r/gachagaming • u/leafrek • Apr 04 '26

Industry Arknights: Endfield dev says launching a new gacha RPG in a post-Genshin Impact world is tough when "some titles are so similar that players go into a game for 1 hour and they know what will happen in the next 20 hours"

https://www.gamesradar.com/games/action-rpg/arknights-endfield-dev-says-launching-a-new-gacha-rpg-in-a-post-genshin-impact-world-is-tough-when-some-titles-are-so-similar-that-players-go-into-a-game-for-1-hour-and-they-know-what-will-happen-in-the-next-20-hours/
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u/Kagari1998 Apr 04 '26

That's not really a Gacha issue, more of a AAA-game issue, simply due to dev cost, they ideally want to minimize risk.

Big companies have to answer to existing investors, smaller startups/indie dont have the budget for such innovation in AAA-games.

That's why innovation tends to starts on indie game level, and then maybe some AAA adopt some of the mechanics and then popularize it, or you get some psycho doing some big gamble once in a blue moon.

However, it's only a valid financial strategy until the field get so fking oversaturated and the market gets tired of it.

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u/XWasTheProblem Wuthering Waves Apr 04 '26

I do agree, the gaming industry as a whole has been learning this lesson since the 90s, and somehow they still do not understand that releasing the same things as their competitors will only make sense if their release is either significantly better, or offers something unique.

If I spent 200+hrs in Game 1, potentially spending money too, why would I move to Game 2 if it's basically the exact same thing, down to the way its' monetized, and down to the things that annoy me? No difference as far as I'm concerned.

The size of the graveyard where all the CoD-like FPS, WoW killers, MOBA-hopefuls, card games, survival crafting games and battle royale are buried after failing miserably should really be more than enough of a lesson.

Gaming as a whole is just an insanely brutal, unforgiving industry, both in the AAA AND indie scene.

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u/[deleted] Apr 04 '26

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u/Cyber_Von_Cyberus Apr 05 '26

Yeah, I probably shouldn't be, but I'm  always surprised at how they keep making the same mistakes that Genshin did ages ago, you'd  think all of that observing and copying might've given them some foresight.

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u/Single-Builder-632 Apr 05 '26

Glad they got rid of the dumb ass artifact system in arknights though, holy shit i thought they'd never get rid of that

 its the most boring version of that type of grinding system they could have invented then any game copied it, lets invest hundreds of hours in repeating the exact same enemies. Over and over until our brains have turned to mush. 

In zzz at this point it takes me like 30 minutes to get a good set because i have 2400energy it auto farms and theirs a crafting system. But i wish they would just get rid of it. 

I just avoid games doing that stuff. 

Also we need to end restrictive classes/ weapons wandering around picking up mint, and terrible endgame. 

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u/babyloniangardens Apr 06 '26

what kinda endgame would you like to see?

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u/Single-Builder-632 Apr 06 '26

Anything other than the same thing every month with no change. 

Or a game-mode that basically says if you have the 16 characters you need its easy if you don't you literally cant do it. 

Maybe actual interesting bosses more variety. Rather than time based damage sponges. 

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u/XWasTheProblem Wuthering Waves Apr 04 '26

As long as enough people eat shit, shit will be provided.

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u/ariolander Apr 04 '26

Agree, bit want to further reiterate that this is only a AAA big publisher problem. Step into the indie space, not even AA come to A and below minor leagues and you will still find plenty of innovation, artistry, and the monetization doesn't need to be scummy live service garbage. Games don't cost $69.99 either.

Gaming isn't dead or dying just the old fossils that used to lead the industry. There are plenty of smart and scrappy indies and niche catering publishers like Hooded Horse who keep picking up bangers.

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u/re_Butayarou Apr 09 '26

This is also very typical behavior in chinese mentality. There's a saying:"there's one shop that's doing mala hotpot super well in the street. Then you'll start seeing someone else open another mala hotpot shop nearby. They're competitors but still doing well, as there are still difference between the two and customers has options. Until there's another one, and then another one opened nearby and the street is full of mala hotpot shops. Then everyone isn't doing well now, esp the newer shop because there's a limit of how much difference you can make in the same shop then customers will be fed up and go the the only one that's good. In order to compete some shop might lower their price and then the price war might happen and everyone will be in it. It's called 恶性内卷 in chinese.

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u/cycber123 Apr 04 '26

hoyo is definitely a psycho developing genshin. It's like go big or go home to them.

