". The immdiete plot of each arc has you interact with the "god" of that arc's region, called an Archon, and there is a greater overarching plot about overthrowing gods in the floating island of Celestia who are responsible for the state of the Genshin world. And Mihoyo carried over the "Impact" name from HI3 to retain continuity.

Then they made a fourth Houkai/Honkai game, Honkai Star Rail. Same story revolving around supernatural calamities (this time called Stellarons instead of Houkai). The "Star Rail" part refers to the main party's vehicle, the Astral Express (inspired by the Galaxy Express 999 anime). It appears that by default, most vessels in the HSR setting are incapable of interstellar travel. The Astral Express was created by a man who ascended and became a god named Akivili to discover new worlds, and open up tears in the fabric of space that allow people who follow in the Express' wake to travel to other worlds. This path is called the Star Rail. The first few arcs have you retrace the Astral Express' path to established worlds, but the current arc has you go off grid into uncharted territory to establish the Star Rail there.






In the background codex lore, Genshin and HSR actually all take place in the same overall universe of the Imaginary Tree in HI3. Alternate universe/rehashes of HI3 characters appear in Genshin and HSR. HSR is also somewhat of a sequel to HI3, with an actual character (Welt) from HI3 having travelled across universes to HSR after the ending of HI3.

Mihoyo's latest game, Zenless Zone Zero, has been declared by Mihoyo to have zero connection to the Honkaiverse whatsoever. No similar names, no character rehashes/expies, no shared far background setting of the Imaginary Tree, etc. They do share the same overall story idea of the game taking place in the wake of an apocalypse.

Never watched Evangelion so had no idea about all the inspiration they took from it Interesting that it's the only collab Hoyo has ever agreed to with another franchise

They made the Sony robo dinosaur game protagonist into a playable character into Genshin. She was only available for a limited time and has never come back.




HSR recently just got a Fate/Stay Night collab a couple months ago. There is a story event around it if you have completed Penacony and some of the Penacony epilogue/Trailblaze Continuance missions. Archer is free to claim until 3.6. Saber has a banner you have to roll for and will last indefinitely. Pretty interesting since Fate already has a gacha game (Fate/Grand Order). Gacha games typically don't do collabs with each other.

[Valter]

This requires a little bit of a history lesson.

► A short history of Mihoyo

Liu Wei, Cai Haoyu, and Lu Yuhao. Now billionaires.

Mihoyo was founded by three college students: Liu Wei (aka Da Wei), Cai Haoyu, and Luo Yuhao. They named their first game engine Misato, after the character from Evangelion. They formed a company and decided to name it Hoyo, taken from the first letters of Haoyu and Yuhao's names. The O was added because many famous tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo had Os in their name. When they went to register their company, they found out Hoyo had already been taken, so they added Mi to it and named it Mihoyo.


Misato from Evangelion


Their first game was FlyMe2theMoon, named after the Evangelion ending song. Unfortunately, it was a buy to play game in China where piracy was rampant (for various reasons, namely that the CCP would alternate between banning and legalizing foreign consoles, and restricted the number of foreign games that could be published in China each year. So Chinese gamers had become accustomed to simply sidestepping this nonsense and just pirating), so it did not help Mihoyo very much. So their next game, Houkai Gakuen (themed after Highschool of the Dead) was made into a live service game so that it could not be pirated (pretty much what almost all of the other Chinese game devs were doing). Houkai in Japanese means "collapse" or "decay", and Gakuen means "academy" (because the devs were still students). The titular Houkai are the enemy mobs you fight and supernatural in nature, causing apocalypses. The game did well.




Mihoyo reinvested their money and made a better sequel, Houkai Gakuen 2, which did better. Then they reinvested their money again and made an even better game named Honkai Impact 3rd. Mihoyo dropped the Gakuen because they weren't students anymore. HI3 was Mihoyo's darling game, where they created characters that they fell in love with and have been creating rehashes/expies of those characters for their next games Genshin and HSR. Raiden Shogun and Yae Miko from Genshin, Acheron and Phainon from HSR, etc, are rehashes/expies/alternate universe versions of HI3 characters. Houkai was changed to Honkai. The Impact part is another Evangelion reference (that show takes place in the aftermath of a calamity called Second Impact, which was caused by supernatural beings and wiped out most of the Earth, and the imminent threat of a Third Impact).








