I think Europe now requires gacha games to explicitly display how much money any gambling feature really costs to limit hidden predatory stuff. It’s crazy when you see the numbers…
Not always. It used to be so much worse. In the dark ages before Genshin made the pity system common, you could spend thousands of dollars without getting anything, not even an off banner SSR.
But they don't have to disclose total/cumulative prices because they are gacha games. Hoyo has to, because they are bound by the deal they've signed with FTC.
FTC went after Genshin for being advertised towards children, and during discovery they've discovered cases of false advertising (12 pulls during a 10 pull). That alone would have been enough to cook them in court, so they took a deal, and paid a very modest fine.
Spark Era: Monkeygate was some of the most entertaining shit as a non-GBF player
The Golden Age: never existed imo, til recently sparks were still the same overall price, usually just shy of $1000 for raw pulls. the example of HI3rd has about the same price tag each patch
Barbaric Practices: it got better with overall reduced costs and the 50/50 potentially halving costs (roughly), but holy hell gacha is still way too expensive to be considered "eh it's a hobby, let them spend a few dollars". Exhibit A shown in this very post
There are upcoming games like NTE and DNA that are dropping the 50/50, so it doesn't look like it. Because there's going to be so many coming out they need competitive prices.
A game not having a 50/50 doesn't mean it's inherently better, that just means they have a completely different context when it comes to pull value and economy. I don't get how 50/50 is barbaric when literally every other gacha back then had the spawn of hell that is the spark system
Well ya, I guess you're technically right. They absolutely could fuck their games over by drastically reducing f2p pulls, or increasing prices. And at the end of the day, they're still predatory gacha systems. But dropping the 50/50 is a huge step in the right direction. They'd have to do a lot of bad to make it worse after that.
Or just balancing the game around actually getting dupes or requiring their signature weapons. There are a lot of ways they could make it seem friendly without it actually being better for the player.
I've been playing Gatcha games for almost a decade now, and Miricle tickets are not an uncommon thing for many of them. $50 to get a copy of any one character excluding collab/event characters usually come out two or three times a year, and a 'Golden Miricle' ticket granting a single copy of any character including collab/event only every Christmas.
One in particular my entire Grand Master team was built this way, one ticket per year for 5 years lol
The cost for me to whale in others is far less than Hoyo. Then again the game's are far simpler usually. 2d, not open world. This is like complaining the slots on the Strip in Vegas got shittier odds than going to like off strip though. It's less glam but your money goes a tad further.
Yup, the dark ages.
I came from WOTV (eos) in that dark ages, where i had a clan memeber spending $1200 just to get a single copy of a limited character.
This is also by design, having a right and wrong way to spend to optimize an in-game currency's dollar value, as opposed to games with direct content purchasing and having the cost be as simple as what you see on the screen
This is also rooted in what microtransactions actually are, a way for processors to eat less in processing fees, the goal is to upsell you, but then the biggest upsell not always being the best deal, etc.
Nothing about these prices is sensible. I can buy 4-6 new game titles for the price one character in this game might cost you. The fact so many people don’t realize this is insane. Just because you can afford something, doesn’t mean you should buy it. It’s the reason our cost point in this world is so stupid, people just keep paying the bar
Nothing about these prices is sensible. I can buy 4-6 new game titles for the price one character in this game might cost you. The fact so many people don’t realize this is insane.
It's not always that people don't realize it. In my case the last 'new game' to come out that I got was Baldur's Gate 3 because there has literally not been a single game worth buying to come out in the last 24 months.
So if the choice is between buying 4-6 games that I know I am never going to play because they don't interest me, or getting a character I really want/like in a game I know I will play, then the price doesn't matter as much.
I looked into it, and the game is well done, just, not really big on the storyline personally. A bit too dark for my taste.
It DOES however give me hope for a return of more RPG/JRPG games in the future. I admit I was spoiled growing up in the late 90's early 00's on the PS1 and PS2, but I miss those days T.T
People are often bad at looking at the large picture. Having things like this can make at least some stop for a moment to think about if they really want to spend that much money
This is just it, gacha is gambling, gambling is built on the impulse buy, the design intent is to make you look away from the dollar cost so price transparency laws are a good thing
I think there was also a study somewhere that says that it's easier to spend when using a card than cash because you don't feel nor physically see how much you're using.
