Gacha games

NOTE: This page has no relation with the Gacha Life franchise. This is specifically talking about a genre of mobile games.

An example of a gacha system, where heroes of varying rarity are summoned through the gacha system with varying rates. Game shown here is Genshin Impact.

Gacha games, alternatively known as mobile hero/PNG/waifu collectors, mobages, or mobile MMOs, are a mobile game genre where the gameplay revolves around summoning and evolving playable characters, often called monsters/units/heroes with a rarity system that spans across from 1 star (★) to 6 stars (★★★★★★) (or in some games, 5 stars), with progression usually gated behind stamina systems with stages or dungeons costing a varying amount of stamina. Back then, in the early era of gacha games with some examples being Hello Hero, Brave Frontier, Summoners War, and many older gacha games dating back to 2013 to 2017, gacha games were seen as a niche thing as most of these games had little to no YouTube coverage at the time and were obscure to most mobile game players at that era. However, as of late 2018 when the likes of Epic Seven, Azur Lane, and Dragalia Lost gave gacha games a bigger push, gacha games started to become more and more relevant to mobile game players in the US and around the world, with Genshin Impact raising the bar of newer gacha games when it took the industry by storm in 2020.

The biggest selling point of these gacha games is character/hero collection, as some gacha games have over 200 playable characters, which for comparison, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has a total of 89 different fighters including Echo Fighters and all DLC. For example, Granblue Fantasy has over 400 excluding alts (Christmas, Summer, etc) as some gacha games incorporate alts where its the same character but with a different costume and skillset.

The first gacha game, or mobile game with an emphasis on summoning characters through gacha system was none other than Dragon Collection back in 2010. When that game succeeded, it led to many older gacha ancestors such as Puzzle and Dragons back in 2012 and Cygames's Rage of Bahamut which started on a platform called Mobage (hence the term "mobage" was used to call a gacha game back then) and then hit iOS/Android in 2012. In 2013 when Chain Chronicle and Brave Frontier hit the scene globally, it was also the time when Korean devs started making their own gacha games, with Hello Hero launching in 2013 becoming one of the earliest ancestors of Korean gacha gaming that also inspired Netmarble to make Seven Knights with many other devs following suit, with one of the more famous examples being Summoners War. However, as gacha games (which, at the time, people called them different things as they didn't know what they were called) progressed and evolved, it has been reported that many gacha games failed to captivate players and ended up shutting down pretty quickly, usually in around 2 years or sometimes even less than that.

Gacha games are known to make absurd amounts of money from mobile game spenders and whales compared to most full priced $60 games from both AAA game devs and indies, which is why most gacha devs only make more gacha games after their gacha game succeeds in making millions to them. Games such as Uma Musume: Pretty Derby, Blue Archive, Nikke: Goddess of Victory, and Love and Deepspace, have managed to accumulate over 200 million USD in revenue worldwide, which after the 3 core markets that spend the most (China, Japan, and South Korea), the biggest markets tend to be Southeast Asian countries (Indonesia/Thailand/Singapore), Russia, Brazil, and the US, though they don't spend as much as those three markets. This has lead to many more of these devs entering the gacha game industry, essentially seeing them as the next gold rush, but out of the hundreds of gacha games, only few of these make it past more than 3 years at best and manage to break past 10+ million USD in revenue due to them calling it quits very quickly after low revenue combined with its failure to retain their playerbase, as well as many other factors.

Often times, gacha games will have pre-registration events which has become one of the biggest examples of pre-order culture done right, where the more pre-registrations on their website, App Store, and Play Store combined, the more rewards players will get on launch day including currencies and extra summons. This has become a crucial factor in gacha games as the launch can determine the gacha game's long-term success, as there have been many gacha games that flopped quickly due to its launch going badly.

