r/gachagaming • u/Aiden-Damian • 7h ago
General [BREAKERS: UNLOCK THE WORLD] MULTIPLAY VIDEO (TGS2024 ver.) Co-op.
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r/gachagaming • u/GachaModerator • 11d ago
InFold Games and Infinity Nikki have allowed us the opportunity to offer community members the chance to participate in their upcoming "Reunion Playtest" or win either a cash prize or merchandise! More info below. Image.
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Infinity Nikki: The Coziest Open-World Game
Nikki and Momo embark on a new adventure to travel across the fantastical kingdoms of Miraland, each with its own unique culture and environment. Players will encounter many characters and whimsical creatures while collecting stunning outfits of various styles. Some of these outfits possess magical abilities that are crucial for exploration.
In this vast, fantastical world, master techniques such as floating, running, and plunging to freely explore the land as well as tackle cleverly designed puzzles and levels. The joy of 3D platforming is interwoven throughout the game's open-world exploration. Each unique scenery is vibrant and charming. Soaring paper cranes, speeding wine cellar minecarts, mysterious ghost trains—so many hidden secrets are waiting to be unraveled!
Let the gacha begin! May the prize summoning rates be ever in your favor!
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Event Period
September 22 11:30 to September 29 11:30 (UTC+8) Event has ended!
Infinity Nikki "Reunion Playtest" Qualification (10 Winners!)
$50 Cash Prize (10 Winners!)
Infinity Nikki Whimstar Cushion (3 Winners!)
BONUS
If the Official Discord Server reaches 10,000 members before the end of the giveaway period, 5 additional Winners will be selected for a $20 Cash Prize (+5 Winners if Reached!)
FINAL MEMBER COUNT: 8,160 (Updated: September 29 UTC+8)
How Will Winners Be Chosen and Announced
Required Information
All Winners will need to provide the unique PIN included in their Winner message, as well as the following.
Please note that any and all personal information collected is transmitted solely and directly to official InFold Games staff. The subreddit moderation team does not have the ability to view this information.
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Entry Restrictions
Anyone from anywhere in the world is eligible to enter!
For CBT participants, minimum device requirements apply. Click Here for more information.
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Website, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram
INFINITY NIKKI
Whimsical Adventure with Endless Fun
Harnessing the power of Whim that's hidden within outfits, Nikki has the tools to help her overcome difficult trials. Her courage and determination know no bounds. The Floating Outfit allows Nikki to hover gracefully, the Gliding Outfit summons a giant flower for high-altitude flights, and the Shrinking Outfit places her on Momo's head as he navigates through small spaces. These Ability Outfits open up many possibilities for adventure and thus offer an endless amount of fun!
Wonderful Moments with Endless Immersion
Miraland is also a fantastic place for you to relax and enjoy life.
With sunrises, sunsets, and the ever-changing weather, the creatures of Miraland have their own pace of life. Remember their daily routines and try to find them! Wear outfits with special abilities to fish by the river or catch bugs with a net. The game features an in-depth gathering system where the items Nikki collects become great clothing materials.
Stroll through flower fields and meadows, walk along mountain streams, and encounter merchants offering special outfits. Let your inspiration rise with the paper cranes on the streets. Use Momo's Camera and dress Nikki up in your favorite outfits. You can choose the perfect backgrounds and frames to take pictures of her, capturing every heartwarming moment of your journey anytime, anywhere.
Pear-fect Guides Recruitment
Pear-fect Guides is a non-profit content creation team based on secondary creations of the game Infinity Nikki. This team is a creative organization composed of stylists, led by the game team. As part of this team, you'll collaborate with stylists from around the globe, becoming their "Pear-Pal" in real life, and offering practical support along the way.
Check our official account and post for more details:
Pear Pal Official, Pear-fect Guides Recruitment
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Contest Guidelines
The entry period for 'Infinity Nikki "Reunion Playtest" Global Giveaway' is September 22 11:30 - September 29 11:30 (UTC+8), listed above under 'Entry Period'. Comments will be locked once the Entry Period closes, and Winners will be promptly notified and messaged with next steps, according to 'Required Information'. Winners will have until October 2 at 11:30 (UTC+8) to fill out the 'Collection Form' as directed in their Winner message, and provide the requested information to claim their Prize. Any and all personal information collected is transmitted solely and directly to official InFold Games staff. The subreddit Moderation Team does not have the ability to view this information. Not claiming a Prize within the 'Claim Period' will result in Prize forfeiture. CBT Qualification and download details will be distributed via official email from InFold Games in a timeframe dictated by InFold Games. Accounts must be created prior to giveaway start to be eligible. Only one valid entry is permitted, per participant. Duplicate comments will not be counted as entries. Winners are chosen at random from a pool of all valid entrants. All entrants have an equal chance at winning. The Moderation Team has the right to disqualify members suspected of breaking the Contest Guidelines from all current or future Contests at their discretion, without notification.