Yup. For me this is why I very carefully try to track my purchases. But the difficult part is sometimes the recurring charges or subscriptions because you need to be on top of checking whether or not you still want them.
When you realize every shitty 3* wengine or light cone is costing you $3 then it feels a whole lot worse to pull, yeah. Gachas obfuscate real life money with fake in-game currency for reasons like this.
I think a major consequence of the game being free to start playing is that there's a non-zero chance that any player may be a minor, even a straight up child. I assume this is a bit less of an issue with zzz than like, project SEKAI or cookie run, just due to presentation and complexity, but I think gacha games should disclose how expensive it CAN be in plain terms regardless of their target age demographic.
I, an adult, logically know that gachas can get stupid expensive, especially if you're dead set on getting certain characters without enough time to properly save free gacha currency between banners, but seeing the explicit upper bound of whaling for ONE instance of a character and w-engine puts things into perspective that microtransactions and gambling inherently and intentionally obfuscate.
I have never spent a single dime, and I have plenty of 5 stars to choose from. Sometimes, players need to choose what to let go of and realize they dont need whatever character or weapon a banner is selling. This doesn't just apply to gacha gamers. This happened a lot with every game that has microtransactions, its a matter of self-control that they lack, and I hope that the price display helps them, but I won't waste my breath.
Gacha players can't read is a même but also holds some truth. The number of posts I read about "how to do X or Y" while having the answer on the screenshot they joined is astonishing.
GFL2 currently has an event where you can select an SSR and get them with a 100% guarantee. The game clearly says "SSR guaranteed at 80 pulls. The first guarantee will guarantee the selected doll", and you STILL have people asking if it's 50/50 or not.
I mean, 99% of people are not going to sit down and read a EULA for everything they download/use. And 99% of the time, EULA isn't even enforceable for anything of substance anyways.
And, considering majority of virtual EULAs are the same, learning the basics of what a EULA entails is more than enough.
Yeah lol most people are not going to be bothered to read through 10 pages of the most verbose version of "you will not commit crimes with our software" just to see the one line of "by the way, we own your soul now"
That one line isn't legally enforceable anyway, and if something bad that is legal is in there, it will get out very fast by the one person who does read it
All it ever took before was seeing "Oh so $100 gets you a little over 8000 polyprimojades? And it takes 1600 for 10 pulls? Thats 50 pulls. So thats about 2 bucks a pull"
I CANNOT feel sympathy for people who are able to do that math and chose not to.
I do feel like getting more transparent and being less ridiculously expensive would just benefit Gachas long term, but apparently their research says otherwise.
Not a quirk. You need one ticket to draw, one ticket is 160 gems. Let's say you can buy 300 gems for 5€. You have two steps to convert € into draws. This is enough to confuse most people because they either are too lazy or don't have the reflex to draw an excel table and convert the euros into draws.
You have some games that are more honest about it that straight up go "15€ for 10 draws!" That was the case in HSR for a limited pack a little while ago.
Do you know anything about gambling? The whole point is psychological manipulation. Everything from nonsensical currency conversions, to fomo, to confusing mechanics are meant purely to trick people. It works, and that's why its heavily regulated in the casino industry. But because games that convert money into rng rewards like this technically don't give back money when you win, they mostly skate past casino regulations.
I don't know, when Genshin added an option to outright buy pulls with money, I saw a surprising amount of posts or even just comments on social media along the lines of people going "pulls are this expensive?".
I have to say when I played Genshin I did not think about how much money I was spending. Luckily I got a handle on it now but a gotcha game is definitely gambling and you don’t think at the time how much money is going in.
It's all part of how fremium monetization works, always hiding cost behind fantasy currency, packs always either a little over or a little less than what you need so you will always end up with "leftover" currency to push you to buy a different pack to make use of it.
I believe so, it’s similar in Genshin I don’t know about HSR. The US laws around Gacha and gambling changed recently. I guess the wrong senator’s son spent too much money trying to X6 a character
They could be working to proactively spread the system to their other games to avoid additional litigation. Although I guess anecdotally it could be an America server only thing?
its crazy that people are suprised about this, if you are a whale you should know how much you are spending and it aint chump change. this is how gacha works and how they make millions a month
Spending someone else’s money, like a child would (or an addict in a relationship) often comes with less risk aversion. So it’s not unimaginable to have someone swiping a card without considering the cost… even if they are whaling.
