Mobile Games, Gacha, Android/IOS games

[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)

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.

what if it's because asian countries have laws against cash shops but not against gambling

[WhiteShark]

what if it's because asian countries have laws against cash shops but not against gambling

You phrase that as though it were true, but it's definitely not true in Korea and Japan.

[rusty_shackleford]

what if it's because asian countries have laws against cash shops but not against gambling

You phrase that as though it were true, but it's definitely not true in Korea and Japan.

how do you know unless you're a nip lawyer with a wide understanding of nip game law?
for example, did you know online games sold in USA that have text or voice chat are now required to support disabled people and therefore have various forms of STT, TTS, etc.,? It's the reason a lot of newer games don't even have text chat.

[WhiteShark]

how do you know unless you're a nip lawyer with a wide understanding of nip game law?

I know because there are Japanese and Korean MMOs with cash shops.

[rusty_shackleford]

wait, isn't japan the country where if you buy a digital good and then later shut down you're required by law to reimburse the customer the price of the good?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

wait, isn't japan the country where if you buy a digital good and then later shut down you're required by law to reimburse the customer the price of the good?

Cheap 2D Japanese gacha games have been shutting down left and right in the post Genshin world. Just this week I think 3 or 4 announced their end of service. I have not heard any of them reimbursing the playerbases. The only major refund in a gacha game that I have heard of is that famous case when a Granblue Fantasy player spent $6,000 pulling for Andira but didn't get her, which became high profile and caused worries about government intervention. Cygames refunded the guy and implement the pity system so that if you pull enough times you are absolutely guaranteed to get the character you want, and all of the other gachas soon followed suit until Genshin redefined pity as a 50/50 chance to get the one you want, which has since then become the new standard.

[WhiteShark]

wait, isn't japan the country where if you buy a digital good and then later shut down you're required by law to reimburse the customer the price of the good?

I don't know if any country does that, but FFXIV has a cash shop, and I doubt Square Enix intends to reimburse anybody for their cosmetics purchases.

[rusty_shackleford]

wait, isn't japan the country where if you buy a digital good and then later shut down you're required by law to reimburse the customer the price of the good?

9xsq01zzz1zc1.png

@WhiteSquare completely, utterly, eternally btfo forever to NEVER EVER EVER recover

[WhiteShark]

wait, isn't japan the country where if you buy a digital good and then later shut down you're required by law to reimburse the customer the price of the good?

@WhiteSquare completely, utterly, eternally btfo forever to NEVER EVER EVER recover

So they make them refund virtual currency but not the things you buy with it. Ok. This proves that cash shops are legal in Japan, as I stated originally.

[Finarfin]

[rusty_shackleford]

What is this?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

The custom games editor aka Roblox mode for Genshin is coming soon.

I thought that sidequest about the novice adventurer was pretty neat.

[Finarfin]

What is this?

That one is Destiny Rising. Netease made a gacha but Destiny. It is in an alternative timeline.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Level 100 in Genshin has been announced (current cap for the past 5 years has been 90). At 90, you will need that character's special item called a Masterless Stellar Fortuna. This item can only be obtained by pulling a duplicate of a character after you have already C6ed that character (pulled a character and then pulled six more duplicates to unlock the rest of their effects/talents/abilities). You need one Stellar Fortuna to go from level 90 to 95, and then two more to reach 100. So, basically, you need to C9 a character, or pull them a total of 10 times to reach level 100.

So to acquire and raise a 5 star character to level 100, you will have to spend (assuming a worse case scenario where you lose every 50/50):

180 pulls for hard pity x $2 per pull x 10 copies = up to $3,600.




The Capturing Radiance system added last year means that you cannot lose three 50/50s in a row. So if it takes 10 copies to acquire and C9 a character, you are guaranteed to get the character within 1,530 pulls, so $3,060 at max. But that is only if you did not interrupt your Capturing Radiance by pulling for other characters. I think it was averaged out to 90 pulls per character over the long term. So it might take you only $1,800 to get a 5 star level 100 character. Or $7,200 for a full four man party of level 100s.

Lmao if this gets added to HSR and ZZZ. I wonder if Kuro Games will imitate this for WuWa, since they have been otherwise following the leader.