Common Gacha Game Genres

Genre	Description
Idle/Autobattler	One of the more common types of gacha games, where you run teams of 5 heroes and they all attack at the same time while charging up their super attack. Earlier ancestors include Soul Hunters and Heroes Charge, and modern equivalents include both Blue Archive and Nikke: Goddess of Victory. Most gacha games that aren't action-focused usually have an "auto-battle" option where all players need to do is watch the AI take control of their heroes. Not all autobattlers play the same, as Counter:Side incorporates a shared MP & rotation system similar to Clash Royale as you run teams of eight where the MP is used to deploy units in battle, with Blue Archive doing something similar but with 4 on-field heroes and 2 supports with the MP being used for their skills and if should a character die on the field, they're out of the skill rotation.
Turn-based	This is a common gacha genre made popular with the likes of 2014's Summoners War and its inspired gachas like Epic Seven, Honkai: Star Rail, and Raid: Shadow Legends. Each hero has 2 to 3 attacks, including a normal attack with no cooldown and with varying effects depending on their in their kit, and combat boils down to one hero attacking at a time. Usually like in most turn-based JRPGs, who gets to go first is determined by the SPD (Speed) stat. Usually ran with four heroes and sometimes five heroes.
Rhythm	This is a gacha genre which out of the three major markets, remains very popular in Japan but not in China or Korea. Instead of ordinary battles against enemies or bosses, the gameplay takes place on typical rhythm game fashion. These type of games are often more skill based than stat based, as usually, the characters from the gacha system will provide special effects to assist the player throughout each song. Compared to other types of gacha games, they usually have fashion gacha, or gacha systems for costumes and outfits as opposed to just summoning for characters/heroes. Unlike a few gacha games, sometimes having a darker tone, this genre is more lighthearted and appealing alternative to these few dark-toned gacha games. Examples include: Hatsune Miku Colorful Stage, Ensemble Stars: Music, Bang Dream Girls Band Party, and The Idolmaster Cinderella Girls.
Action/Tag	This is the genre popularized by the likes of Honkai Impact 3rd, where gameplay revolves around assembling teams of three and combat revolves around one hero attacking at a time with skills that usually are on time-based cooldowns and an ultimate attack that must be charged up via attacking enemies. The other big mechanic associated with these games is a tag mechanic where characters switch in and out on the field with enter/exit attacks. While at first, this genre was only seen in Chinese gachas, as of 2024 it has eventually made its way to Korean devs with the likes of Solo Leveling: Arise and Breakers: Unlock the World.

Why Do Most of These Games Fail

NOTE: Many of these factors are not limited to Japanese gachas, but also both Korean and Chinese gacha games as well, including those that only release in China/Korea and not globally.

