The single worst impact of Gacha Games is that every Waifu Gacha starting from Genshin has already taken away all standard anime and video game discourse. It's like you see anime girls being drawn right now, 60% of the time they are from some sort of Gacha Game and 30% of the time it's Touhou or Vocaloid-related.
And it's justified because the DEI/Judeo-Christian Moral Guardians and Payment Processors already drove all of the Waifu Gaming and anime industry away and the App Store and Play Store is the only way they could thrive at this era.
It's a very grim outlook for the future of both the Video Game and the doujin genre.
The quality of anime had been plummeting for decades. After a show's initial run ends and the seasonal anime fandom moves on, it is almost never good enough to endure and be recommended like how Cowboy Bebop and Evangelion are eternally recommended. The most recently released classic anime that are still recommended are Death Note, FMAB, and Fate/Zero. That was over a decade and a half ago. Nobody is recommending that you spend your time watching Darling in the Franxx or Eighty-Six today. Both the audiovisual quality and the writing has become too mediocre compared to alternative uses of your free time. Kadokawa, A1 Pictures, and all of those companies kept greenlighting disposable isekai after isekai.
You had the higher ups at Bandai Namco turning their head in confusion wondering why Gundam viewership is watching, thinking that they need to pivot to high school lesbians to appeal to new generations rather than firing their writers and bringing in professionals who can keep audience engagement.
Same deal with videogames. At the turn of the millennium, Final Fantasy was pumping out hit after hit every year. Pokemon was all the rage. Fast forward to the 2020s and most of the JRPG studios are dead or are not doing anything. VNs are dead, even studio Key is making gachas now. The old timers at Square Enix and Pokemon can't make good games anymore. Nobody recommends FF16 or new Pokemon games. Nobody is enthusiastic about new pokegirls like with Misty, May, Dawn, or even Serena. Square Enix preferred to squander their FF14 money on funding Nomura and Kitase's remake mockery's of FF7 rather than reinvesting into making the game better, or making good new FF games.
And the Japanese did not take overseas markets seriously. They kept delaying Western releases until long after it was no longer new and novel and the product had already been pirated and fansubbed. Aniplex was jacking up prices to ridiculous degrees. Lolcowlizers ran rampant and numerous attempts were made to contact and inform the Japanese creators. Most of them did not care. Japan struck had gold in their hands with Granblue Fantasy and Fate/Grand Order, which were titan gachas in Japan, but dragged their feet bringing them to the West. Fire Emblem and Trails were launching years after their Japanese releases. And so on.
CyGames and Typemoon made their gacha billions, and then instead of reinvesting that money into making a game with higher production values, they were complacent and decided to just running their 2D jpeg games. You have the president of Square Enix complaining that they should have been the ones to make Genshin Impact when they greenlit 25 cheap cashgrab mobile games and then EOSed them, and are then confused as to why people don't get invested in Square mobile games.
After Mihoyo made it with Honkai Impact 3rd, they did not remain complacent. They reinvested their money into stepping up their next project. They paid attention and knew that within a few years, phones would be powerful enough to play good looking 3D games, and began developing one in anticipation for that day. And they did not treat foreigners as an afterthought. They had their game have a simultaneous crossplatform global launch. Their games are also much more democratic than the Japanese. The players vote with their wallets for what they want to see more of, be it getting certain kinds of characters or TV mode ripped out. While the JRPG developers ignore longstanding fandom complaints because they are cushioned by investors.
The Japanese have only themselves to blame for losing their marketshare.