[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.

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

It's not about "allowed" vs. "disallowed," it's about whether or not someone signs the software package using their Android developer credentials, which typically include a legal first and last name and government-issued I.D.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Honkai Star Rail

I have finished the 3.0 base Amphoreus story and am now on patch 3.1. I think I'll be caught up before the Trails in the Sky remake launches on September 19th.

► Show Spoiler

The Amphoreus story has been... not awful. It is "better" relatively speaking that the last three main story arcs. You crash land on a planet and emerge from the wreckage of your train car in a dark, ruined world, which was a little atmospheric at first. You get introduced to the characters and the conflict in a timely manner. It is established pretty quickly that we are fighting against corrupted stonemen who are trying to wipe out the last surviving city state on this planet, and we then learn there is a head honcho of these forces so we set off to kill him. There has been no meandering around aimlessly with no tangible plot objective like with the first several hours of Xianzhou and Penacony. The Amphoreus characters so far have not been speaking in riddles or philosophizing, and stick to talking about actual tangible goals or stuff that actually happened recently. I also liked how Aglaea was not a suck up to the heroes and instead threatened to kill us in her interrogation, and then forbade us to talk about other worlds. However, the fundamental presentation issues persist.

The dinosaur caravans are neat.




The seat of power of Amphoreus being this huge bath area is novel. I also liked the waterfall curtains that seemlessly disguised the loading and unloading of areas.




I like the flute music that plays in the city of Okhema.



It is odd how Phainon, Castorice, Hyacine, and Anaxa do not dress like the townsfolk who were greek clothing. If Mihoyo was set on the Amphoreus playable characters looking like this, then they should have designed more townsfolk NPCs who look like them.

It does feel odd for this place to look like ancient Greece, but then everyone apparently has a smartphone and there is a twitter and an internet and people are recirculating photos of the other worlds that guy stole off of our camera. The greeks wearing derpy sunglasses and holding up smartphones during the Seal Slammers event was funny, but it is a little jarring in this serious main storyline.

It is bizzare how just at the end of the prior arc, we recruited Sunday into our main party, but then he does not go with us to Amphoreus. Welt and Himeko have also done very little over the course of the game thus far despite being a part of the central party. Hopefully the next arc will feature everyone more.


It would have been nice if when travelling to Nikador's fortress/Mydei's homeland, we got a map showing us where and how far we are traveling. I was confused because I thought that the dungeon was that fortress you saw right behind the central city of Okhema, in the area of the world that is still eternal day, so I was confused how we suddenly wound up in the Evernight with the sunlit parts of the world being out of sight.






The section where the camera pans and you see Mydei also running along the other chain was a pleasant surprise. It does feel ridiculous how much faster he ran, though.

The battle music with the heavy rattling woodwinds is neat.




I wish that the talking lion statue characters on the walls were animated. The cowardly gossiping lion in Okhema is pretty funny.




The dungeon puzzles and minigames are engaging enough. I like how tricky the shape imposition puzzle is.




I finally unlocked the pet class for the main character. The ultimate attack looks neat.






Aglaea's two animations are cool. Unfortunately, only two cool animations does not seem like good value when there are characters like Phainon, Hyacine, and Castorice who have more. Also, sadly the way the game works is that you can only use one four man party at a time. You only need one party for the vast majority of the game, so you just stash your three favorites in there + a healer. And then for the optional endgame stuff like Pure Fiction/Memory of Chaos, you need a second party, but characters are not really customizeable and have really narrow synergies. It is usually not effective to just grab any random character and drop them into a team. If you want to use Aglaea, then you have to get the other three characters who synergize with her, and those might not be characters you like. It's one of my frustrations with Mihoyo's game design.






Nikador had a cool model, being this thin bone mecha prophet. Though once again due to early exposure in Divergent Universe I thought he was going to be a standard enemy boss like I thought Hoolay was going to be, not a big bad.







The bartender event got a part 2. I liked how some of the less prominent or underexposed HSR characters got some screentime here. Except for Belobog. I guess it sucks having an entire arc's cast stuck on their planet because their civilization does not own any spaceships and they're too poor to afford tickets. This time the bartender event was about mixing magical drinks that can impose effects on people, which was neat.








