>>712463516
>Profitable
That's the issue. There's been a lot of data on this, its not that everyone who's playing gacha are paying $20-50 and calling it a day en masse which is leading up to huge profits in the successful games. Instead, there are a relative few users paying asinine amounts - the kind of people who say
>Oh yeah I only spent $400 this month I didn't like this event or that banner etc
are a tiny percentage of everyone who tries the game. That's part of the issue. The same is true for a lot of other shitty monetization like "item mall" based Korean MMOs. Its one reason they tend to all spiral down into the floor for the experience as they squeeze every bit out, leaving the only people playing a handful of people spending a fortune, so the company makes content to ensure those people keep buying item boxes , which of course turns the entire thing into a completely untenable experience for anyone who's NOT that devoted, but that's not the point - they're making the game for the 3 assholes who will buy $10K worth of item boxes or gacha pulls or whatever per month at this point .
Even with games like Apex Legends, LoL, Marvel Rivals and as of recently Overwatch 2 (the original Overwatch had a much more fair system) and other "F2P, but Battle Pass FOMO and skins cost a ton or have lots of events where things cost even more", its a handful of hardcore esports, streamers, and big spenders as the target. Overwatch 2 had a huge drop of players for a variety of reasons and rightly so compared to OW1 during the transition, but it wasn't too troublesome because they just kept adding more ways to monetize the few willing to pay, even if it isolated them from the masses. That's before we even get into all the psychological tricks that gacha and others use to basically fuck with certain people who have broken brains - they hire PhDs to short circuit your brain; common since the mobile age of monetization etc.