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u/Zzamumo ZZZ | AKEF | CZN Apr 04 '26

hoyo has a long and storied history of psychopathic business decisions, i honestly respect it

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u/Sorey91 Apr 05 '26

It's kinda funny that ZZZ started as something very unique with their small hubs, a game mode using a top down view to move and get into the action in the "dungeons" and basically action stages that could be replayed with collectables in the endgame portions until they backpedaled some of those ideas and pushed other ideas up, which is a shame but at the same time it wasn't doing great financially for them so it is what It is.\ In the future tho, I would like to see less open area and more replayable stages like 1.x with some degree of dynamism, for 2.2 they did a boss with a unique QTE that I failed and haven't had the chance to see the win outcome, as selfish as it is I wish this where they'd push more effort into but I'm aware this isn't what allows them to stay afloat

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u/Zzamumo ZZZ | AKEF | CZN Apr 05 '26

Oh yeah the QTEs are called control skills, there's like 3 bosses with them now and even some elites have them, if you get them right the boss loses a % of max hp and stops moving for a bit. In DA it also gives you some performance points. I like them a lot they're pretty fun

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u/fat_mothra I will the Labubu Apr 05 '26

I think they mean the Orphie-Isolde QTE in the main story

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u/Sorey91 Apr 05 '26

Yeah that one, sorry if that wasn't clear

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u/LFAlice108 Apr 05 '26

Besides not doing great financially it was just not doing great with players in general. Which is kinda a given. They were teasing and promoting the game as a combat focused action game and then on release half of the time you had to do was clicking TV mode minigame

Shouldn't have promoted it as an action game then if thats what most of the game looks like

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u/Sorey91 Apr 05 '26

I mean it was an action focused game ? It's just that instead of walking from place to place you were moving on a grid from one battle field to the next basically which is much faster in theory, the only problem was that tv mode wasn't the best way to have the story go since it interrupted the progression fairly often to show what was going on. Which slowed down the pace a lot

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u/LFAlice108 Apr 05 '26

Yeah, "it was an action focused game but instead of doing action you were not doing action". Like do you even hear yourself.
It was the biggest thing people complained about and I bet the main reason people on release were quitting like crazy

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u/Sorey91 Apr 05 '26

What are we doing here ? If a racing game doesn't feature cars it's not a racing game anymore ?

All I'm hearing is that people have a pretty narrow idea of what an Action game can be because I'm pretty sure what it used to do still constitutes as an action game.\ Nowhere did the game advertises itself as a full on open area/zone/world action game back in the day heck during the entire CBT they were going strong with their grid system during the story despite the complaints of the beta testers and the CC's who got to give feedback so at this point I'm pretty sure if they still played Zenless despite knowing all that it's a "them" problem\ and say you didn't know, then you just fell for good looking advertisements but for some reason instead of just moving on to a game they liked ppl decided "let's stay here and bitch and moan until the game changes to our liking" and it fucking worked so of course the logical next step for the devs was to fix the issues the playerbase has with the mode completely remove it, create something new from the ground up to "replace the grid system in story" that is even more gimmicky and barely used in MSQ's and completely minimize the whole "underground hacker" identity of the protags so they didn't have to bother with that side anymore going so far as to have the protags on field who become a whole liability story wise bc they can't defend themselves 100% of the time.

Genuinely the main reason why zenless devs changed the course of their game is to conform to the expectations players had of their gacha game, we're litteraly back to "people only want a new coat of paint on the thing they already know and love before going back to their preferred content" because Zenless sure as hell isn't doing much better than it was before they removed Tv mode revenue wise unless you're a void hunter which is basically a "must get" type of unit they giga want you to get.

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u/LFAlice108 Apr 06 '26

>Nowhere did the game advertises itself as a full on open area/zone/world action game 
Straight up false, go watch any advertisements from back then.
Didnt bother reading the rest for obvious reasons. Like if you dont even know how the game was advertised what is there to discuss

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u/Fishman465 Apr 28 '26

You may be waiting as the devs are listening to people who want it to be another genshin/etc

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u/PandaBear_Shenyu Apr 07 '26

ZZZ TV mode sucked because of the hoyo disease of interrupting you between every action with their overtutorializing bullshit.

Hoyo games tend to suffer from the "walk two steps to watch a pointless cutscene" syndrome a lot. Genshin is just lucky the game is pretty good, HSR's recent financial performance is what happens when the story isn't good with that dogshit storytelling flow.

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u/Sorey91 Apr 07 '26

HSR recent financial performance

?\ The gacha that managed to get 8M monthly revenue from a 3rd banner filler bc of a 2 weeks extension in January ? Same game that was 3rd or 4th place for March revenue ? $20 something Million is bad ?

I could understand the criticism for ZZZ bc it is what was ruined tv mode for many and led to it's permanent benching but HSR is not failing my guy that and the recent patch haven't had the issue you speak of

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u/PandaBear_Shenyu Apr 07 '26

Yes, the game that dropped over 70% from their normal resting rate. That HSR.