The dog became a cosmic dark lord.

Wuthering Waves

► Show Spoiler

I saw a WuWa art by SWD3E2 of the new Mavuika clone. She has a large red griffon mount?!?! I booted up the game to try her out...

I press a button, and the griffon only appears for one second.



You can't ride around or fight on it like you can on Mavuika's motorbike. How do you rip off the OG game's $100 million redhead claymore wielding goddess of war and not copy the mount part?



The devs had ONE job!

Back to saving my asterites for the rumored Federation mech pilot character. Hopefully he stomps around in a mech for longer than a second.

Zenless Zone Zero

► Show Spoiler

New ZZZ character released, Seed. She is ostensibly a "mech" pilot character, but in actuality you spend at least half of the playtime as the girl on the scooter, and you are unimmersively instantly swapping between girl and mech form. Where does the mech come from? Out of thin air like Svarog apparently. Would have been much cooler if you spent all of the time in mech form, like Firefly. Also, yet another character design/presentation that makes it impossible to play this game on mobile.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

@Lhynn @SoLong @Breathe @Faceless_Sentinel and other HSR fans: I am finishing up an exhaustive review of Honkai Star Rail. Is there anything you think I should cover? So far I have focused on general visuals (character designs and variety, animations both in and out of battle, environment art, UI, music), the story (namely the wonky presentation and scene writing and stilted cutscenes), solid PC performance, the shortcomings of the 4 man party system with no character customization which leads to rigid parties, the costs of the game, and I think that has been it.

[Valter]

@Lhynn @SoLong @Breathe @Faceless_Sentinel and other HSR fans: I am finishing up an exhaustive review of Honkai Star Rail. Is there anything you think I should cover? So far I have focused on general visuals (character designs and variety, animations both in and out of battle, environment art, UI, music), the story (namely the wonky presentation and scene writing and stilted cutscenes), solid PC performance, the shortcomings of the 4 man party system with no character customization which leads to rigid parties, the costs of the game, and I think that has been it.

Is the combat still shallow as a pond? I remember the very limited amount of skills kinda bored me after a while

[Finarfin]

HSR mainly has the 3-4 skills, you just do combine different characters to make more damage and extend how often you can attack iirc

[Val the Moofia Boss]

This year they have introduced two units with more skills than usual (Castorice gets three new buttons when she presses her ult to summon the dragon) and Phainon (gains three new buttons when he pops ult to transform). Everyone else pretty much is stuck at 2 or sometimes 3 buttons and/or a passive followup attack.

[SoLong]

@Lhynn @SoLong @Breathe @Faceless_Sentinel and other HSR fans: I am finishing up an exhaustive review of Honkai Star Rail. Is there anything you think I should cover? So far I have focused on general visuals (character designs and variety, animations both in and out of battle, environment art, UI, music), the story (namely the wonky presentation and scene writing and stilted cutscenes), solid PC performance, the shortcomings of the 4 man party system with no character customization which leads to rigid parties, the costs of the game, and I think that has been it.

This seems pretty comprehensive. Personally I'm most annoyed by the uneven story writing and I suspect that this was caused by rotating writers. Unfortunately figuring out if I'm right would require insider knowledge on the company, so I don't think you could figure this out either.

There is a tiny additional detail that deserves mentioning: the quality of character models on the PC is now being restrained by the fact that HSR is also supposed to run on mobile platforms. The most recent content lets certain characters summon additional allies (memosprites) and the HSR devs had to simplify their models and/or keep them offscreen because most mobile phones could no longer handle them.

I'm not sure if that's a point of criticism (any multi-platform games inevitably cling to the lowest common denominator performance wise) but I think it's worth mentioning that the experience on PC is degraded due to it also being a mobile game.

(Also, you mentioned me in your review and I got a notification about it, but I can't actually view the topic. Is that intended?)

[Kalarion]

...

(Also, you mentioned me in your review and I got a notification about it, but I can't actually view the topic. Is that intended?)