Mihoyo's next game was Genshin Impact. Genshin means "original god". The immdiete plot of each arc has you interact with the "god" of that arc's region, called an Archon, and there is a greater overarching plot about overthrowing gods in the floating island of Celestia who are responsible for the state of the Genshin world. And Mihoyo carried over the "Impact" name from HI3 to retain continuity.

Then they made a fourth Houkai/Honkai game, Honkai Star Rail. Same story revolving around supernatural calamities (this time called Stellarons instead of Houkai). The "Star Rail" part refers to the main party's vehicle, the Astral Express (inspired by the Galaxy Express 999 anime). It appears that by default, most vessels in the HSR setting are incapable of interstellar travel. The Astral Express was created by a man who ascended and became a god named Akivili to discover new worlds, and open up tears in the fabric of space that allow people who follow in the Express' wake to travel to other worlds. This path is called the Star Rail. The first few arcs have you retrace the Astral Express' path to established worlds, but the current arc has you go off grid into uncharted territory to establish the Star Rail there.






In the background codex lore, Genshin and HSR actually all take place in the same overall universe of the Imaginary Tree in HI3. Alternate universe/rehashes of HI3 characters appear in Genshin and HSR. HSR is also somewhat of a sequel to HI3, with an actual character (Welt) from HI3 having travelled across universes to HSR after the ending of HI3.

Mihoyo's latest game, Zenless Zone Zero, has been declared by Mihoyo to have zero connection to the Honkaiverse whatsoever. No similar names, no character rehashes/expies, no shared far background setting of the Imaginary Tree, etc. They do share the same overall story idea of the game taking place in the wake of an apocalypse.

Never watched Evangelion so had no idea about all the inspiration they took from it Interesting that it's the only collab Hoyo has ever agreed to with another franchise

They made the Sony robo dinosaur game protagonist into a playable character into Genshin. She was only available for a limited time and has never come back.




HSR recently just got a Fate/Stay Night collab a couple months ago. There is a story event around it if you have completed Penacony and some of the Penacony epilogue/Trailblaze Continuance missions. Archer is free to claim until 3.6. Saber has a banner you have to roll for and will last indefinitely. Pretty interesting since Fate already has a gacha game (Fate/Grand Order). Gacha games typically don't do collabs with each other.

We don't talk about the Alloy cameo, in fact it never happened! Take your pills!

The Fate collab I had no idea about. If it's really recent it might be a combo to boost their recent Hollow Ataraxia Remaster release
Also is Grand Order still successful? It's been so long... if it's not as profitable as it used to be, it might be a better move to start doing collabs with bigger gachas.

[Finarfin]

It is weird how Genshin is the only game that hasn't had a collab in years. Just get some anime or game that fits.

[Kriptini]

"Honkai Star Rail"

You and your weeb ****. What the hell does that even mean? Only two of those are real words and neither one has any meaning when used together with the other two.

This requires a little bit of a history lesson.

► A short history of Mihoyo

Liu Wei, Cai Haoyu, and Lu Yuhao. Now billionaires.

Mihoyo was founded by three college students: Liu Wei (aka Da Wei), Cai Haoyu, and Luo Yuhao. They named their first game engine Misato, after the character from Evangelion. They formed a company and decided to name it Hoyo, taken from the first letters of Haoyu and Yuhao's names. The O was added because many famous tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo had Os in their name. When they went to register their company, they found out Hoyo had already been taken, so they added Mi to it and named it Mihoyo.


Misato from Evangelion


Their first game was FlyMe2theMoon, named after the Evangelion ending song. Unfortunately, it was a buy to play game in China where piracy was rampant (for various reasons, namely that the CCP would alternate between banning and legalizing foreign consoles, and restricted the number of foreign games that could be published in China each year. So Chinese gamers had become accustomed to simply sidestepping this nonsense and just pirating), so it did not help Mihoyo very much. So their next game, Houkai Gakuen (themed after Highschool of the Dead) was made into a live service game so that it could not be pirated (pretty much what almost all of the other Chinese game devs were doing). Houkai in Japanese means "collapse" or "decay", and Gakuen means "academy" (because the devs were still students). The titular Houkai are the enemy mobs you fight and supernatural in nature, causing apocalypses. The game did well.




