Genshin Impact is one of the most important projects of the year
An open world F2P with Zelda nature, anime characters and a ton of gacha.
On September 28, Genshin Impact, a free-to-play action RPG, was released on PC, PS4, and Android with iOS. She came out and almost immediately flooded the entire gaming information field. Someone just shares pictures with anime characters in an environment taken directly from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Others speculate whether the new game is better or worse than Breath of the Wild or the upcoming Immortals Fenyx Rising. Still others are trying to understand what is happening in general.
Meanwhile, Genshin Impact continues to conquer new heights - it recently became known that in the week since its release, its revenue amounted to $ 60 million (more than PUBG Mobile, for a second).
It is difficult to pass by such an event. We went through a significant part of the available content in order to figure out what happened to the developers from the miHoYo studio - and where it all can lead.
But first, it’s worth understanding in general what environment Genshin Impact came from - a Chinese F2P game with a budget of one hundred million dollars and a gacha system that makes crazy money in Asia.
Gacha games and China
They started making money on loot boxes back in the “zero”: ZT Online showed that with their help it is easier for some games to pay off, and Farmville, thanks to them, opened a gold mine for its authors. But it wasn't until the past decade that Japanese developers have proven just how much money loot boxes can generate.
In Japan, journalists contemptuously called them "gacha". This is an abbreviation for gaspono, an automaton that randomly dispenses figures in transparent balls. The chances of obtaining some rare gashapon toys are extremely low, which greatly fuels the excitement of some collectors and encourages them to spend thousands of yen in these machines.
The comparison of gasapon and loot boxes is especially striking for the Japanese due to the fact that, unlike the West, they put new characters into their “cases” much more often, and not just weapons with all kinds of equipment Keqing build guide.
Gacha games come in just about every genre: puzzles, card collectible games, RTS, turn-based strategies, action RPGs, JRPGs. The mechanics in them can be arbitrarily deep. The main thing is that the gameplay can be stretched longer. So the player should be more and more willing to try to knock out new characters and items that cannot be obtained in the usual way. In addition, usually in gacha games there is a simple, but still full-fledged storyline.
In 2010, the first full-fledged gacha game was released, where almost all monetization revolved around loot boxes - Dragon Collection. In a year, she brought her creators a billion dollars. A boom of similar projects followed immediately.
And already in 2012, a scandal unfolded in Japan, comparable to what was in the West in 2017 because of Battlefront II. It’s just that game developers everywhere introduced the compa-gacha system - “full gacha”. On it, they sold not just resources that could be used to buy the ability to knock out rare weapons or heroes, but resources that give a chance to get items with which you can create rarer things. Because of this scheme, people squandered even more money in games.