1. Luck-based progression: As with loot boxes, gacha games are focused entirely on gambling for specific characters that range from 1* to 6* (or R, SR, SSR), where in most gacha games, the highest rarity heroes will often have less than a 1% chance of actually rolling them. Eventually, this led to many gacha games throughout 2018 to 2019 to start implementing pity systems where by a specific number of summons, they will be guaranteed that character. Very often, progress can be gated by not having the right characters or that one character that would allow the player to progress the game easily, depending on if they make the lower rarity characters/heroes useless in story content (see WMOTGF no. 3 for more information), which can be furthered if the gem gain (currency used for summoning) is very limited or is entirely dependent on limited time events which often times builds a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out) on their playerbase.
   • While Cygames eventually incorporated one of the first pity systems in Granblue Fantasy when Monkeygate occurred in 2016 where a Japanese player spent $6,000 and could not get the said new character, pity systems took a while to become accepted in most other gachas as many of these devs were at first convinced that pity systems would tank their revenue (see WDMoTGF #6 for more information) and prior to that, most gacha games that didn't have any hero selector tickets/summons also had no banners or pity systems. Fate/Grand Order didn't get a pity system as late as 2022, though one key factor that made it successful was that it was one of those gacha games where the lower rarity heroes are usable in main content.
   • Some gacha games have Light/Dark separation, or when Light/Dark heroes have separate banners, usually with more expensive summons than normal summons. The most famous example is Summoners War, which had a LD5 summon rate of 0.35%, though to be fair, its one of the few gacha games as of 2024 to not have any growth systems that require dupes as Devilmon (the monster used for upgrading skills) can be easily acquired via events or monthly content. Most gacha games nowadays, which are more generous when it comes to summons often have hero growth systems gated behind dupes, such as the Constellations from Genshin Impact or require dupes to further ascend/evolve the hero.
2. Chasing trends/copying each other: The biggest issue is that like most mobile game trends, gacha games usually follow each others' trends and add very little to improve on them. Currently, the most copied gacha game remains Lilith Games' AFK Arena where its the portrait mode (where the game is played vertically instead of horizontally) 5-hero team where one hero attacks at time with the idle lobby because of how AFK Arena became huge in China to the point where most gacha devs would make gachas based on AFK Arena's gameplay given how easy it was to copy AFK Arena compared to other gachas. Aside from AFK Arena, some bad examples of copying include the following;
   • Jewel Dragon - Puzzle & Dragons, the former being a complete copy of Puzzle and Dragons that died with very little fanfare and was only available on the iOS App Store. Puzzle and Dragons later ended up inspiring two Korean knockoffs by NHN PixelCube, Kill Me Again: Infectors and Kingsman: The Golden Circle, which both games ended up shutting down in less than 2 years. One knockoff that managed to survive was Legendary: Game of Heroes, where instead of making one piece move across the board, multiple diagonal moves are made at once.
   • Artery Gear Fusion - Epic Seven, which was seen as a Epic Seven clone but with chibi sci-fi androids. The game failed to garner much success, with its only highest revenue coming from its launch peak, often known as the "honeymoon phase". Scrutiny then occurred when the game launched a collab but made it to where it was impossible for free-to-play players to max out a collab hero as the collab heroes took separate materials for upgrading their skills and said material was able to be acquired only once. The game eventually went into an announced maintenance mode in Korea before doing so for Japan and global, where the game is kept in a still playable state but without any new updates/content. As of August 2024, the game was announced to be shutting down, lasting less than 3 years since it launched in May 2022 due to its inability to retain its playerbase and low revenue, as it lost to other high-quality turn-based gachas such as Honkai: Star Rail.
   • Eternal Tree - Granblue Fantasy, the former shutting down in only one year in Japan in June 2023 after launching in June of last year, because simply put, the Japanese gacha players just preferred Granblue Fantasy anyway and saw Eternal Tree as a knockoff. It eventually shut down in Taiwan later that year with very little fanfare, which launched in late 2021, therefore only lasting 2 years.
   • Winning Derby - Uma Musume Pretty Derby, the former being a bootleg-quality game that utilizes AI artwork combined with poor production values. Common traits of "bootleg" gachas include not only copying the gacha game's gameplay as is but also including things like copypasted character kits and lazy production values, especially when AI or sometimes tracing is used for the character portraits. This game as reported by Yahoo became one of the greatest examples of when a gacha game's success manages to inspire copycats, with most of the copycats being incredibly inferior to what game they're copying.
3. Having too many useless playable characters: Many of these gacha games rely on the philosophy that only the highest rarity characters/heroes (SSRs/URs, nat 5s/5 stars (★★★★★), uniques) are relevant gameplay-wise, especially those that have more highest rarity heroes than all lower-rarity heroes combined. This not only makes the lower rarity heroes entirely useless and fundamentally pointless to have aside from cluttering the gacha system altogether, but it also makes the highest rarity ironically the most common. Furthermore, some gacha games rely on excessive power creep, where they release stronger heroes after stronger heroes to increase their revenue from whales, which only works short-term as it easily follows up with said revenue falling quickly afterward when it becomes to where there are too few useful characters and too many useless characters. Games such as Revived Witch have proven that this philosophy is not needed as it shown that all it eventually ends up doing is hurting the overall gacha game's lifespan and possible revenue from gacha game spenders, especially when it ends up where the highest rarity heroes are either too broken forcing players to pull them to progress the game's main content or are too weak to be considered usable for most content.