Mihoyo reinvested their money and made a better sequel, Houkai Gakuen 2, which did better. Then they reinvested their money again and made an even better game named Honkai Impact 3rd. Mihoyo dropped the Gakuen because they weren't students anymore. HI3 was Mihoyo's darling game, where they created characters that they fell in love with and have been creating rehashes/expies of those characters for their next games Genshin and HSR. Raiden Shogun and Yae Miko from Genshin, Acheron and Phainon from HSR, etc, are rehashes/expies/alternate universe versions of HI3 characters. Houkai was changed to Honkai. The Impact part is another Evangelion reference (that show takes place in the aftermath of a calamity called Second Impact, which was caused by supernatural beings and wiped out most of the Earth, and the imminent threat of a Third Impact).








Mihoyo's next game was Genshin Impact. Genshin means "original god". The immdiete plot of each arc has you interact with the "god" of that arc's region, called an Archon, and there is a greater overarching plot about overthrowing gods in the floating island of Celestia who are responsible for the state of the Genshin world. And Mihoyo carried over the "Impact" name from HI3 to retain continuity.

Then they made a fourth Houkai/Honkai game, Honkai Star Rail. Same story revolving around supernatural calamities (this time called Stellarons instead of Houkai). The "Star Rail" part refers to the main party's vehicle, the Astral Express (inspired by the Galaxy Express 999 anime). It appears that by default, most vessels in the HSR setting are incapable of interstellar travel. The Astral Express was created by a man who ascended and became a god named Akivili to discover new worlds, and open up tears in the fabric of space that allow people who follow in the Express' wake to travel to other worlds. This path is called the Star Rail. The first few arcs have you retrace the Astral Express' path to established worlds, but the current arc has you go off grid into uncharted territory to establish the Star Rail there.






In the background codex lore, Genshin and HSR actually all take place in the same overall universe of the Imaginary Tree in HI3. Alternate universe/rehashes of HI3 characters appear in Genshin and HSR. HSR is also somewhat of a sequel to HI3, with an actual character (Welt) from HI3 having travelled across universes to HSR after the ending of HI3.

Mihoyo's latest game, Zenless Zone Zero, has been declared by Mihoyo to have zero connection to the Honkaiverse whatsoever. No similar names, no character rehashes/expies, no shared far background setting of the Imaginary Tree, etc. They do share the same overall story idea of the game taking place in the wake of an apocalypse.

Please sir, save some chromosomes for the rest of us!

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Also is Grand Order still successful? It's been so long... if it's not as profitable as it used to be, it might be a better move to start doing collabs with bigger gachas.

By the metrics we have, it is still very successful. Up in the top 10 mobile games according to Sensortower, and up there with GBF and Uma Musume as the biggest Japanese gacha game. Still raking in hundreds of millions of USD each year.


Sensortower rankings for July 2025


The thing about Sensortower rankings is that it does not have the complete picture, since they collect their data from the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. It does not track Samsung Galaxy App Store, Playstation store (according to a leaked report, Sony views Genshin as a tentpole for Playstation revenue, having made over a billion USD there within the first two years), Steam (WuWa got a Steam port last year), the Epic Games (Genshin also available there), or games that you do not access via an app store/console, etc. We know that Granblue Fantasy was tremendously successful in Japan, rivalled only by FGO and now succeeded by Cygames' newest gacha Uma Musume, but GBF is accessed through your web browser so Sensortower can't track sales there either. A lot of gachas also offer a direct download outside of an app store. Chinese users also don't download their games from Western appstores and instead use a Tencent app called YingYongBao, which SensorTower cannot track revenue on. And a lot of whales will buy gacha primogems via third party websites that offer discounts, and this activity may or may not be tracked. Also, gacha game popularity varies by region. IIRC WuWa is now more popular in the US than Genshin, but Genshin is far, far more popular than WuWa globally (China, then Southeast Asia and Japan, then the US). Whereas WuWa is only really popular in Korea and to a lesser extent, the US. FGO is mostly popular in Japan but not that much outside of it.