Reviews in submission for editing can't be accessed by anyone but the man writing the review and the editorial team. That's interesting, I didn't think his notification would even reach you.

[SoLong]

...

(Also, you mentioned me in your review and I got a notification about it, but I can't actually view the topic. Is that intended?)

Reviews in submission for editing can't be accessed by anyone but the man writing the review and the editorial team. That's interesting, I didn't think his notification would even reach you.

I assume that's unintentional then. I guess we need to ask someone who actually knows the whole under-the-hood of the website.

@rusty_shackleford

Is it normal that I get mentions from non-public parts of the website?

[Val the Moofia Boss]

There is a tiny additional detail that deserves mentioning: the quality of character models on the PC is now being restrained by the fact that HSR is also supposed to run on mobile platforms. The most recent content lets certain characters summon additional allies (memosprites) and the HSR devs had to simplify their models and/or keep them offscreen because most mobile phones could no longer handle them.

I'm not sure if that's a point of criticism (any multi-platform games inevitably cling to the lowest common denominator performance wise) but I think it's worth mentioning that the experience on PC is degraded due to it also being a mobile game.

Yeah I saw that in the dev stream about that Aglaea's memosprite. It was envisioned as having a head, but apparently that was deemed to have taken up too much performance so we got the headless Garmentmaker, which sounds a little odd. I think they were considering a hypothetical scenario in which you could potentially have 4 Remembrance characters with 4 memosprites with that polygon count. It might also be why Castorice's dragon takes up a "backline" slot which might become mutually exclusive with other future high poly models deemed to be backline, so you can't have something like 4 Castorices with 4 dragons that detailed.




I have heard a theory that the territory/reality marble mechanic was conceived not just to give the dragon and the super sayian Phainon more room for their apocalyptic attacks so that you don't have flying dragons or falling moons clipping through Penacony battle scene ceilings, but also to reduce the polygon count. I think the reality marbles are cool and are a good way of explaining away the apocalyptic attack animations don't destroy the surrounding environment.

I personally have never felt that HSR on PC has been "hamstrung" or "degraded" by having to also be able to run on phones. The game looks gorgeous, and so far the plots have been written to be about small parties. Also, because the game is not open world but is instead separate district levels, the districts of places like Belobog, Xianzhou, Penacony, Okhema, etc, look much more grandiose than the immersion breakingly small Genshin cities of Monstadt, Liyue, Fontaine, etc. It is Genshin where the phone restriction became conspicuous because Inazuma is about a civil war and Inazuma, and the Natlan story is about a total war between Natlan and the Abyss. But then ingame you just see twenty guys on a beach and then numbers labelled on a map saying that there are supposed to be thousands of people involved. That is odd given that there were games like Chronicles of Narnia and Kingdom Hearts 2 on PS2 that a did good job convincing you that you are in a big battle with lots of enemies onscreen (even if the characters in the background were actually 2D cards/gifs that only became 3D models when they got close).






Five year old phones now are more powerful than PS3s which could display armies of higher poly models fighting onscreen like in The Last Remnant. PS4 support for Genshin is being terminated in April of next year. I wonder if this Nod Krai arc was intended to stall for a much more grandiose looking Snezhnaya.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

New HSR playable character announced.

Your Pinkachu becomes your wife? I thought Cyrene was supposed to be Phainon's love. Strange.

[SoLong]

New HSR playable character announced.

Your Pinkachu becomes your wife? I thought Cyrene was supposed to be Phainon's love. Strange.

I think it's a combination of the usual "one female character per world gets close to the TB" deal the game has, combined with the fact that the first Cyrene the player character meets isn't actually Phainon's Cyrene.

► Show Spoiler

I knew this whole "the world is a simulation constantly being restarted" deal would get confusing. Technically, the only character having a claim to being the original would be Phainon, since he constantly merged himself with his succeeding selves.

At least Cyrene was better developed as a character than normal examples of this "girl of location X" trend games display, at least in my opinion. I still maintain that one of the better parts of HSR is that we actually have a consistent in-game group rather than exploring the world all by ourselves like in Genshin. No, Paimon does not count as company, that thing is too annoyingly grating.