   • Aversion: Summoners War avoids this trope altogether, as the vast majority of its content including dungeons and the monthly Trial of Ascension can be cleared with the easily acquired nat 3* and 4* units. While it was one of those gachas that had very low 5* rates, it made it to where dupes don't matter unlike most gacha games that are more generous when it comes to summoning rates and that the highest rarity heroes aren't always everything.
   • In fact, some gacha games that have dupes make it to where you cannot further evolve or ascend the hero unless you get a certain amount of dupes (where, in some gacha games, you cannot ascend/evolve a hero from 3* to 4* without dupes of that same hero). This becomes a big problem in collabs (where the gacha game launches a limited-time summon event for another franchise's characters, usually anime/manga) as collab heroes cannot get any more dupes after said collab ends. Epic Seven for example has a dupe system called Memory Imprint, which is an additive stat boost depending on what position the hero is in and doesn't gate any evolution/ascension systems behind dupes, as you can still 6* and max out a hero without dupes aside from Memory Imprint.
4. Lack of content: Many gacha games snowball their player bases/revenue after 4 to 6 months at best due to players running out of content to do after completing the main game's story, especially when they're often designed to be played only once and usually via the game's "auto-battle" mode, where all the players have to do is watch their team fight waves of enemies. Therefore, it results in players getting bored with nothing to do except for further upgrading their heroes and waiting for the next story update, therefore resulting in them uninstalling and moving on to another gacha game.
   • This is the main reason why gacha games require some sort of repeatable endgame content (Spiral Abyss from Genshin Impact for example) that requires multiple teams to survive for more than at best 2 years, as a lot of gacha games have failed and shut down in less than 2 years due to the majority of their content including story being able to be cleared very quickly and just with one team of 4/5 heroes, furthered by the fact that players had nothing to do afterward except for AI vs. AI PvP (where, in most 5-hero auto battlers, the PvP content cannot be manually controlled and is entirely through "auto-battle" mode) and other unrewarding side content or limited time events.
5. Having way more servers than necessary: A common culture associated with some gacha games is having an excessive amount of servers, or having like 10 different servers as opposed to the standard 3 or 4 (US, Europe, Oceania, Asia). The problem with having so many servers is that it costs more to maintain multiple servers and it ends up segregating the player base to the point where the player base artificially feels emptier than it should be, therefore eventually resulting in server merges as a form of cost-cutting. During the early era of gacha games dating back to 2014 and 2015, several of them made it to where the Korean/Japanese versions were the same as the global versions but only had one shared international server, with some giving Global players the option to play in the Korea server via server selection.
6. Greedy monetization methods: Several of these games often find ways to cynically monetize themselves, with methods such as VIP systems (alternatively known as VIP tier benefits as VIP systems often have multiple tiers), where spenders get more quality of life such as increased resource gain, reduced summon costs, etc. These aren't limited to idle gachas or AFK Arena clones when back in 2018 and 2019, Japanese and Korean gacha game devs became convinced that when pity systems become mandatory (For example, Epic Seven didn't have a pity system at launch before implementing it in mid-2019) to where most Japanese/Korean/Chinese gacha veterans refuse to play another gacha without a pity system, whales would have nothing to spend their money on if free to play players get a full roster and complete all in-game content too quickly, which they seen as one of the most common reasons why many gacha games failed to retain both free-to-play players and whales. As a response that was seen as "positive" at first, many Korean and Japanese gacha games during that time implemented VIP systems here and there on turn-based gachas and even IP-based gacha games, such as War of the Visions as an attempt to get whales to spend more money on their games, but many of them flopped shortly afterward with many of these devs learning from gacha veterans that VIP systems have always been bad altogether as it makes the game worse for free-to-play players via paywalling quality of life and other essentials that "better" gacha games have had for free, such as sweep/skip functionality that some autobattlers have. Most gacha games nowadays pivoted towards free/paid currency separation and paid banners, or banners that can only be pulled via paid currency, which are both common monetization methods seen in many current gacha games. In fact, Eversoul was going to implement a VIP system which was found in the game's files, but was scrapped during development.
   • One of the most infamous examples of this is Taimanin RPG: Extasy. During its launch week, the developer that was publishing this globally, suddenly realized they gave too many gems from the start, so instead of just nerfing the gem-gain or just revamping the system already (because it was already launched in Japan prior to globally), they had to resort to not only nerfing the gem rewards but also putting every player into gem debt, where they cannot earn any more currency until all gem debt is cleared off for no fault of the players. This resulted in the game underperforming with the damage already done, and shutting down in less than a year globally. It's extremely hard to recover a gacha game's reputation from a launch disaster, as their developers/publishers simply put, cannot undo the damage that has already been done quickly enough.