The main issue with FGO is that 1. it is not very popular globally like with these new 3D gachas that went mainstream (primarily due to the source material, the Fate/Stay Night VN, having been easily accessible and marketed outside of Japan until recently. So outside of overseas weebs hanging out fan translation forums, you had to have been Japanese to have known about it), and 2. it isn't able to continuously bring in lots of new people. Mihoyo's strategy is to have Genshin be marketed as family friendly and get people into Hoyo games via Genshin, and then when people grow older and want something else, there is HSR and ZZZ ready and waiting for them. Same reason why Pokemon succeeds is that even though us jaded old fans are dissatisfied, Pokemon is still able to get kids while they are young. With FGO and the other 2D gachas, it appears they are entering the same situation that WoW did where it's overall just the same aging playerbase.

It is weird how Genshin is the only game that hasn't had a collab in years. Just get some anime or game that fits.

I think it probably has to do with licensing issues. Japanese companies are notorious about licensing rights. IIRC the second Judgement game (Yakuza spinoff) for a long time wasn't able to get brought over here because the company that owned the rights to the main character's voice did not want his voice to be able to be heard on the internet (even though anyone could just record gameplay of Judgement on a console in Japan and upload it online). This has also been an issue with the 2D gacha game collabs where releases in other regions were delayed and one of the reasons was that they had to dig out the licensed collab stuff out of the code because it was not licensed to go outside of Japan. Genshin and HSR are multiplatform games with simultaneous global releases in many countries. So that's probably a dealbreaker for collabing with most anime stuff owned by Japanese companies that are still stuck in the past about this.

Non-anime stuff can be harder to fit in, not just because of aesthetic differences but also because there might not be as much overlap in fandom tastes. What non-anime properties would Genshin or HSR collab with? Star Wars? MCU? Harry Potter? Either of the two Avatar franchises? Well I guess ATLA might fit, but ATLA is not big and has more of a Firefly-esque cultfandom of vocal Millenials. Or maybe Hades? Is that big?

[Valter]

Also is Grand Order still successful? It's been so long... if it's not as profitable as it used to be, it might be a better move to start doing collabs with bigger gachas.

By the metrics we have, it is still very successful. Up in the top 10 mobile games according to Sensortower, and up there with GBF and Uma Musume as the biggest Japanese gacha game. Still raking in hundreds of millions of USD each year.


Sensortower rankings for July 2025


The thing about Sensortower rankings is that it does not have the complete picture, since they collect their data from the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. It does not track Samsung Galaxy App Store, Playstation store (according to a leaked report, Sony views Genshin as a tentpole for Playstation revenue, having made over a billion USD there within the first two years), Steam (WuWa got a Steam port last year), the Epic Games (Genshin also available there), or games that you do not access via an app store/console, etc. We know that Granblue Fantasy was tremendously successful in Japan, rivalled only by FGO and now succeeded by Cygames' newest gacha Uma Musume, but GBF is accessed through your web browser so Sensortower can't track sales there either. A lot of gachas also offer a direct download outside of an app store. Chinese users also don't download their games from Western appstores and instead use a Tencent app called YingYongBao, which SensorTower cannot track revenue on. And a lot of whales will buy gacha primogems via third party websites that offer discounts, and this activity may or may not be tracked. Also, gacha game popularity varies by region. IIRC WuWa is now more popular in the US than Genshin, but Genshin is far, far more popular than WuWa globally (China, then Southeast Asia and Japan, then the US). Whereas WuWa is only really popular in Korea and to a lesser extent, the US. FGO is mostly popular in Japan but not that much outside of it.

