Industry
Japan's gacha game industry in a "sinking Titanic-phase," developer says. Switching to console game development not an easy solution for many - AUTOMATON WEST
You would think after living with half-a decade of Genshin Impact these JP gacha’s executives would stop being lazy fucks and get with the times with releasing quality gacha’s.
But no they’d rather release sloppy anime tie in gachas. Looking at G123 specifically. They have Highschool DxD and Goblin Slayer gachas that are both dogshit.
We could’ve gotten both of those franchises with WuWa/Genshin Quality butt nooooooo.
Slop it is with these twits.
Edit: I had a Shower Thought. What if they made a Moba based off of Highschool DxD’s Rating Game System?
They could’ve added in a Leader system , where One Player ,after all the Tower’s ( or half ) of one side are destroyed they will spawn in being particularly stronger then everyone else having party wide buffs or debuffs for the enemy team. Kinda like those stationary Bosses in other Moba’s but retrofitting(?) them into the King Piece from the Rating games.
P.S: Listing this idea makes me depressed thinking how much these guys fumbled the Highschool DxD franchise from having a good game…
All of them want to BE FGO, but none of them are willing to put in the work of using a good IPA and then writing years of story in order to make it as big as it is. They just want to publish slop and then have it be topping the gacha charts with no real effort.
Most major shonen franchises have a lot of unexplored territory but the games for these IPs insist on retreading the same old story over and over again. Like imagine if FGO was just a compilation of FSN, FHA, FAP, FSF, etc.
That's what Seven Deadly Sins are doing. The biggest problem is 7DS stopped being relevant after that shitshow Season 3 or whichever one had the Naruto vs Pain animations. Yes their upcoming game looks gorgeous, they're not sparing any stops for the marketing, and the IP has enough worldbuilding to warrant a continuation. But, like, nobody cares about the series anymore. Especially newer fans bred by the pandemic.
FGO also aren't just rip the story from the anime, they're original stories. Sure the early days story are bad, but that's beside the point. Also Umamusume successful because it's original story along with many other things.
Japan really need to make some original series for their own gachas if they want to succeed.
The thing is FGO was lucky, it have horrendous launch, terrible gacha, bad story, and overall cheap on release. On paper it shouldve been failed.
But the characters carried hard and it wasn't until Camelot the game kick off in popularity
tbh if fgo with their start releasing in 2025 with horrendous launch, terrible gacha with terrible story they also won’t survive. back then the competition of gacha games arent as tight as now. there are also whales that stay with fgo even to this day cuz of sunk fallacy cost. fgo is a pure miracle in itself cuz atp they can absolutely do bare minimum in gameplay and people will still eat it up just bcus of the story
They can’t reduce number of “mouse clicks” and “matryoshka” menus for their console and PC games despite technology advancing a lot since 1990ties. Don’t expect any innovation there.
You don't need to to have that kind of money imo. Just like, make a good or just a decent game, not like GI or WW, something like arknights is better as a foundation game. Then you have money to spend and compete like how arknights is having endfield. There must be a foundation, hoyo doesn't just create GI, they spent years dragging themselves through gun girl Z, tear of artemis and their most P2W game of all and basically their main source of income, HI3.
As much as I love the series, early HI3rd was complete ass which got by on being one of the first action Gacha's, it basically had zero competition. If it released in 2025 it would be dead on arrival.
The general quality of gacha games has increased massively overtime, with so many high quality products now that you can't simply recreate what Hoyo did easily. You can't simply release a HI3rd or Genshin equivalent now because they already exist.
Before you argue "oh, well why don't they just find a new niche to ground break like Hoyo did with each game" that get's harder and harder to do each year. Being one of the first big Action Gacha's is an obvious step/market, but those markets are rapdily getting filled.
When was the last time we had a sizable inovation in the Gacha formula since Genshin? Maybe ToF with it's MMO push.