7. Some of these gacha games often have useless or badly executed mechanics, such as automatic EXP generators where you can place down heroes and they gain EXP over time. The problem with these kinds of mechanics is that 90% of the time, the EXP gain is so low that it adds nothing to help the player's progression than just simply using auto repeat, sweep, or EXP items. Some gacha games have the option of buying gold or the game's farmable currency via premium currency, the value is so low that even whales will always avoid it, especially when the amount can be easily farmed by dailies. For example, Guardian Tales had the option of buying 1 million gold for 10,000 gems (for reference, it takes 8,100 gems to do 30 summons). Buying gold/currency via gems/paid currency becomes pointless when the gold is farmed way too quickly and ends up being more expensive than summons/gacha in many of these games.
8. Time-gated progression: A majority of these gacha games, excluding AFK Arena clones (where instead of having a stamina gauge, EXP/resources automatically accumulate over time up to a maximum of 12 hours) have a stamina mechanic that limits how long a player can grind. On the topic of stamina, some gacha games increase the amount of stamina you need for later stages and resource dungeons to the point where it takes 6-8 games/dungeons/battles to fully deplete the stamina meter, and some of these games make it to where it takes up to 16 to 20 hours to fully regenerate it, assuming that said gacha does not have daily stamina rewards or stamina generators like what Princess Connect: ReDive and Summoners War both have. Usually, the stamina meter can be increased by grinding your account level or via special buildings/mechanics. Usually, it can take up to 30 minutes to an hour to fully deplete a stamina meter via auto-repeating dungeons, as most games other than 5-hero auto battlers often do not have sweep/skip systems where you can instantly complete stages and get rewards afterward.
9. Performance issues: These games, as with many mobile games, are no strangers to performance issues and here and there to where the framerate can chug CPU-bound wise and sometimes get memory leaks (where after you exit out of a game, you can't open it back up immediately due to RAM-bound issues). While many people will easily shrug off the 1* App Store/Play Store reviews where the only thing they complain about is that it crashes on their device to the point where they can be seen as incredibly "cliche", this mentality dates far back to 2014 and 2015 when mobile games got even more demanding and required newer flagship phones to run them properly (for example, an iPhone 4 chugs on games such as Tap Titans and Summoners War). It can also be linked because of how Android games, unlike iOS, are expected to run across a multitude of hardware, including Qualcomm, MediaTek, and Exynos, it can be very hard to get optimal performance while making sure it can run on all three types of hardware. For iOS, porting on Apple Silicon is in reality much easier because it is not as fragmented as Android OS, which is why iOS and Apple Silicon Macs are getting AAA native games like Assassin's Creed: Shadows while Android devices are unlikely to in the future as of 2024.
   • The most common reason for this on even the latest flagship phones: Mobile operating systems & hardware throw out old code yearly unlike desktop operating systems to keep their system sizes down and maximize mobile performance including battery life. This approach also means that there's a chance that newer flagship hardware could end up being unoptimized on engines such as both Unity and Unreal 4 (which was used in Wuthering Waves and was prone to performance issues on launch on 2022 and 2023 flagship Android phones) and end up randomly crashing or stuttering abnormally due to certain code getting thrown out either hardware-wise or newer OS-wise. This is why Infinity Blade and many older iOS games for example broke on newer iPhones eventually leading to Apple purging all legacy App Store games for good, as the iPhone 6 and newer could not run the outdated aspect ratio/resolution of these games or any of the old code including the legacy Metal API, which is Apple's proprietary graphics solution on iOS and macOS.
10. Cash grabbing on IPs: Many of these gacha games are made to cash in on popular franchises and IPs, usually anime and manga. When Fate/Grand Order, based on the Fate franchise became a huge success in Japan, many gacha game devs have tried to imitate its success. Therefore, with how many limitations IP-based gachas have, they often have shorter lifespans, especially taking in mind those only released in Japan. One example of an IP-based gacha that didn't even last a year was Grancrest War: Quartet Conflict, which not only flopped in Japan but also globally.
    • The worst example of this is Devil May Cry: Peak of Combat. At first, the developer behind this game, NebulaJoy, best known for Mega Man X Dive (which was one of the few gacha games to get offline versions), was aiming to make a faithful mobile version of Devil May Cry, but then simply to pander to the Chinese gacha game players, they turned it into a Honkai Impact 3rd/Punishing: Gray Raven knockoff where you run 3 party members and there's this tag system with enter/exit attacks. Simply put, it had to compete against other games like Solo Leveling: Arise, Wuthering Waves, and Zenless Zone Zero within that same year which were much bigger successes and were in the same genre. The game was eventually announced to be shutting down in China in December of 2024, with its global shutdown yet to be announced.
    • While gacha games based on Japanese/Korean anime IPs are hit or miss, gacha games based on Western franchises (TV shows, cartoons, etc) such as Tom Clancy's Elite Squad are often no better, as they're often made by developers who lack understanding of how the gacha gaming industry works and thus most of the time they shut down quickly due to them not making enough money to sustain themselves financially. For example, Adventure Time Heroes, which was just a Raid Shadow Legends knockoff based on the Adventure Time series, ended up shutting down less than a year after it soft-launched in Southeast Asian countries. This is also furthered by the fact that gacha games based on Western franchises have lesser appeal towards the three big gacha markets; China, Korea, and Japan.