The main issue with FGO is that 1. it is not very popular globally like with these new 3D gachas that went mainstream (primarily due to the source material, the Fate/Stay Night VN, having been easily accessible and marketed outside of Japan until recently. So outside of overseas weebs hanging out fan translation forums, you had to have been Japanese to have known about it), and 2. it isn't able to continuously bring in lots of new people. Mihoyo's strategy is to have Genshin be marketed as family friendly and get people into Hoyo games via Genshin, and then when people grow older and want something else, there is HSR and ZZZ ready and waiting for them. Same reason why Pokemon succeeds is that even though us jaded old fans are dissatisfied, Pokemon is still able to get kids while they are young. With FGO and the other 2D gachas, it appears they are entering the same situation that WoW did where it's overall just the same aging playerbase.

It is weird how Genshin is the only game that hasn't had a collab in years. Just get some anime or game that fits.

I think it probably has to do with licensing issues. Japanese companies are notorious about licensing rights. IIRC the second Judgement game (Yakuza spinoff) for a long time wasn't able to get brought over here because the company that owned the rights to the main character's voice did not want his voice to be able to be heard on the internet (even though anyone could just record gameplay of Judgement on a console in Japan and upload it online). This has also been an issue with the 2D gacha game collabs where releases in other regions were delayed and one of the reasons was that they had to dig out the licensed collab stuff out of the code because it was not licensed to go outside of Japan. Genshin and HSR are multiplatform games with simultaneous global releases in many countries. So that's probably a dealbreaker for collabing with most anime stuff owned by Japanese companies that are still stuck in the past about this.

Non-anime stuff can be harder to fit in, not just because of aesthetic differences but also because there might not be as much overlap in fandom tastes. What non-anime properties would Genshin or HSR collab with? Star Wars? MCU? Harry Potter? Either of the two Avatar franchises? Well I guess ATLA might fit, but ATLA is not big and has more of a Firefly-esque cultfandom of vocal Millenials. Or maybe Hades? Is that big?

Yeah with that in mind it really does seem like TypeMoon is trying to reach a more global audience. I'm happy if this is the case since several of their products are/were japanese-only for a long time, like the Hollow Ataraxia VN or the Extra/CCC game.
As to what future collabs can be reached, I can see more animes getting in the spotlight. Even Blue Archive broke its streak of no collabs recently and accepted doing a Scientific Railgun event. As for Genshin, it might just be a matter of time now that HSR has done a collab. But these deals are always a give and take situation. If a franchise is too small, why would Hoyo bother advertising it? I'd assume they demand appropriate renumeration, and it can't be cheap to have your franchise advertised in the biggest gachas in the world.

[Finarfin]

Which Phone Emulator is good? BlueStacks?

[Valter]

Which Phone Emulator is good? BlueStacks?

Bluestacks 5, not the X version they're pimping out that's some cloud-gaming garbage. Tuning the settings is important to allow it full access to your processor's cores and your RAM amount. There's also an literal "turn off ads" setting

[Finarfin]

Which Phone Emulator is good? BlueStacks?

Bluestacks 5, not the X version they're pimping out that's some cloud-gaming garbage. Tuning the settings is important to allow it full access to your processor's cores and your RAM amount. There's also an literal "turn off ads" setting

Got it. I installed BlueStacks 5 and tuned some settings. Should be ready to check out Destiny Rising on the 28th.

[Demonic Fate]

Would Waydroid work? It should have GPU acceleration, and while I dumped Destiny 2 years ago, I still occasionally wish I could log in and fire a Riskrunner at mobs, if only Sony didn't block Linux users.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

A presentation still of the Pokemon-esque Mihoyo game has been leaked.

It's actually autochess...




Talk about misleading advertising. The announcement trailer did not lead me to believe that this would be autochess.




=====

EDIT: more stills

[methoxetamine]

I'm too lazy to make a new thread, forgive me, maybe this could apply to some games though. You guys see that Google is going to block sideloading on Android next year? I'm ******, **** those **** cocksuckers at Shitgle

https://archive.md/6y8wb

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I'm too lazy to make a new thread, forgive me, maybe this could apply to some games though. You guys see that Google is going to block sideloading on Android next year? I'm ******, **** those **** cocksuckers at Shitgle

https://archive.md/6y8wb

I wonder if it would be possible for there to be some sort of open sourced smartphone OS like Linux that is also able to have access to the Samsung Galaxy app store and Google Play Stores. Maybe spoofing or emulating an android OS to get past the verification like PC emulators of phones.