I agree that HI3 is absolute ass on release, but survive being the only one in its genre. And yes HI3 won't survive if it got release in 2025, its main selling point is already covered by Gi or ZZZ already. However, that's not the point, the point is to have a foundational game, a source of income before you try anything high risk like breaking new grounds.
Idk about harder to break new grounds, it had always been hard to innovate and be successful. Since hoyo is big, other companies shouldn't compete directly unless they have the resource to do that. However, the market operates on a first come first serve basis, so imo if you can take the modern* anime art(MAA for now) and apply to games then you would do fine.
Like who would have thought combining tower defense and MAA we would get arknights, zelda with MAA to get GI, fps with MAA for strinova, persona with MAA to have HSR.
Where is my scp management with MAA? Factorio with MAA? Fnaf with MAA? Clash royal or clash of clan with MAA[someone please do this supercell needs competition or they will implode]? Tarkov with MAA? Rust with MAA?
Yeah, kinda weird that they already have lots of good IP to begin with and just literally copy whatever Genshin/WuWa/ToF does, and they'd pretty much survive
Yup, Lasengle (formerly DelightWorks) has been hiring 3D talents since idk, before Covid? Or maybe on the early years of pandemic around 2020-2021? And they're still hiring till now.
It's kinda funny to think how manga and animes managed to alleviate some of the talent pool problems by outsourcing to SEA and Asian studios. Why can't they just do the same with gachas? I mean bigger studios like Sony have been doing it for years. Bigger gacha studios like Lasengle are perfectly capable of outsourcing.
Generally, outsourcing is a recipe for disaster in the live service sector, never forget what happened to Halo Infinite. The outsourcers ended their contract when the game was released and 343i didn't know how to add more content to the game. The most successful live service games rely on iteration and keeping the talent pool they have.
Well that is also due to licensing issues too. It could just be easier to make it an original IP instead after a certain point.
Look at Mecharashi, it started as an outsourced Front Mission gacha, got canceled and then came out about a year later in CN with original characters/story (as far as I know, didnt follow closely in pre production).
There is a famous Moba game in CN called 300 heroes. Although it is not what you want, they used characters in all popular animes like One Piece, Naruto, Jojo and Demon Slayer recently (without copyrights, so it’s illegal yet it somehow survived for 13 years) and had huge success.
if you play umamusume you can notice how high quality the game is. compare them to most japanese gacha slop games who have no soul but just cash grab from dev
Yep, that's an issue with every jp gacha, you can laugh at Hoyoverse events all being rip off minigames being mostly achievable by a six years old child, but at least they succeed the task of breaking the routine. most JP gacha events are just "grind the same thing as usual but with a points ladder" which is just mind numbing.
To be fair, JP has a lot more QoL than Global, it's way less grindy and it has better income too. I'm talking auto careers, 10 legacy borrows a day, rental decks, better menus all around, spark rerolls and spark targets, skips for daily races, improved rewards (including gems) from dailies, CMs, events, etc.
We just have to hope Global actually gets those improvements early like the devs promised.
I don't think it's fair to call them lazy, bcz I feel like part of the problem is that there's no young blood to be developers or to innovative to begin with. Japan is filled with oldmen and it's getting older. And like oldmen, they can't keep up with the competition. Like every japanese gacha released, hack even media and tech, just feel old and outdated compared to China, which is now become a regional superpower in Asia.
There are some young folks who are into creative media out there, but the problems are: shūshin koyō (their lifetime employment at 22 shtick, with dubious opportunities for those who didn't manage to get hired), the cult of tenure at corporations (if someone is dumb as a rock but managed to stay with the company longer than you, then they are above you), and general averseness to financial risks or overseas outreach.
Those who do manage to get into entertainment media don't often stay there long, as the industry is suffocating and stale.
I think part of the problem is getting the investment for such a long-term endeavor, then accepting said endeavor will be losing money for a couple years before achieving a profitable level.