11. Regarding the common argument that gacha games' stories are better than stories in AAA/full games: It's very hard to get invested in a gacha game's story when in reality, most of that is going to become nullified as many gacha games do not finish their stories, or simply put, shut down on a cliffhanger altogether before EoS/shutting down. Back then, many gacha games told their stories in the cookie-cutter portrait-to-portrait lobby-based dialogue with zero interaction with text appearing instantly. Only a few gacha games finish their stories before EoS/shutting down, but most of the time, they do not, shutting down in a way where the plot is left open for another episode or season. This is because as gacha games are live services, they are expected to keep the story going as long as possible. Summoners War for example averts this trope, as instead of going for an endless plot where each of the episodes/worlds are usually meant to be played only once, the dev team focused more on replayable endgame content (such as Trial of Ascension which resets monthly) which played a big role in being able to retain its playerbase over 10 years.
    • On top of that, most gacha games' stories cannot be revisited once the gacha game shuts down for good (see WMOTGF no. 13 for more information), forever buried in the sands of time.
12. Global shafting: Gacha game developers or publishers would often do paltry practices that hinder the experience of global servers but not their original/native Japan/Korea/China versions. This can range from raised summon prices, to various changes such as censorship, etc. The most common reason for this practice usually stems from where most of these games that did this practice were in fact not doing too well either commercially or financially in China, Japan, or South Korea, the three biggest gacha game markets. Therefore, the devs (sometimes with an external publisher) decide to launch their gacha game globally as a financial "band-aid solution" against just throwing in the towel altogether. It's been proven that if a gacha game already failed to garner success in all three major markets, it is even less likely to succeed anywhere else.
    • The biggest example was Border Reign, alternatively known as Kingsense globally, where Superprism, a publisher decided to pick it up for a global release in May 2021. Aside from many launch disaster antics including a server rollback (where the gacha game reverses everything to a previous state, the worst being launch time) and a 5* rating campaign where the official Discord launched an event that eventually got canceled due to backlash, the game ended up shutting down afterward in less than half a year. It was later found out that Kingsense was actually a publishing job of a Japanese gacha game that had already failed critically and was on life support back in 2019 and launched in China in January 2021, where it also received heavy criticism and flopped there as well.
    • Another example of this was where N-Innocence, a Japanese side-scrolling action gacha with fighting game style elements, released in the US even though the Japan version was already dead, which resulted in both the Global (only the US) and Japan shutting down that year, with the US version only lasting 10 months as its dev wanted to postpone the US shutdown until December when Japan already shutdown in August. The game failed to retain its playerbase due to slow updates and lack of dev communication.
13. Poor longevity: Since the early years of gacha gaming (2013 to 2016 when people called these games different things before the term "gacha game" was standardized and when Facebook was king when it came to these games), one of the biggest factors that led to these games having a very bad reputation is that they are notorious for having very short lifespans and shutting down very frequently, where most of these gacha games do not live past 2 to 3 years at best, with 2023 seeing a ton of gacha games that didn't even last a year. For example, Ezetta Prophecy only lasted one month before shutting down due to sunk cost fallacy going on within the devs. Because how there are too many gacha games which causes oversaturation, it takes a lot of luck and risk-taking for a gacha game to manage to get past the 2-year reputation (as many failed gacha games EoS/shutdown around a year and a half, or around 16 to 18 months from launch). Usually when they shutdown, as with typical live service/MMORPG shutdowns, they become permanently unplayable, or in some cases, they may have a "memorial mode" where you can view artwork, cutscenes, etc. When compared to most live service games or MMORPGs, gacha games are a lot more oversaturated than those kinds of games, which results in many of them shutting down very frequently. Very few gacha games, with Sword Art Online: Memory Defrag being one of the first examples, get offline versions.
    • A very common reason why most of these games shut down very quickly is that they were unable to make enough revenue for their developers to stay afloat, therefore resulting in the developers shutting down, which is why most of these gacha devs are never to be seen again after their gacha game shuts down afterward, buried in the sands of time. This leads to a common pattern where prior to a gacha game's EoS/shutdown, the gacha game suddenly goes without updates, events, or any new content for an extended period of time, which is often referred to as radio silence/unexpected maintenance mode, where it is usually followed up after 4-6 weeks of no updates with the EoS/shutdown announcement. Usually during this phase, the devs are under negotiations about the future of the gacha game, most likely EoS/shutdown.
    • Gacha games often have to update at a much more frequent pace than typical MMORPGs, as they're often meant to be played in short bursts of time as with the majority of mobile games, usually averagely around 2 weeks every Tuesday on many gacha games.

