I have played Gacha games like Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail in the past. I don't insist on playing those completely for free, but do spend moderate amounts of money to grab the high value for money "introductory offers" and the like. I tend to have myself under control, don't go overboard with the spending, and I am certainly not a "whale". I play the game for a while, get bored, and drop out, like with any other game. In my I'm leaving Genshin Impact post on this blog, I wrote a line saying "My dream game would be Genshin Impact with turn-based combat.". So I am looking forward to trying out Sword of Convallaria coming out on August 1st, a strategy RPG with turn-based combat which is also a Gacha game. And I couldn't help but notice that the Gacha system is very interesting and favorable for me.

Games need to make money. The big question is how the cost should be distributed among the different players. The "everybody pays exactly the same" system, like a one-time purchase, has some advantages, but also some disadvantages: Some players are going to get far fewer hours out of that one-time purchase than others. In games that let you interact with other players online, like MMORPGs, there is also an observation that the most hardcore, most competitive players are not only using more of the game's resources than casual players; they also are more likely to get into conflicts with other players over their competitiveness: Casual guilds have a lot less guild drama than competitive ones. Some MMOs in the past have put few restrictions on PvP, which gave rise to the "player killer", the type of person who likes making the game miserable for other players. And if you consider a player who spends a huge amount of hours in an online game, and spends his accumulated power to basically spoil the game for another player, who will now play even less, the question arises of why it would be considered fair if both of these are paying the same for the game. Shouldn't there be a tax on the more competitive players, especially if they negatively impact the game experience for others?

Sword of Convallaria has several different game modes. One of which is a single player story mode. And that mode is not only the most casual mode of the game, it is also the cheapest, and least affected by monetization. You can apparently take your favorite Gacha characters with you into that mode, but it isn't as if they would give you a huge advantage there or you'd hit a paywall in the story if you didn't bring somebody expensive. The monetization with Gacha characters is instead nearly exclusively targeted at the most competitive players, and especially for the PvP part. If you want to be a player crushing other players, you need to be a whale, and that is fine by me. My plan is to do some very limited spending on favorable offers (there usually are some, especially at launch), play a bit of the Gacha part of the game, but mostly concentrate on the story part. Let the whales finance the game, while I get to play at less than I pay for a traditional single-player game.

- posted by Tobold @ 9:28 AM Permanent Link