[Valter]

I'm too lazy to make a new thread, forgive me, maybe this could apply to some games though. You guys see that Google is going to block sideloading on Android next year? I'm ******, **** those **** cocksuckers at Shitgle

https://archive.md/6y8wb

Google is the antichrist, but be assured the righteous shall rise.

[Valter]

A presentation still of the Pokemon-esque Mihoyo game has been leaked.

It's actually autochess...




Talk about misleading advertising. The announcement trailer did not lead me to believe that this would be autochess.




=====

EDIT: more stills

So there is autochess and there is... riding your monsters? Maybe it's a mix with multiple game modes? Only time will tell

That said, I am so glad. Riot and its ****** faggotry faggy agenda pushing *** faggers pushing faggotry down every game they own have an absolute stranglehold on autochess, which I love. I will be jubilant if Hoyo comes through with their own autochess

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The official website is now up, and closed beta test signups are active.

https://hna.hoyoverse.com/en-us

A couple new trailers, including a gameplay trailer.






Looks like there will be other activities to do. You can visually customize a character.

The website shows characters partnered with creatures (called "Anima"), so I wonder if it will be like Pokemon Masters EX where you have to roll and the character and the Anima come together as an inseparable package deal, or if you can catch Anima somehow.




I like Mimoo the milk cartoon cat and Magisdrake the pelipper 18th century lawyer.

[Finarfin]

Those two Anima look pretty nice.

[Trickster]

Gacha shouldn't exist. All skins, characters, etc., should be available in game shops without that ****** casino.

[Finarfin]

Been playing Destiny Rising all day yesterday and gotta say it is quite fun. Using the MuMuPlayer from Netease and it runs very well. Almost as if it is a PC port. The devs did say they are interested in porting it to PC so hopefully it will happen soon because this could be the replacement Destiny 2 for people who are disappointed in Destiny 2.

[Finarfin]

[Kriptini]

I'm too lazy to make a new thread, forgive me, maybe this could apply to some games though. You guys see that Google is going to block sideloading on Android next year? I'm ******, **** those **** cocksuckers at Shitgle

https://archive.md/6y8wb

For clarification, this will not block sideloading, only anonymous sideloading. You will still be able to sideload signed packages, which is really only an issue if you're a pirate.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Gacha shouldn't exist. All skins, characters, etc., should be available in game shops without that ****** casino.

In today's industry, it would not be possible for a high production value serialized game like Genshin to exist and continue year after year if it were a box purchase game. That is fantasy economics. Take a look around at how the Western AAA box purchase model has been breaking apart for the last several years with flop after flop and studio closures. Black swan hits like Elden Ring and BG3 are the exception. Most games are not hits.

We know from Mihoyo president Cai Haoyu and one of the Genshin lawsuits that the initial development of the base game of Mondstadt + Liyue and 22 playable characters cost $100 million, for a simultaneous global cross platform release on PC, Playstation 4, Android, and iPhones. With the gacha model it took Mihoyo 2 weeks to recoup their initial costs. But annual development/operations (adding new content every 40 days, more events and quests, adding more patch lands like Dragonspine and characters, developing the expansion lands like Inazuma, etc) costs $200 million USD per year.

If each year of Genshin was sold as a box purchase game where your progression carries over from entry to entry (ie Inazuma 2021, Sumeru 2022, Fontaine 2023, Natlan 2024, etc), with each entry after the first one costing $200 million USD to produce and was sold for $60, then that becomes $40 Mihoyo gets after 30% platform fees. 200,000,000/40 = 5,000,000 copies need to be sold per game at $40 for that game to break even.

But you don't want to be breaking even. You want to be making enough profit to beat the stockmarket, because if you have all of these hundreds of millions of dollars and you are not reliably beating the stockmarket, then you mind as well just invest into that instead because the stockmarket is safer and nearly guaranteed. The annual stock market return is 10.5%.