Examples

Good examples

1. MiHoYo/HoYoverse gachas (Genshin Impact, Honkai Impact 3rd, Honkai: Star Rail, and Zenless Zone Zero)
2. Epic Seven
3. Guardian Tales
4. Blue Archive
5. Granblue Fantasy
6. Fate/Grand Order
7. Arknights
8. Azur Lane
9. Fire Emblem Heroes
10. Project Sekai: Colorful Stage (also known as Hatsune Miku Project Sekai: Colorful Stage internationally).
11. Kingdom Hearts Union χ[Cross]
12. The Battle Cats
13. Pokemon Masters EX
14. Limbus Company

Bad/failed examples

These are many examples of failed gacha games. As stated above, those many failures aren't limited to Japanese gachas that mostly don't make their way globally, as this reputation also extends to Chinese and Korean gachas. Many of these games have failed to retain their playerbase after the first few months after launch and ended up shutting down in 2 years or less due to very low revenue, or ended up jumping the shark, making drastic updates that eventually caused their playerbase to get fed up with the game and quit.

1. WAVE!!! Naminori Boys was a Japanese otome gacha game based on the iconic WAVE!! IP that launched in 2021 to a huge disaster, bugs were rampant, and it was reported that the text would end up being replaced with placeholders if the device was set to anything else but Japanese. The final nail in the coffin was when the developer, MAGES decided to do a maintenance to fix the game. Then the maintenance got prolonged again and again until at least one month when it was announced on X that the game was going to be shutting down for good. Excluding the prolonged maintenance, the game only lasted three days.
2. Closers RT: New Order was a Korean gacha spinoff of the MMO Closers that launched in 2023 to abysmal financial results, and then after 2 days, the developer decided to pull the plug on the game itself and issued refunds to everyone with the game shutting down in only 7 days after it launched. The game's rating dropped down to 2* before shutting down with poor action combat that failed to compete with the likes of Honkai Impact 3rd and similar games as it was a 3D auto battler loosely based on Dragalia Lost, bugs and glitches, and inferior graphics compared to other gacha games of its time.
3. Love Live School Idol Festival II miracle live was the direct sequel to Love Live School Idol Festival, which the predecessor shut down before making way for the sequel. However, it failed to garner any successful revenue against other competing gachas both in Korea and Japan when it launched in Japan first. Then, in 2024, it was announced that the game was going to get a release globally, but with a catch; the game would be shutting down in only three months, with its EoS/shutdown announced before the game was even released, to begin with. The game ended up underperforming and killed its franchise for good afterward. Typically, most gacha games shut down micro-transactions upon EoS announcement in 1-2 months, but this was one of the exceptions, making it sound more like a last ditch cash grab since they were obligated to release it globally despite it already failing in Japan. After the failure, the game's publisher, Bushiroad would step back from publishing gacha games in June 2024.

   

   The EoS announcement before the gacha game even released.

