Gacha Game Hate Thread

[Celebrate Nite]

With the amount of gacha games that get shut down, how often do those gaming companies go bust?

a lot more than you think.

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

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

Hell, even BIG named companies like SNK have gachas where they just decided to pull the plug. KOF All Stars was one of them, and everyone fucking loved that game and was super pissed they were closing down. Instead it got replaced with something called KOF AFK and nobody fucking likes it.

 

[Gravityqueen4life]

The reason i like Blue Archive is because its very free to play friendly. You always feel like you making progress in the game and the devs themselves always seem to give you stuff for free (i like how you get pyroxs, the main currency, every time there is a maintenance update). Alot of the stuff you simply get for playing the game and reading the story. The Cash shops dose exist but rarely dose the deals look worth it, and they limit you how much you can spend on it.

 

[Kivotos strongest Sensei]

Plus how does anyone know the devs just shat out a game just for a "get rich quick" scheme and then pulled the plug when they finally had enough money?

I think that mostly happens because big companies see Gacha games as a safe bet, so if they make a profit or break even then they keep them around, but if they don't then the company just announces an EOS to cut their losses. The RGG/Yakuza franchise has had a gacha game since 2018, albeit only in Japan, whereas Nier Reincarnation didn't last more than 3 years. It's a market everyone wants to get in on, but because of it the competition is very fierce.

You have to offer something that sets you aside from the rest. Hoyoverse games succeed because they're effectively pc games that you can play on your phone, Blue Archive is carried heavily by its story and characters, Uma Musume by the fact that it's a big multimedia franchise and it's easy to get into, et cetera. Games that rely on a single gimmick or a fairly obscure IP, or chase trends set by other games cannot successfully compete, because why would you play them instead of the originals?

 

[TheTitKoker]

IMHO of the few/only decent gacha titles is Gundam Battle Operation (2 currently). Predominantly skills based and more-than playable against cashies who barely know how to use their buff horses on average. The main, awful, and non-addressed issue there was lack of in-game voice chat and lack of being able to queue up for ranked matches with your friends/make squads to lobby hop. You'd almost always end up playing with all randos and most of whom absolutely fucking sucked at the game.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

a lot more than you think.

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

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

Hell, even BIG named companies like SNK have gachas where they just decided to pull the plug. KOF All Stars was one of them, and everyone fucking loved that game and was super pissed they were closing down. Instead it got replaced with something called KOF AFK and nobody fucking likes it.

I wonder how accurate are the monthly revenue postings. They may very well be pre tax and expenditures since those games live or die by audience opinion of how healthy they are. And even the games that do get few millions every month probably waste a ton of money on promotion so actual profit is very small.

The industry is very toxic, but unfortunately it's pretty much the only location today for JRPGs as the entire genre died post ps2.

 

[Thiletonomics]

A Chinese Gacha game, Snowbreak; Containment Zone, was recently brought back online after it had to temporarily go offline due to some sort of scandal in China. However, the gooner shit was heavily censored, and many Chinese are not happy about it:



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

Or is Anita Sarkessian also working to destroy the Chinese gaming industry too, in the name of "protecting women, Womxn, Women+, and children"?

 

[Kivotos strongest Sensei]

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

Or is Anita Sarkessian also working to destroy the Chinese gaming industry too, in the name of "protecting women, Womxn, Women+, and children"?

Chinese feminists complained to the CCP about objectification and the usual things, and since the company isn't one of the big ones, they had to bend the knee and self-censor.

This is completely different to LADS, which contains animated sex scenes sans penetration, but is still allowed to continue because it brings in more money in yearly revenue than the entire Hoyoverse.

 

[Thiletonomics]

Chinese feminists complained to the CCP about objectification and the usual things, and since the company isn't one of the big ones, they had to bend the knee and self-censor.

How insane are they compared to Korean and Western feminists?

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

How insane are they compared to Korean and Western feminists?

Even more crazy than the standard for Asians

 

[Kivotos strongest Sensei]

How insane are they compared to Korean and Western feminists?

To understand the different strains of feminism in these countries you need to first understand the relationship feminists have with power.

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

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

China on the other hand has the opposite problem of Korea. The cultural revolution turned everything upside down. Confucianism was gone, women are equal to men in all things, in line with Communist principles. That is, in all things that don't have a direct impact on the state. They fill the middle manager position in Chinese society. Whereas the worker and the CEO are both men, the administration at the lower levels is in their hands. China is also facing an unprecedented demographics crisis, with roughly 50 Million more men than women, meaning that women are put at a higher value (Everyone wants to get married and have children, no?). What this effectively means is that they can exert pressure, be it as an ideological bloc, or as someone's girlfriend/wife, and the men who actually hold the power are forced to listen to them and cave in to some of their demands. They are not necessarily insane or radical, but they live in a society where their words have more weight than in the West or Korea.