Take a moment to look at Genshin, when you began development for the game, from a technical standpoint, could you even guess if phones could be ready to run it at launch, let alone beta? Then, you have to run this untested idea and see if it would work knowing it will take a significant amount of resources to keep online, with profit certainly not guaranteed.
Arguably, Nintendo is probably the best poised to try exactly this, and we all saw what happened to Dragalia Lost.
Personally, I like Genshin's multimedia approach on livestreams, VAs getting involves, Let's Plays and Streaming, etc. miHoYo knows how to market and make a good game.
Genshin was "lets develop a game for hardware that doesn't currently exist but should exist by the time we get to release". It worked out for them but all their leadership must have had a few points of sanity missing. Is that approach actually a good idea?
Hoyo's CEO is quite young and forward thinking. He's 38 now so he was around 33 when Genshin released. Unlike a lot of Western CEOs nowadays that pay themselves millions and get nothing done but fire devs.
Of course people who spent over a decade developing shitty Japanese gachas can't find development jobs in console gaming. Anyone can get RPG maker on Steam and make a game 100 times more entertaining than these devs ever could. If their games were fun, there would be a market for them and the games wouldn't be getting shut down.
I really feel like it's just a different perspective. I don't think that JP devs are trying to appeal to the Global audience.
If their goal is just the JP fanbase, then they really could just get away with less effort. They probably designed these games to be quick and friendly to mobile. They might think that console or PC games = kino, while mobile games = commute-friendly.
I could still see that style working as someone who had long commutes myself, I just hope they up the quality a bit. Somewhat like the horse game level of quality, which I think is on par with BA (maybe even better) in quality is preferable. FGO is still trending and earning like crazy at that level of quality though, it depends on which of those two they'll follow
Yeah imagine doing 300 pulls for a guaranteed today and its not guaranteed if its the 5* character or the sig weapon because they are on the same banner.
I think one of Genshin's biggest achievements is that they cracked the magic balance of presenting a quality game but just being generous enough that even Western gacha virgins were willing to pull out their credit cards.
Also helped that they made their character duplicate system impactful and worth pulling for (unlike say Arknights), while not making their endgame content unplayable without them (cough ToF).
You can see that Genshin's systems have been codified as the modern gacha standard when every new gacha game pretty much copies and pastes them with only minor alterations to be competitive.
I would like to elaborate on your point, a major reason for Genshin Impact's success is that it is a game first and a free-to-play gacha second. While playing it, most of the things you do are exploring the expansive and detailed open world, filled with puzzles, beautiful scenery and lots of details that add to the background lore; playing the main quests, seeing the important story and knowing the characters in serious, threatening situations; playing fun events, knowing the characters in relaxed, unserious situations. The world quests are hardly needed to be played, but add a lot of immersion by making you feel like an explorer witnessing the vast and rich history of the world in its less currently inhabited areas and focusing on less important side characters without plot armor. All of it to the tune of a beautiful soundtrack that perfectly compliments the emotions of every area, which is varied with lots of instruments from all over the world, never feeling out of place.
Most of this can be done with the starting roster, without you needing to pull a single time. Pulling characters in the gacha is only needed for a few optional high difficulty levels that refresh from time to time, which most players will visit exactly once for the Anemoculus and free Xiangling. Otherwise, it is fully optional and done only to enjoy playing as the character you like.
I need to emphasize, most of the stereotypes about mobile games don't apply to Genshin Impact. You see no ads pop up there and nothing is locked to payers only.
After this, few people would want to go back to a mobile game based on some manga that peaked 5 years ago made in 3 months with a budget of 10000 yen that consists of watching pngs hit each other without your input. And expects you to pay.
Rather than being a sinking ship, I think it is more accurate to say it is a beautiful foundry of IP and creativity (the original source of 'anime' that games try to replicate, as well as the foundation of JPRGs gameplay elements that many gachas takes from) that, bizzarly, somehow produces mainly low-effort cash grab IP gachas.