Disclaimer
The Moderation Team does not accept payment or kickbacks in any way for collaborations, events, or rewards we might host or offer, nor do we make or remove posts or comments at the request of anyone. Our goal continues to be maintaining a neutral third-party space for news and discussion, while also helping to promote the success of the genre and offer additional ways to connect the community with the developers and publishers behind their favorite games.
r/gachagaming • u/AutoModerator • 4d ago
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r/gachagaming • u/Aiden-Damian • 7h ago
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r/gachagaming • u/JackfruitNatural5474 • 16h ago
r/gachagaming • u/Aiden-Damian • 2h ago
r/gachagaming • u/Devittraisedto2 • 5h ago
Randomly remembered this today, I was playing my first gacha which was Kingdom Hearts Unchained X. Slowly learned about constant powercreep, medals(the in-game units) were always being powercrept every 1-2 weeks and more and more new combat mechanics were added, such as the amount of buffs, the types of buffs, abundance of HP. I vaguely remember one of the bosses had more than 50,000 HP bar.
Since medals were constantly being powercrept, my setup was pretty much unable to keep up, so I went to look into free premium currency generators online and believed they were real. In hindsight, I should've known, but I was young and dumb as shit at the time, so I just went and put my game information there and snickered to myself "hehe I'll be rich as fuck soon". Shit didn't happen, nothing happened, felt disappointed. Years later I realized I could've been scammed and now I want to smack my younger self.
Still hate what that game became after PvP was implemented, and that they made the mobile game canon in the entire Kingdom Hearts series.
r/gachagaming • u/rosemarymemory • 12h ago
r/gachagaming • u/Valuable-Village1669 • 1d ago
In this essay, I will aim to provide a relatively non-technical explanation of why gacha makes so much money relative to other forms of monetization while not compromising player satisfaction to a proportionate degree.
There is a concept in economics called consumer surplus. It can be defined as the difference between what a consumer pays and what they are willing to pay for a product. For example, if I think a skin is so desirable that I would be willing to pay $15 for it, but it is on sale for only $5, then I have a consumer surplus of $10. All businesses want to minimize consumer surplus, because an excess of it means that there is money that a person is willing and able to pay without overly compromising demand for the product. In other words, companies want to milk you out of your money as much as possible without making you feel bad enough for you to stop spending.
With a typical product, there is a balancing act in setting the price. For instance, if the price of that skin was set at $10, that might decrease consumer surplus for me but might also make someone who is only willing to pay $9 not spend, and also leave money on the table for someone willing to pay $20. In the first case, they have lost consumer surplus of $9, and in the second case, $10. Thus, there is always an inefficiency in consumer surplus with typical pricing. This inefficiency is impossible to reduce beyond a certain level.
An important point is that dissatisfaction with pricing is only created when a price is beyond the willingness to pay and the consumer surplus turns negative. The whale is not mad that the skin is $15, but the dolphin who was priced out at $10 definitely is. Even if consumer surplus for a group is close to zero but positive, those people will not be too dissatisfied because they, by definition, are still willing to pay that much for the product based on how much they value it. Keep this in mind, it will be important later on in this essay.
Now lets get closer to the heart of why gacha works so well. Price discrimination is the idea of "different prices for different people". You give people different prices based on some discriminator variable as an analogue for their willingness to pay. For instance, movie theaters have cheaper tickets for seniors and students. Have you ever wondered why that is? It's because by pricing those tickets lower, they capture the consumer surplus they would have lost if those groups did not buy tickets due to the regular price being higher than their willingness to pay.
People generally see price discrimination as unfair, because they are forced to pay different set prices for the same product. And it doesn't generally go very far in practice, because a business cannot price something perfectly for everybody without reading their minds or having access to their finances. But what if you could flip the situation? What if you could make it so the consumers willingly choose the maximum price on their own?
Ideally, you'd then approach a hypothetical situation called "perfect price discrimination", where each person is given a price that is perfectly at the limit of their individual willingness to pay, reducing consumer surplus to zero and maximizing your profits.