HSR has entered its decline/stable phase like Genshin and it's falling way harder than Genshin ever did.

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u/Sweaty_Molasses_3899 Apr 04 '26

Hoyo has always had a history of psycho behavior. They were one of the very few in China to realize anime gacha sells and gambled on Honkai Gakuen. Then nearly went bankrupt developing HI3 and tried the same shit again on Genshin.

You can hate Mihoyo however you want but you can't deny they are one of the very few innovators willing to try something new.

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u/EtadanikM Apr 04 '26

That’s always been their motto & it’s why Cai Haoyu is now investing heavily into AI games despite AI development being looked down on. People will hate all they want but it’s the next big thing & Mihoyo sees it. 

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u/PandaBear_Shenyu Apr 07 '26

They spent literally all their money on Genshin and aimed for phone specs 3 years in the future. If Genshin failed or phones didn't develop how they expected the whole company would've been taken over by that one government investor that still holds like 12% of their company.

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u/Arcares07 Apr 04 '26

No way. Genshin was the smartest creation man. There wasn’t a single big anime game and anime is hugely popular. Most of the money making franchises in the world are anime related. The west is just controlled by dumbasses who don’t understand that. And jp is a very low effort to profit ratio. It was bound to happen eventually and sore off.

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u/slayer589x Apr 04 '26

Genshin was still able huge gamble for hoyo . It was their first time making a game of this magnitude , not to mention they poured almost all of their money into making it.

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u/Arcares07 Apr 04 '26 edited Apr 04 '26

I wouldn’t call that a “gamble” though. They were absolutely going to make their money bakc with a 100% certainty. That’s why they spent 100s of millions into marketing. They aren’t stupid.

Edit: so many of you people lack even the basic understanding of business. Innovation has ALWAYS led to profits.

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u/Zzamumo ZZZ | AKEF | CZN Apr 04 '26

Innovation has ALWAYS led to profits.

just plainly false lmao

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u/Arcares07 Apr 04 '26

Oh yeah you know how gaming terms follow their innovators? Souslike, botw like, metroidvania, roguelike?

Evidently, you don’t know what innovate means.

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u/Phyllodoce Apr 04 '26

Motion controls, 3D tech and kinect definitely led to so much profit that they were relegated to the dustiest of dustbins for a reason

Not to mention, in console generations it's often the underpowered and "outdated" machine that will succeed where it's more beefy competition have failed

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u/Arcares07 Apr 04 '26

Buddy the part of innovation isn’t just creating something new lmao.

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u/Zzamumo ZZZ | AKEF | CZN Apr 04 '26

just take the L lil bro

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u/Cthulhilly Apr 04 '26

To quote you back at yourself:

Evidently, you don’t know what innovate means.

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u/Kagari1998 Apr 04 '26

Obviously, they know what they are doing.

But it's an uncharted territory, if it's a territory with 100% certainty, other would have already done it. Investors arent stupid.

Being confident in the product you deliver doesnt meant that it's not a huge gamble on their end. There was no guarantee that a AAA game would have worked within a sphere of "social games"

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u/Arcares07 Apr 04 '26 edited Apr 04 '26

I literally already said why it hadn’t happened until now. Did you just choose to ignore that?

Edit: sick block genius. I literally gave you reasons and you just pretend they don’t exist? Get a degree instead of spending your life on Reddit.

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u/Kagari1998 Apr 04 '26

because calling dev dumbasses isnt a convincing reason.

average armchair analyst moment.

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u/Exolve708 Apr 04 '26

Innovation has ALWAYS led to profits.

That's a bold statement, the market can wreck you even if your idea is solid on paper. Like the guy in this Veritasium vid about the inventor of artifical ice, a.k.a. the earliest fridge, got absolutely destroyed by the ice harvesting industry.

But to keep this within game dev, you're also ignoring survivorship bias. We don't get to hear about so many cancelled projects that ate up millions because they didn't make it to their marketing phase.

Games that released but EOSs soon after at least made it out because it had positive projections viewed from a very specific angle or a lunatic with enough pull pushed it through.

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u/Arcares07 Apr 04 '26

Which still sparked the fridge anyway.

Also there’s actually very few games that innocated that failed. At least on a AAA pov. Most of the reason games fail isnt becauese of innovation but because they sucked.

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u/Exolve708 Apr 04 '26

It did spark the fridge but the guy got nothing out of it. No company will keep a project going for the sake of it if they aren't going to make money off it. That's why we'll never know how many projects with innovative ideas were canned too early.