4. Brave Frontier: ReXona, then known as BFX, was supposed to mark the comeback of the famous Brave Frontier franchise developed by Alim. However, aside from its uninteresting gameplay which can be best described as somewhat like Soul Seeker where gameplay revolves around summoning heroes in a battle where they attack and leave the field after a while, it failed to get gamers intrigued especially with its outdated looking graphics that feel like a mid-2010s 3D gacha game. Eventually, the game shut down in less than a year (September 2021 to April 2022, with EoS announcement 3 months in advance on January), taking all of the other Brave Frontier games with it and killing the whole franchise for good, with Alim moving onto new IPs afterward. Like Terra Battle 2 which only lasted one year, it proved to gacha devs that making direct sequels to gacha games that try to co-exist with the predecessors never works.
5. Muv-Luv Dimensions, then changed to Immortals: Muv-Luv Alternative, was an action twin-stick shooter gacha game based on the Muv-Luv franchise that started as a visual novel before expanding towards manga and anime spinoffs. When the game launched in 2022, it crashed disastrously with a 1% SSR rate with no pity system as late as 2022, tons of bugs, including a duping bug where converting guest accounts into registered accounts would for some reason give the account free summons and it can be stacked multiple times. After a planned ban wave and a fallout stemmed from Japanese gacha players, the game was pulled within six hours after release. However, the devs didn't give up on the gacha game just yet, as they decided to polish it some more for a re-release on July 11, 2023.
6. Super String was a Korean turn-based gacha game that launched on May 25, 2021, in Korea and November 26, 2021, globally that went for realistic-style graphics similar to what several Korean MMOs did. The devs made sure that the game could be well enjoyed by F2P (free-to-play) players with no paid currency pulls or limited-time characters. However, this was held back via the game's failure to retain their players long-term via slow content updates, sheer lack of content, and the fact that free-to-play players ended up getting everything too quickly. These factors combined eventually alienated not only free-to-play players, but also whales and spenders, which resulted in paltry revenue earned for the devs. This caused the game to shut down on March 28, 2023, less than two years since the game launched. This is an example of how generosity can hurt a gacha game's reputation, rather than help it.
7. Witch's Weapon was a Japanese gacha game from DMM Games that launched in 2019 and shut down in less than 2 years, but has garnered somewhat of a cult following including posthumous collaborations. Similar to what many Japanese gacha devs did in 2018 and 2019, it was one of the few non-idle gachas to have VIP systems, and reportedly, the VIP system it had was designed to expire after a set period and it was one of the VIP systems where parts of it can be unlocked for F2P players, including the auto-battle. The gameplay boiled down to just locking onto targets and watching the hero attack them automatically with a variety of weapons that are summoned via the gacha banner with an aesthetic somewhat similar to Closers. When the COVID pandemic impacted the world in 2020, which also caused people to pull back from spending and many other gacha games to shut down due to failing revenue, it was then announced to shut down later that year due to low revenue and its inability to retain its player base long-term.
8. Revived Witch, developed by Chinese developer PixelNeko and published globally by Yostar Limited was anticipated to be one of the next fantasy pixel gacha games with its release going up against Blue Archive from Nexon Company, which was already progressing through their redemption arc after many failed gacha games such as Lyn the Lightbringer and Overhit. It had a solid launch but fell off very quickly both revenue-wise and player retention due to its sheer lack of content and having too many useless playable characters where majority of the game's content including the game's story can be completed with just three heroes with no incentive to build more heroes/multiple teams. The stamina system it had was excessive, to where stamina cap increases through grinding its absurdly high account level cap were very minimal to the point where it barely helped, aside from the fact that resource dungeons (the currency doubled as EXP for heroes) took a lot of stamina to the point where the stamina ran out extremely quick. The game was announced to be shut down in May 2023 and then later in China that year, less than 2 years later.
9. When it comes to gacha games that jumped the shark, the most infamous example was the Korean gacha King's Raid. It was a four-hero autobattler (at the time, most autobattlers had you run 5 heroes) that had superior graphics compared to most gacha games, and tried to stand out amongst others via having players easily get the heroes and having the whale stuff be focused on hero and weapon progression rather than just having you summon dupes of heroes. However, aside from the fact that it relied on having too many confusing progression systems and having a "gear destruction on failure" mechanic similar to what many 2000s and early 2010s free-to-play MMOs did which most gacha games already ditched in favor of gear XP enhancement systems, internal issues within the developer, Vespa, would cause them to jump the shark via nerfing and revamping features for the worst in an attempt to make a last-ditch effort to try and save the game's failing revenue. The backlash from Korean gacha veterans got so dire that it caused Vespa to lay off a large number of employees and eventually put the game into maintenance mode because of how many people already left the company altogether, where it sparked memes about King's Raid outliving tons of gachas via its current maintenance mode state.
   • Aside from that, Vespa released another gacha, Time Defenders, which also failed and shut down in less than 2 years after launching in 2022 because of how much they stretched too thin financially with King's Raid, Time Defenders, and an untitled Shining Force project with SEGA.
10. Exos Heroes, developed by Korean company LINE Games is another one of the biggest examples of jumping the shark. It was basically a 3D turn-based gacha with high-quality 3D graphics similar to the likes of King's Raid. However, what caused its downfall like with King's Raid was its massive changes that ended up turning away its player base, where in 2021, they launched a big update which ended up with tons of bugs, nerfs to pre-existing characters, and many other drastic changes. This, alongside the lack of content throughout 2021 and 2022, eventually lead to its downfall and tons of players quitting, where in 2023, it was announced that Exos Heroes would be shutting down for good both globally and in Korea. It basically lasted three and a half years as it launched back in 2019.
11. Avatar: Generations, based on the iconic Avatar: The Last Airbender TV series by Nickelodeon developed by Navigator Games and published by CDE Entertainment (formerly under Square Enix). Being that this was one of the few gacha games to be based on Western TV series, with the other being Adventure Time Heroes, the expectations were very low as gacha games developed by Western developers (US, Canada, or Europe) are often made with a huge lack of understanding of how the gacha gaming market works. The gameplay, like Adventure Time Heroes, boiled down to being a mediocre RAID: Shadow Legends clone with none of the charm of other competing gacha games, with low-quality 3D graphics that feel like one of those outdated gacha games from 2014 to 2016. The game ended up shutting down in less than a year and half when it soft-launched in August 11, 2022, or if taking in mind its full launch in January 31, 2003, less than a year in December 2, 2022. It was stated that it was due to Navigator Games going under layoffs and eventually shutting down after failed investments. This is a great example of why most gacha games based on Western franchises/IPs fail; they solely have to rely on gacha players and whales from the US, Canada, and Europe and don't do too well in Japan, Korea, and China.
12. Gameloft had one gacha game that dates way back to the early era of gacha games, Dragon Summoner, released back in February 2013, a year before 2014, the year where mobile gaming got a big uprising with games like Piano Tiles, Flappy Bird, and Make It Rain, as well as the many Korean gacha games that went global at the time. The game's graphics were unimpressive with an interface that looked like it was copying off Rage of Bahamut as it went for a mix of pixel sprites and drawn backgrounds. Eventually, with the game's poor revenue globally and lack of content, the game ended up shutting down in only one year and was buried in obscurity, like many older gacha games such as Monster Blade by Nubee, which was an Infinity Blade clone with gacha. This was back in the early years of gacha gaming (2011 to 2017), where back then, gacha games were basically seen as a niche thing and most of them didn't have very much YouTube coverage with their only social media presence being Facebook, as Facebook was used for saving progress across devices.

Comments

Loading comments...