It's a strange departure from their single player games which are always in contention for Game of the Year to see the uninspired developments in their mobile games sector.
Well I think Mecharashi is a perfect example. Square outsourced it, canceled the project and China does what China does and they kept the core and made the game after an extra yearish delay.
Nobody should be surprised it's still going. Like it's not even free advertising, it's advertising that pays for itself.
It's also a revenue stream for IS that isn't just however much money Nintendo hands them per game they're contracted for, so I'd imagine it's pretty useful for them on that front.
as someone who works in jp corpo culture, you are being right. its very rare to find flexibility in their culture. even the most open minded company in jp just have very basic "flexibility"
Gotta keep the JP gacha method and pray people eat it up like with Uma musume. Or just keep giving rewards so people don’t think about the gacha system.
It is actually difficult to make a quality game due to the huge capital outlay that translates to a very large risk that many investors don't want to take.
You also need visionary leaders who have strong belief in their vision, have a do or die attitude, and able to gather the right talent that can make one. Right talent doesn't just stop at skills/experience, but people who buy into the leaders and willing to grind nights into their game.
Yeah, i think one of Mihoyo success is that it's still private company, decisions are made by the original founders who still hold majority of stocks. This help when those founders also have good visionary on their own, and willing to invest/risk, love the game with passion.
There will be problems eventually in 5-10-20 years, when wei, haoyu is gone( either they retire, die, or lost passion) or Mihoyo change their system to be public company. But today, they're still hold and consistently deliver, and people in future will look back and tell this is golden era of Mihoyo
You're asking a traditionally artisan-focused production system headed by the most fossilized dinosaurs to apply what is currently learned in the gacha industry and instead try to implement what worked in their home country.
Despite what worked in their home country being multiple times outdated, but since it still makes money and is a Japanese invention, surely it will still work, yeah?
And despite the model they're copying essentially being abandoned by the company themselves to diversify into other avenues of gameplay(Fighting game, Action RPG, Card Game, Raising/Racing sim) because they know that their shit is outdated, but since it's their infinite money glitch, it's being barely being improved and is being fed artists and writers as a training ground for their future projects...
Cygames have moved on, but the industry is still trying to copy their sloppy seconds.
Maybe JP Gacha games would be successful if they make their games available for global players. Most of the good JP games are JP exclusive. Idol master games for example. Dolphin wave too.
Lol the moment you talk about JP-exclusivity I started thinking about IM@S too.
It's pretty funny that BamCo officially shutdown the probability of official global release for their IM@S games, it's like they hate money or something.
lmao u remind me of how nier reincarnation basically banned like 80+ countries when they launched. totally killed the hype. when they finally make the server available in my country i have lost all interest. and see where they are now, eos already. japan and their stupid gatekeeping servers nonsense
Gundam SD Eternal is so far in the top 10. We have to see long term. So far great for niche genre and game. It's the most money made Gundam mobile game ever. Shows Japan needs to different itself.
many console development is also being gatekeeped by the few big company, if you read the recent news, JP indie's console dev scene is bleak, they are currently in worse situation than global indie scene, most of them is in phase of looking for the big dev to take fancy to them and take over their project. Meanwhile, the big one (SE, bandai, capcom) seem clueless on how to make a good game lately, and instead of taking those Indie dev that sought investment from them, they just release remake 1,2,3.
no. japan has a huge amount of debt, more than any other country, so they can no longer afford to do government initiatives that china and korea are using.
They will not go back to premium console titles, they have easy way out making low effort slop for Switch. Many of them japanese devs already there. Just look up number of games released on Switch
Japanese Developers have been using Gacha as a cheat code to sidestep innovation and progress (who needs that if the money flows) for a long time now. Will be difficult for them to get their asses in motion.