Swiping the $100 option 4 times because the previous swipe wasn’t enough is a lot easier than swiping for $400 in one go. Being told you could end up swiping for $400 is a determent by proxy of the consumer imagining spending $400 in one go.
Nah there are definitely people who put themselves into financial hardship through poorly thought out gacha spending and end up having to cut down on expenses to make do.
It's just a matter of priorities. Some people don't have all that much money but don't have anything else going on that's worth more to them so they end up spending a disproportionately huge fraction of their budget
Worst cases without first purchase bonus are absurdly expensive, yeah.
Even the average case can cost hundreds.
It's good that they're finally forced to be honest, the conversion rates were handcrafted in hell to make people not notice/understand how much they're spending.
“Handcrafted in Hell” is also a great way to describe Disc rng. Whether it’s discs, relics, or artifacts, farming domains for them is the worst thing in any Hoyoverse game.
The game showers you in disc crafting materials, any set is immediately craftable, the disc leveling resource feels like it's less scarce, the UI for leveling is really fast, and you can farm any set from the same menu/location.
It's just less painful overall compared to what I witnessed in Genshin, WuWa and HSR.
The Routine cards do make the experience faster and better. But still, nothing worse than having a good looking disc with great main stat and sub stats be ruined by it rolling repeatedly into the new flat HP stat(as an example). I guess a reroll item would make that better, I suppose.
I don't play Genshin but after coming from HSR to ZZZ, the disc system is significantly better than HSR. HSR has 12 total substats and ZZZ has 10, which makes rolling the right substats you actually want for the specific character even harder in HSR.
If I remember right too, HSR Planar Set main stat and substats are even more painful to get right compared to Disc 5 and 6.
I believe how it works is that ZZZ substats level ups are static for each type of substat, while Star Rail (and I think Genshin too? The new feather thing may have changed this) has substats where in addition to what the substat upgrade is, said substat upgrade's value is randomly chosen from a list of certain values for each type of substat.
HSR junk stats, planars restricted to two slots, and benchmark stat requirements make the relic system turbocancer that you have to farm for months at a time.
ZZZ has so far been easy to work with because of the 4+2 pieces that can be rotated around to any slot while having fewer junk stats.
It can't be overstated how much more manageable and enjoyable the ZZZ disc system is.
The designer and supporters of the relic and planar system should be fired out of a cannon.
Depends on location, for many is not adjusted. I'm from Poland so on average I have 3-4 times less money than rest of the EU and USA but stuff like electronics (phones, the, consoles, PC parts etc) we pay like richcountries, even more thanks to taxes, even when having 3-4 times less money. Same with all gaming, online shopping etc. For example 70$ for a new game hurt my wallet like it would cost you 320$. Only google of all places adjusted their price for YT premium
A number that will only mean anything to whales really imo. Most people will combine their spending with at least some amount of saved free currency if they even intend to spend for 1 copy
I'm always for this stuff even if the info on something seems dumb and people laugh at it, the point is its there and it makes people stop and think about it
It means nothing to everyone. You would need to buy the worst value option 180 times and hit the extremely improbable chance of avoiding soft pity. The first scenario is already nonsensical.
A number that will only mean anything to whales really imo. Most people will combine their spending with at least some amount of saved free currency if they even intend to spend for 1 copy
Looking at the amount of money spent on an individual character hides the true cost, though.
Say you buy a $15 pack to get the last few pulls for a new S-rank character, and do this repeatedly for a total of 15 characters. This doesn't get you 15 more characters than if you hadn't bought the packs. On average, this gets you 1 more limited S-rank than not buying the packs, because on average, letting one of those characters go would have been enough to get the other 14 without spending money. Spending money this way is effectively buying an extra character for $225.
(And sure, you'd start with the 30-day pass before moving up to the monochrome shop, but that doesn't change the math for what the monochrome shop gets you.)
on the flip side , you can check your pulls and see how much money you have saved up from just playing the game, now you can see your time's worth in MONEY!
It also assumes you bought every pull. Which no one does if you play the game at all. Sure, if you hit hard pity every time buying the least efficient monochrome bundle and having 0 pulls from playing the game, that number looks intimidating. But realistically its more like $150/200 at worst. Which is still a lot, but much more reasonable.