I do hope that they ratchet the plot complexity back with the next destination, because both Penacony and Amphoreus have steadily escalated the threat level. They really need to slow down before they cross the event horizon of the audience's collective suspension of disbelief.

Also, with Mem being another Cyrene, the ******* troonslators are now forced to stop with these obnoxious gender neutral pronouns for the pink critter. Even the wiki warriors finally caved and Mem is now properly referred to as "she". So I count this as an improvement in any case.

[Manny V]

imagine how much better this thread would be if people were talking about flappy birds or doodle jump or some other inane **** instead of weeb filth

[rusty_shackleford]

Where the western gachas at?

[Oyster Sauce]

Where the western gachas at?

Counter-Strike, Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty, Overwatch, every sports game, Star Wars Battlefront 2, Rocket League, League of Legends, every phone game, Apex Legends, Mass Effect 3, Halo 5

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Where the western gachas at?

The only ones I can think of are FIFA and Raid Shadow Legends, but FIFA is not on the radars of people like us and the latter does not have a good reputation. Otherwise, the West has gambling in the form of lootboxes for Overwatch and other shooters, or the selling of individual characters like in League of Legends or Warframe, but not gambling for characters.

Japan and the West have different perceptions of gambling.

In Japan, regular gambling for money like slot machines is banned. You can gamble on sports like horse racing, buy lottery tickets, or pachinko which is like a pinball machine where the reward is that you get a capsule/pod with a toy inside it. Sets of pachinko capsules can be turned in together for a cash prize. That's why the people have baskets next to their seats, to put their winnings in and take them to the desk. So pachinko gambling is Japan's equivalent of slot machine gambling as we perceive in the West.




Or the gachapon machines at stores, where you turn the knob and get a capsule with a random toy.






This is where the Japanese idea of gacha games come from, where instead of getting a toy you instead get a videogame character. Refugees from the dying visual novel industry, console videogame developers who were unable to make the leap to 3D HD, composers, and character designers from light novels/games/manga/anime came onto the scene and made these games and their characters more appealing and normalized it. Anime going mainstream in the West in the 2010s and then Genshin presenting itself as a "real game" with its 3D graphics and open world allowed gacha games to cross over into here and for people to begin buying into it. I don't think gacha games could have taken off here without that outside influence.

I think the main reason why we aren't seeing Western gacha games is because during the 2010s, Western game studio suits were not paying attention to the gacha industry taking off overseas in Japan. Instead they were looking at other domestic trends here like MMOs, then MOBAs, then Minecraft clones, then TCGs, then hero shooters, then battle royales, then autobattlers, etc. It takes money to make money and a lot of the Japanese 2D gachas that we consider to be cheap today were not able to be produced out of someone's garage (you need to be working very far ahead of the currently released patch to keep the updates coming out on time, and need expert backend programmers to prevent hacking), so that's probably why we didn't see indies over here trying their hand at them. Then Genshin happened and raised the bar so that anything that is not on at least Genshin's level is automatically a nonstarter to audiences, and Genshin cost 200 million USD just to launch.

Also, any gaming suits who have been remotely paying attention will be hesitant to try to become yet another latecomer to a new genre and jump in when Genshin and HSR are already the kings of gacha. The suits should remember what happened to all of the WoW clones after WoW took off, all of the MOBAs after LoL took off, the Minecraft clones after Minecraft, the other TCGs after Hearthstone, the other hero shooters after Overwatch, the other battle royales after Fortnite, etc. China is probably about to experience this first hand with their 20 Genshin clones that are currently in development and slated to come out soon like ANANTA, Arknights Endfield, Azur Promilia, etc. After Genshin and HSR, the next biggest gacha is Wuthering Waves, which only makes 25% of Genshin's revenue. Still a lot of money but 25% for second place and who knows how much for third place and below is not going to be very tantalizing for the suits I'd imagine.

Another issue with hypothetical Western gacha games is that the Western games industry has lots its ability to create really appealing characters that can stand on their own. The last time the West was able to do that was with Overwatch, but after the first couple of years none of the new OW characters have been able to capture people's attention like Mercy, Hanzo, Reinhardt, Dva, etc did back in 2016.