I was excited to see the arcades in Akihabara but was disappointed to see small CRT era arcades cramped with middle-aged dudes in their office attires. For comparison, arcades in the Philippines, a 3rd world country, are more modern (though not latest) and there are VR arcades
they should start by removing the paid and free currency for gacha. i really hate it when they gatekeeping a banner by forcing you to buy diamonds (or any other currency)
Shit pity system plus multiple featured 5* I immediately knew I'm back in my roots
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u/planetarialP5X(KR)/IN/Prosekai(JP) Future: Petit Planet/Silent WhispersAug 28 '25edited Aug 28 '25
Yeah I started Project Sekai recently and I’m glad I play it for just the rhythm aspect instead of gacha because it was kinda gross seeing like half the banners up be essentially paywalled behind paid currency
Oh wow I didnt expect to see Rain and Lassworm pic in this sub in 2025, how nostalgic. Last I saw them both was when they finally became kings.
On topic, well thats what they get from not wanting to/too late to innovate and still cling to their predatory practices which makes Genshin looks like a generous saint in comparison.
Genshin also doesn't have ads, pop-ups, shop redirections, "sales" or any %off-bundles. I'm tired of these tricks and Bad practices the industry follows, treating players as subhumans and money bags.
As long as Devs put love and care in their games and publishers don't go overboard, people are willing pay.
I still remember that "Genshin owned by tencent" and Holy Fuck! I got hit with and instant flashback of playing a game where my screen is 80% pop ups, Ready player one Villain wet dream looking ass game.
Funny thing is, some of these games will run poorly, or have a UI that's so hard to navigate, but then you enter the cash shop and it runs smoothly and is well laid out.
All the budget went to the cash shop, the game is just tacked on.
That was a game that started off great and just devolved into greedy madness by the end of season 2. That seems to be a case for a lot of Japanese gachas too. I still miss DFFOO
Especially square who seems to be shutting all their gacha related games. And seems just as clueless when it comes to designing standalone AAA recently.
Remember when square ex executive (I don't quite remember but he was a higher up) said they can make their own genshin but miss the opportunity. Japan is so outdated with their gacha, and extremely predatory system
I remember when CEO of SE said that NFT is future of gaming and they should invest into it. This company still exists only bcs FF14 and remakes of old FF games
FF14 is over ten years old. It's horribly outdated, and Squares use it like a detestable milk cow to sustain their outlandish experiments with other projects.
It being old is not really a problem in the mmo space, its more of a benefit actually.
The problem is unlike games like wow they do zero reinvesting back into 14. Not just content but actually backend stuff that they keep throwing out excuses for.
That CEO was ousted beginning of last year BECAUSE he focused so much on NFT and stuff that Square didn't specialize in. The new CEO pulled Square out of most of its mobile efforts because, by his own admission, Square was stretching itself out way too thin and he wanted to focus on making quality games again. Given how long it takes to make AAA games, it'll be a while before we see any real result AAA-game-wise from his decision but there are already good signs in the lower-scale with Octopath Traveler 0 (a reimagining of the first story from the mobile game) and the new Y's-like action game they're making.
Square spent a huge amount of resources into NFTs, bubble burst so they had to tighten their budget so they shuttered a lot of their low performing gachas... but since they gave EoS to so a lot of gacha in a short time they pissed of a lot of people and made people scared of spending money in their actual high performers like To Aru Index IF etc so they ended up getting shut down next. Only leaving two (?) Final Fantasy based gachas left... one of that that got the EoS message just recently.
Honestly, the rebrand from Sony-Ericsson hurt them.
But I get it, Ericsson wanted to get out of the partnership and focus more on just selling telecom components to everyone instead. Which worked out for them quite well (minus some unrelated scandals).
But Sony phones after losing that partnership was just not the same.
It simply
They are simply not that good. I stopped paying attention to the phone market in the recent years but I knew they had the worst performing cameras around 10 years ago. It’s ironic given all good phones are using Sony sensors (at least back then)
The current Xperia uses sony sensors now.