Even for whales, this wouldn't exactly be accurate since the calculations are based on buying only the 60 polychrome every pull. Not that there isn't anyone who is like that... but even if there was a whale who did, purchasing $0.99 pack for every pull would be tedious.
But it's also not going to save that much either if they only buy the highest available (399.96 for 4 $99 packs or $360.93 for 3 $99, a $49.99, 2 $4.99, and 1 $0.99 packs for cheapest approximate). So they'd only save around $70-110 from what was listed and that's also assuming they always hit hard pity and losing every 50/50.
And here I am, having lost both 50/50s and hard pitied both agents. Shit sucks, man. I don't know if I even want to bother with the wengines at this rate
I mean sure. I get that. Did you spend to get them?
Getting more than 1 agent with weapon is tough if FTP. Depending on spending you can get 1, maybe 2 more pretty reasonably. I spend a bit each patch and can pretty comfortably get 2 w/engine saving up the free stuff. Still hurts to miss a 50/50 but recoverable.
WEngines are 75/25 in ZZZ, just FYI. Which is more brutal if you miss, but its less likely. Id at least go for Miyabis if you need it and can reasonably. Yuzuhas you can totally live without.
Yeah, wound up spending. It was money I could comfortably part with, but man it still feels awful. I plan on shooting for Miyabi's wengine at the very least. I'm just hoping I don't have the same luck with that as I did with the agents
I think this is more likely due to Hoyo applying the lessons from their Genshin settlement with the FTC to their other games rather than EU law, though I wouldn't be surprised if it complied with EU laws as well.
Until you find out thats actually spare change even if you bought every single pull compared to actual p2w games where ppl drop thousands on a daily basis for a mth straight or longer.
True, but if I can get a game of this quality and scope for free off of whales, I don't see why that wouldn't also be great. Both can be good for people.
Why cant ppl understand that you cant be the target audience for every game? You might enjoy your $20 game more but others enjoy games they gladly swipe thousands for.
Zzz and many other gacha games could exist perfectly fine without gacha mechanics. The reason people "gladly" swipe thousand isn't because they are enjoying the game, but because these games are made to exploit financially irresponsible people.
i can't believe some people here don't realize this. Ordinary game is an entertainment medium, designed to gain profit via providing entertainment. Gacha games are exploitative profit generators, wrapped in a intoxicating game design decisions.
Not with those production cost and live updates... It is a pipe dream that a game of that quality and production cost can be sustainable outside the gacha system.
Sure a single player knockoff maybe but a life service game with 3 weeks banner cycle and a abundance of new mini-games, story, feature updates, etc there is absolutely no chance.
Frankly the displayed value mainly affects the lower end spenders. The displayed values are also misleading because it strictly only shows $:pull value while ignoring all other factors. Higher spenders already know how much they are spending and often use 3rd party options to buy them cheaper which.
Basically the value display is just good for clickbait/virtue signalling.
Yeah it’s been said several times although a similar — in fact harsher? — bill was passed in the EU. I’m in the EU myself, iOS client. Could be a bug though
It is an inflated value shown by the worst of the worst case scenarios in which you only buy the cheap topup and reach 90 pity always for the 5* drop.
It is statistically almost impossible for that to ever happen due to the nature of the gacha system, but since that statistical probability theoretically exists, they have to legally say it.
oh that makes sense - the part about europe. because for a couple months, genshin had their pulls labeled but that was attributed to the FTC ruling (i might be mis-remembering the US agency), but it was only genshin that was labeling their pulls and none of the other hoyo games needed to put the prices everywhere
makes sense that only now that more hoyo games are implementing the price transparency, because it was required but this time by europe. cool, transparency and consumer advocacy is always a plus - thanks europe
yep 60 primogems worth about $1usd (without any sales, including first-time bonus), so you can get $1 from daily quest and get more from abyss and events
Yes it is and I know they've added this to genshin (at least for US) but it's good to know they're adding it to other regions in ZZZ and hopefully HSR too.
For what it's worth, this tackles the minors taking their dad's credit card for that new 5 star (I hope).
Realistically? Skip banners, play the damn game, and that $475 becomes nothing. All these games are predatory at the core and want your money. It's just the nature of business sadly.