Compound Interest Calculation: Future Value = 200,000,000 x (1.105)^2 = 244,205,000

ROI: = 244,205,000 - 200,000,000 = 44,205,000

Total Target Revenue: = 200,000,000 + 44,205,000 = 244,205,000

244,205,000/40 = 6,105,125 = 6.11 million copies sold at $40 each to reach revenue target

Look around. Is every Assassin's Creed entry selling 6 million copies at full price within the first few months before the deep discounting begins? And Square is consistently disappointed with the sales of their games. And those are established brand names, not new unknown quantities like Mihoyo was. And if Genshin was a $60 box purchase game, would anywhere near as many phone players be paying $60 for it? That would leave you with the Playstation and PC audiences, cutting your total sales. Also bear in mind that a huge part of Genshin's success was that it was available on phones and thus available to people in poorer or less developed countries outside of the US where people do not have gaming PCs or Playstations. And now the economy is getting worse off even in America as people are tightening their belts and spending less on entertainment.

The only thing like this hypothetical is the Trails series (annual serialized RPG series, anime), but the production values are not as fabulous. Trails does not get a brand new nation every year like Genshin. You get a new nation developed once every 4 to 5 years, and then the games in between add in a few extra new towns. A common complaint from Trails fans is that they spend too many hundred+ hour long games games in the same nation/towns. Trails does not have new content patches every 40 days. Trails is not voiced in four languages. Trails does not carry over all of your progression from game to game. Etc. How many millions is each Trails game selling within a few months of release before the discounting begins? So far, none. But Trails does not have global crossplatform release like Genshin does, and is not available on phones, so it is hard to compare (tl;dr Falcom has made a lot of mistakes like sticking to Playstation when Japanese JRPG players had long since abandoned it and gone to Switch. Falcom ignored promoting their games in the West and in China until very recently and missed the window of opportunity to get big there, etc).

Also bear in mind that people only have so much time and money to play games. Genshin had the first mover status of being far and away the highest production value of its kind in that genre with a global crossplatform launch and available on phones. In the five years since Genshin's release, only Mihoyo's next gacha game Honkai Star Rail has attained the same yearly revenue. After Genshin and HSR, the next highest earning 3D Asian gacha game in Wuthering Waves, which at best only makes a mere 30% of what Genshin/HSR does. (This is why there is skepticism about these other 3D Asian gachas coming up like ANANTA, Silver Palace, Azur Promilia, Ark Knights Endfield, etc).

[WhiteShark]

Gacha shouldn't exist. All skins, characters, etc., should be available in game shops without that ****** casino.

In today's industry, it would not be possible for a high production value serialized game like Genshin to exist and continue year after year if it were a box purchase game.
[snip]

I think he just meant that there should be a cash shop that allows direct purchases of the characters you want. Whether that would be financially viable compared to the lottery system, I don't know. I assume it at least wouldn't be as lucrative or they would be doing that instead.

[DecadeRiptide]

Hoeyo is making a Pokémon clone apparently. Would post the trailer but I'm on mobile and am lazy.

[methoxetamine]

I'm too lazy to make a new thread, forgive me, maybe this could apply to some games though. You guys see that Google is going to block sideloading on Android next year? I'm ******, **** those **** cocksuckers at Shitgle

https://archive.md/6y8wb

For clarification, this will not block sideloading, only anonymous sideloading. You will still be able to sideload signed packages, which is really only an issue if you're a pirate.

I only care about ReVanced. That is surely not going to be allowed

[rusty_shackleford]

I assume it at least wouldn't be as lucrative or they would be doing that instead.

biggest failure of economics is the assumption that everything is already optimized instead of just doing something that isn't broken so no reason to fix(optimize)

[WhiteShark]

I assume it at least wouldn't be as lucrative or they would be doing that instead.

biggest failure of economics is the assumption that everything is already optimized instead of just doing something that isn't broken so no reason to fix(optimize)

Granted, but in this particular case, cash shops have already been tried extensively, so it's reasonable to think that the dominance of lottery systems is because it is more profitable than cash shops. Maybe it varies from platform to platform based on their userbases.