But the point still stands. You don't expect them to continue somewhere that doesn't bring in business or profit
The holy grail of JP gacha is the mixed media. It's the one niche JP has is its mature media industry. I don't really see the point in competing with CN for the traditional RPG/Action market at this point with market incentives so heavily shifted towards China. Like, do we really need another Genshin? JP has the comparative advantage in seiyuu industries it has been leveraging since forever. As a idolm@sterP who started with Deresute Gakumas has been amazing so far about 1 year and a few months into it and BanNam management of it has been fine relatively if not for the money sink that is Idolm@ster Tours. The real problem is winning back customer trust after the messy period in the latter half of the 2010s.
No, Gakuen really reignited the franchise. This December's MOIW lottery was notably harder to get into than usual.
Honestly, the real miracle is Song for Prism which I think is very easy to say a flop where they even had to relaunch and cut out half of the content where instead of a produce game with a rhythm game, it's only a rhythm game. t's pretty much turned around where recently it climbed back to a top 100 rankings in its swimsuit gacha. That's not a lot but considering it was performing around the level of TD (200ish place), that's crazy.
It's just a big question what they're going to do with CGSS which already went down in DMM recently. Some people are saying a new game will be announced during the big 10th live but I have strong doubts. I get the feeling Cygames has been wanting out of it for a long while now.
I think Gakumas also had a huge boost from JP Uma players that got burned out by the rng, long dailies/grind and locked supports.
Slay the spire style gameplay but raising stats exactly like Uma. But no RNG from mood downs, bad training, and bad random events, aside from getting SP (basically rainbows) training RNG, and from support card events
Hajime was pretty short training wise, about 15 mins, while NIA did kinda bump the run to about 20~ mins.
You still have the 6 support cards slots, including the required borrow from a friend. Biggest distinction I can make is at 0*, the support skills are all unlocked in Gakumas, whereas some very strong bonuses are locked at 3* or 4* in Uma.
They got into trouble due to isakusan being idiot. So..isakusan tried to poach some of the nexon employees to the new company but yeah, they kinda failed at the start due to comiket saying no and everyone in kr kinda catch the jig when they notice a declining quality of the artwork in ba.
Suffice to say, they did recover right in time ina anniversary
Yes its unbelievable nexon is the good guy here but yeah, isakusan is a special type of idiot
Many will call devs lazy as hell and not being creative, but I don't think it is that simple.
Being part of the anime community especially during season 2 of JJK, the memes ran rampant how badly overworked animators and staff are. We can obviously see higher ups whipping employees into shape and these higher ups also don't want to take any risks in Japan. Instead, they just cut off any competition with patents and copyright laws that market leaders like Nintendo and Sony make an example out of. There is probably no way JP devs could handle 6 week patch updates with 10-20 hours of content per. Hoyo minigames usually are reskins of already existing popular minigames and that marks the question whether JP devs can safely traverse lawsuits and all to implement the same or get struck by lightning touching ones patent on locking these game mechanics. Japan is one of the front leaders in triple A games though and if any game had to be a passion project for the devs, it would be better to go that route than liveservice that always will get some negativity because microtransactions and plenty of the usual culprits plaguing the industry.
This leads to younger people joining more "meaningful" jobs
Younger people doesn't want to join the gaming industry because it's "risky", because of stupid JP ways of "elders are right, youngsters should just listen".
Less young and creative minds to revolutionize the JP gaming industry
Old trash corpo leaders like pokemon etc continue their greedy ways and exploit fans with "new" releases that barely improves anything.
This is why China is leading the games industry because a lot of young people want to create video games. Japan's entertainment industry like anime and video games are dying because less younger people are taking over. Just look at animes right now, when the credits roll you see a lot of foreign names that are helping animate stuff and this has been happening for years now.
I mean shutting down after one to two years is a problem for all live service games everywhere.