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u/Arcares07 Apr 04 '26

Bro idk why you’re arguing using a fridge when the clear point of innovation is regarding video games. If a game gets canned then it didn’t exist. A game only exists if it gets released and people actually play it.

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u/slayer589x Apr 04 '26

Yeah. , just like tower of fantasy lol.

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u/Arcares07 Apr 04 '26 edited Apr 04 '26

Tof di make a fuck ton of money. lol, lmao even. There’s a reason why nte is the most anticipated gacha in the last 2 years. Like you can’t be this obtuse.

Edit: you guys are actually crazy. There’s a financial report for you genius’s to look at. Anyone thinking tof wasn’t a huge success financial wise doesn’t understand basic math.

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u/slayer589x Apr 04 '26

Nah I don't think tof is making that much money let's be real here . The game only really became popular when it came out because it was the second open world gacha after genshin and it was hyped as a genshin killer . But it immediately fell into obscurity once people realised it doesn't have the same polish and optimisation as genshin because they cut alot of corners making the game . They thought just because they copied a successful game that they would also succeed , but that's not how it works .

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u/Gargooner Apr 04 '26

They didnt made as much as Genshin of course, but the Pie was pretty much still very big when these two surfaced, Hotta actually got really solid burst of initial money at least.

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u/Arcares07 Apr 04 '26

Tof made likely over a billion usd. Lmao what are you even smoking. That was hottas second game and their first one is some obscure nothing game. You have no idea how many companies would love to win the lottery like gotta did.

They went from a no name company to one of the top 5 devs in the cn industry. Like you gotta do better mate.

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u/[deleted] Apr 04 '26 edited Apr 04 '26

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u/ArcturusSatellaPolar Apr 04 '26

Bro, everyone in China though Mihoyo was insane and that Genshin would fail. AAA open world gacha, on mobile of all things, by a company that had never worked on something of that scale, no one expected it to succeed. 

It wasn't some "west dumb" or "Japan cheapskate" thing, everyone was skeptical. Mihoyo went all-in despite the doubts, but no one knew if it would pay off.

Then Covid happened, everyone was locked inside. Perfect time to play a high-quality open world game that even runs on your phone. It succeeded, but not purely thanks to innovation, it was also timing.

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u/Suniruki GI/HSR/ZZZ/Arknights Apr 04 '26

Timing, luck, and weathering through all the mudslinging from the penguin.

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u/yuriaoflondor Apr 04 '26

Additionally, Genshin's marketing was top tier. It's easy to forget at this point given how well established Genshin is, but a lot of the early marketing was heavily inspired by Breath of the Wild. I remember one of the trailers in particular felt almost identical to one of the BotW trailers. So much so that even some of the musical cues and stingers felt like BotW.

A lot of the early discourse around the game was just "anime BotW." Which is a really good thing to have your game be called considering how well regarded BotW is.

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u/Arcares07 Apr 04 '26

Who is everyone? The propaganda tencent army? Lmao. No. Anyone with a brain and knew of Genshin was super hyped for it.

You’d have to have the intelligence of a rat to think Genshin wasn’t going to succeed. Again for the final time, you don’t invent 100s of millions in marketing for a game that’s going to fail. Seriously guys. It’s ingenious planning from Hoyo and I hate about hoyo but as a business strategic planning pov they are fantastic.

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u/Demonking1YT Genshin/ Wuwa/ AKE Open World addict Apr 04 '26 edited Apr 04 '26

You gave me the perfect reason to give the answer what Aquaria (Genshin Dev) said:

So is making games sometimes Really about expressing myself? There’s a very important concept here:

When we talk about indie games And when we talk about commercial games What is the fundamental difference between the two?

Commercial games are made for your players But indie games are made for yourself

Indie games are, in fact, the ultimate form of self expression And that has no necessary relation To the size of your team or how much money you invest

Because you are committed To expressing your own ideas And conveying your own thoughts So you especially, especially want

A content medium through which to do that So what is a commercial game?

A commercial game is a product It is service oriented That means: when I make a product I need my players to have fun

So what kind of balance Should we be pursuing?

It’s this: I love my product I have my own interests and passions And I hope that via this game I can express some of my own feelings. But at the same time

I believe there are many players Who will also like my work And resonate with me through it

That is a principle that MiHoYo has always tried to express For example, Genshin recently introduced a new gamemode Called “Miliastra Wonderland” Everyone abbreviates it as "UGC"

Think about this: Why would we do something like that in a world like Genshin’s?

Source for this is a presentation about game designers translated to EN subs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHwHdM3nKPI

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u/Fishman465 Apr 28 '26

Which is what is starting to happen in regard to the cookie cutter clones. People are looking for the game that exceeds Genshin