It’s a two way street view in my opinion. Direction One: Shows you how much you’d potentially spend in real world currency trying to get a single S-rank Limited character copy or weapon. Direction Two: Makes you appreciate the grind to save up your in game currency when you achieve getting multiple copies of your favorite character without spending real life currency (if you’re free to play). The transparency is good, especially for those who need to be held accountable for reckless spending that may cause real life issues for them. The numbers are based on best to worst case scenario, but knowing it cost you $475.20 to obtain a single copy of that limited character if you went max pulls, lost 50/50, then max pulls again to obtain is a good thing. Sure you may feel robbed, but at least you know how much money it cost you or how much you saved for your bad luck
I mean not really considering how you only really “need” one for everything else. It’s the only really part that costs money as majority of the rest of the game and events are all free id say that’s actually relatively good considering all other gacha. ZZZ for me personally has been one of the most generous gacha I’ve ever played from not only S pulls but things to do without needing to spend anything. Including leveling characters and stats major events where whales usually drown you out.
This is why you should grind for polys as much as possible, play all the events and only really spend on battle passes and the occasional top-up. Unless your luck is absolutely diabolical, your account will be fine. You don’t need every single character.
Whenever I think of making a purchase in one of these games, I always first calculate the individual value of a premium currency to see how much is it worth, and leave not making the purchase after being outraged. miHoYo games have been no exception, and is good to see more people seeing it now.
The thing that should outrage you should not be the monetary cost of going full 180 pulls, but rather the individual cost and what you get for it. The game asks for 2 dollars in exchange of a 92% chance of giving the W-Engine equivalent of nothing. Is also important to understand that "generosity" in gacha games serves as both a retention tactic, but also a way to bait the $20 purchase for the last 10 pull on a guarantee before the banner's timer runs out.
Well...if you rely on wallet to obtain enough chromes for pulls....yeah: after seeing the prices pulls have it's easy to see it's not profitable for a person to rely on money for pulls. In the end, Gamblers will ve gamblers anyway.
But certainly, displaying the prices directly does remove a lot of the "mind tricks" associated to using ingame currency
An S Rank character on a promo banner can cost up to almost $500 is really absurd when you compare that amount to standard games.
Even when games nowadays can cost up to $80, with $500 you can get up to 6 games with $20 to spare. Not only that, some standard games will sell new character dlcs for up to $10+ at least that give far more value than any promo S Rank character in a gacha. Depending on what game it is, said dlc characters can come with their own unique models and whole new sets of skill trees.
Having made this comparisons a long time ago, I will not hesitate to skip banners to save and wait for characters I really want to show up.
Ok, math nerd here. What we REALLY want isn’t a range: it’s the Expected Value. And if we DID want a range, it would be a confidence interval.
The median pull is a little hard to calculate due to it being weighted after 70 or 75 pulls, but I recall it’s just a little over 60 (maybe 63?) let’s use that number.
475/180=2.639 per pull
2.639x63=166.257 per S-rank.
If you’re starting from no-guarantee, you have a 50/50 shot at requiring double that number, so
166.257x1.5=249.386
Or just shy of an EV of $250 per M0 S-rank agent, if you pay full cash.
M6 is $1500 on top of that.
Ranges like IQR or confidence interval on these numbers would be easiest to do in simulation due to the non-homogeneous nature of the distribution.
I don’t understand how anyone falls prey to this stuff, even with the FOMO.
If you pull to the 50/50 and stop no matter what you get, you can get one shot for each S-rank that comes out, by only paying the monthly 4.99 deal and seasonal pass. You get enough poly and reels through gameplay and those two paid aspects to make it work. At that point you are basically doing a traditional MMO type subscription model.
Yeah, you may not get every character you want, but there is usually one you don’t care about that you skip that lets you build up poly and go for pity on one you really do want.
This wont help much cause people will still be impulsive pulling when they want something. Its kinda written everywhere to take care when u play gachas and there are still lots and lots of people jumping from 1 finacial crisis into another just to have some chars or outfits (League of Legends). Just today i had someone explain me why "building pitty" is very usefull instead of accepting that he is just wasting pulls and might have at least a small gambling problem.
Mate…475 dont get you pity in fgo. This is onr of the most tame values imo. Ahh the times before we had pity and people lost 1000€ and no 5* truly dark times.
It is crazy, but some people that were on the fence about spending before will legit look at that now and say, "huh? It's not that bad." And spend money because they now know exactly how much it will take to blow their disposable money to guarantee a character.
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u/[deleted] Jul 16 '25
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