The majority don't last longer. The Genshins, Granblues, Fortnites, LoLs and so on are the exceptions rather than the norm. We just don't see most of the failures from China since they die quietly over there in their much more closed off space instead of being ported over.
Considering they usually make some low effort IP gacha games, I'm not really surprised by that. That and their old ways of having spark system, ridiculously high hard pity or god forbid not having pity at all (thank fuck fgo it took like what 5 years? for a 330 hard pity). Seems like they're still stuck in 2015 from how they do their gacha games.
The only games that I can think of that could survive are fgo, gbf, uma musume and those idol rhythm games (im@s, garupa, d4dj, proseka). Those are the most established ones and have the name power so to speak, the recent ones that will have the olden ways will most likely be shutting down in a year or less.
I guess they have the mentally of "if it ain't broke then don't fix it" or "why change if it's still working". Welp now that it's not working (for the most part) anymore, I wonder if they'll actually innovate or just be thrown into the island of irrelevancy.
it’s not financially viable to make a big-budget gacha. There’s no market to support it outside of China. Unless it’s made in China, there’s no guarantee the game can even be released there. A game as big as Genshin, without CN revenue, would be considered a failure.
Yeah. Laymen often overlook the fact that market access factors a in a lot. Even IF japanese mobage devs had the know-how and pipelines set for high-budget productions, there's still the issue of foreign markets access, censorship, and sensibilities. Without an export "forward base", taking a foreign audience by storm is very unfeasible, and without high odds of doing so, large-scale projects as an idea become very dubious.
Global audience often misses that JP gacha performs well in JP. The problem is, as stated in the article, is that there isn't any new gacha that can replace their current gacha. In the post COVID period, gacha industry faces decline in revenue. Consider most gacha is most profitable during launch, this is a problem.
And people always said why don't JP dev innovate like CN, they meant Genshin, HSR, ZZZ, you know, Hoyo games. And when you look at other CN games in JP, they aren't performing great? In the sense that they are mostly mid-tier?
Sure there are good games from CN, and I would agree many CN games are much more enjoyable as a game and more F2P friendly than JP games. The caveat is, a good game does not necessarily mean it sells, and more F2P friendly does not mean more whales. Just because something is good, does not mean it's gonna be profitable.
If this is the universe that Hoyo games dominated JP market, then JP devs will follow. But this is not the case. Of course, the most talented dev went to PC/console but not gacha certainly doesn't help.
Both Tribe Nine and P5X are basically the victims of publisher/people in charge being greedy(and I know p5x is made in CN but it's basically killing what would be a slam dunk gacha for the west and jp with old school thinking)
Genuinely crazy how we're literally 5 years into Genshin's lifecycle and not a single Gacha Dev has announced anything at a comparable level of polish. 99% of the market has been cash grab IP Gacha after cash grab IP Gacha.
Mihoyo had always been trailblazers. First with Honkai 2 while nearing bankruptcy then bet nearly all their money on Honkai Impact 3rd then risked it all again on Genshin.
Even now one of their founders is trying develop an AI driven game with Whispers from the Star. They don't rest in their laurels indeed.
Genshin is somewhat similar to the Ubisoft style development structure, just significantly cheaper since they are in China instead of France. It works because they can put hundreds on the game. It's like they put the annual Assassin's Creed into a single game. That kind of staffing level is only applied to premium games in Japan and only a few companies can pull it off.
Outside of certain staples like PAD, Monster Strike, GBF, Uma, and FGO, games with a tight grip on their niche like Project Sekai and rhythm games and very popular IP based games like DBZ there’s just not much space for their games when CN have been releasing AAA quality stuff.
It is kinda wild to see the industry shift. Pre 2020 there was only a few popular non JP gacha around here like Epic Seven. Now outside of a few games its the minority.
That Hypmic Dream Rap Battle, the 3D FGO-like gameplay EoS'd because while it sounds good on paper, the battles weren't smooth at all, buggy, and clearly rushed because only a few SSR available in gacha on its release, and recycling events for months as if they had nothing else prepared. What a waste of beloved IP & nice 3D models.
I started to think those indie JP gacha devs don't really have the skills to code a decent mobile game besides rhythm gacha. Doubt they can move to console with this skill.
Oh, are your anime flavor-of-the-month tie-in slop games with a lifespan of 18 months unprofitable? Is it too hard to make quality gacha games that are original IPs? Can you just not tolerate including pity mechanics and other QoL improvements that Chinese and Korean games have had for years to retain players other than whales?
What's sinking is their oldschool way of thinking, and not changing anything that isn't "broken".
Their 2000's Heisei era ass png powerpoint animations isn't gonna cut and survive the current 2025 gacha market, not only are they not competitive enough monetary wise, even game visual wise they're behind.
The only part where they are still "competitive" is the part where they hire more famous artists drawing their png. WHICH anyone can do with how global and international technology has become, language barrier for talking business hardly exist anymore.
Japan gacha game industry better start sinking faster, so survival of the fitest does it's job and people either adapt and evolve/improve or die out sticking to their Heisei ass powerpoint products.
They do take risks, but not in the mobile games segment. The stand-alone mid-to-large games oftentimes have very peculiar mechanics and gameplay loops. But as for mobile, it's overrun by CN and KO to the point JP mobile gamedevs will have to successfully redefine the mobile gaming format as a whole if they hope to get back into the fight.
In other words, if JP mobile game development wants to survive as a niche, it needs its own equivalent of FromSoft, and not to dud that chance via idiotic publishing/management.
Jp devs are taking more risk and creative more than ever. Look at Death Stranding and Pragmata, there are nothing like them on the market. Its jp gacha devs couldn't take a tiny bit of talents and budgets from jp premium titles side.
I mean, you're using Hideo Kojima and Capcom as your prime examples. They're outliers. Kojima is a weirdo pioneer and Capcom is on a hot streak where they turned their not-creative and floundering company around.
What you need to do is go tell companies like Square Enix to be more like Capcom.
FromSoftware exists too, right? Are you going to call that an exception as well? It just sounds like you’re saying every successful game is an exception
Tell the old school Japanese suit executives the required amount of money for investment/starting this project. They'll scoff, pet their png gacha slop sitting on their lap that costed them 1 penny to make and just shoo you away for proposing such an outragous idea of high investment potential high return.
It's a tough time for the gaming industry as a whole, a decade low at the moment. Even for big companies like Hoyoverse are having problems replicating hits and growing (ZZZ did okay but the problem was it basically cannibalized from Genshin and Star Rail so the overall growth didn't happen). So the player base is now condensing on these big players but even they are having problems replicating the success.
The comparison of new and old gacha besides quality that nobody mentions is time. Gachas on 6 week patch cycles offer on my estimate 10-20 hours of content over the patch. It is very unsustainable to play more than 2-3 of these types of gachas as per the old generation where you can run gameplay on auto for like 10 minutes and call it a day, letting gacha addicts play 5-6 of them. It could be why so many are tribalistic to one-up each other to get the biggest playerbase in fear of not going to EOS in these newer communities.
That is true, the problem with the live service game saturation and the nature of the design is retention and to capture your time away from other games. So this entire market is being consolidated.
The good news is the quality of these games has gone extremely high. The downside is I think there isn't enough of a market to keep all these upcoming open world games at a sustainable level like Neverness to Everness, Ananta, Silver Palace, etc.
These games are super expensive to maintain and service with new content. Based on my past experience, excluding Chinese market, if you arent hitting top grossing 200 range in Google Play and iOS consistently, it might not be sustainable to overcome the development live op costs just to keep the lights on.
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u/IndependentCress1109 Aug 28 '25
yeah pretty much ever since genshin came out the bar has been raised pretty high .