I've explained enough now to get to the main point: gacha works so well specifically because people can spend however much they want with the reasonable expectation that they will get the product they desire. When a player spends $5 on a gacha game, it gets you theoretically just as much as $100: a chance at obtaining a unit. The nature of gacha games being probability based means that any expenditure could feasibly be the difference between obtaining what you want and not. Just one single pull could be the difference between wasting your currency and walking away victorious. Coupled with factors like FOMO and guarantees to ensure expenditure never feels wasted, along with duplicates to ensure whales' absurd consumer surplus can still be extracted, and gacha is perhaps the most effective system of monetization at minimizing consumer surplus. Every single spender, on their own, can decide to spend enough to minimize their consumer surplus, willingly!
This is why gacha makes so much money. A whale can spend $1000 if they want and a minimum wage worker can spend $5 on what they want, most importantly, on the same product. Traditional microtransactions result in people being priced out and losing the opportunity to have a particular product if it is priced too high. This causes discontent and negative player sentiment. Case in point - League of Legends' $500 Ahri skin. Such a pricing controversy is a non-issue in a gacha with fixed premium currency prices, because things can, by probability, be had for free. There is no such thing as something being only for rich people in most gacha. Theoretically, a complete free to play could also obtain a C6 Raiden Shogun, just as a whale could spend $500 to achieve the same. And the crazy reality of the matter is, both will walk away not feeling ripped off!
This is the real reason why gacha games make millions of dollars every month while traditional games have to fight for peanuts in comparison. If a traditionally monetized game priced something such that spending $1000 was an option, it would cause people to drop the game. However, in gacha, such a thing is commonplace. They can get tons of money from people, while having them clamoring to spend more. It is because gacha is perhaps the most perfectly designed monetization system of them all to approach the "perfect price discrimination" pinnacle.
*As a disclaimer, this essay is purely for informative purposes and does not intend to promote or extol gacha as being a good thing to implement. Gacha has many negative consequences due to this ability to approach reducing consumer surplus to zero. Specifically, if a consumer has a willingness to spend greater than what they actually can afford to spend, gacha will do much better at crossing that line due to its greater efficiency. Thus, gacha can be quite dangerous for those who cannot control their spending.
r/gachagaming • u/selius1212 • 1d ago
With the senran kagura collab in bd2 opening today, we got yomi as a welfare free 5 star. While not the absolute worst unit in the game, she has very little practical application.
So that made me wonder, who is the worst welfare you've ever seen?
r/gachagaming • u/Aiden-Damian • 1d ago
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r/gachagaming • u/TheBatIsI • 23h ago
This morning my twitter feed was filled with pictures of a new Arknights Unit which is an alt form of a unit already voiced by Kawasumi. This new form is a regal blonde woman with a blue and gold color scheme.
And just a few days ago I learned about Gloria from Sword of Convallaria who is another regal blonde woman with a blue and gold color scheme.
Websites like Wikipedia and behindthevoiceactors don't cover every role she's had, so it really makes me wonder, just how often does Kawasumi get called up to voice Not!Saber?
I mean she's done roles that aren't pure Saber clones like Sugar from Nikke, and Shenhe from Genshin Impact, but damn this seems to be a way more common trend than I thought.
r/gachagaming • u/zero-clock • 1d ago
DATE: OCTOBER 2nd 2024.
This is my first post on Reddit.
I am not a CN player. I don't speak Chinese. I'm only doing this because nobody is willing to. I'm a former arknights player. currently playing genshin and zzz. lurking here for the last 6 months. I fully believe 2024-2025 might be the turning point for CN gacha just like 2019-2020. I'm afraid that the information presented here might not be the most accurate and I will not take a deep dive(dramas) into each group but provide a general overview. If anybody has suggestions, I will edit the post.
At present time genshin is still the largest gacha in both community and content creation. Mihoyo currently dominates the CN gacha space in terms of revenue, influence, and marketing with all of its games.
circle = gacha space
CP = Character pairing(shipping)
Xiaohongshu = china instagram
Weibo = china twitter
Jimei = sisters who play gacha games(not insult)
xxn = radical feminists(kind of an insult)
CMG = insult for girl otakus
LADS = love and deep space. An ML game for women
Hetun = pufferfish.
Xiaozi, xz = filial son or family (can also be called -xz)
Mi,rice = mihoyo
MIxed-toilet = game where male and female characters exist. (omni-pandering)
ML= masters - love. A genre that originated in FGO. For now, consider it romantic fanservice. This can be used by both genders not just male players. For now ML = (50% romance, 50% fanservice)
Douyin = TikTok
BIlibili = china youtube
Zhihu = China Quora
teiba = china Reddit+twitter
nga = old Chinese forum from the WOW era
zng = insult for boy otakus
expand the circle = opposite of gatekeeping
mlxr = if men don't play (opposition to mixed-toilets and male characters). The slogan of spicy immortals.
spicy/spicy food = ML content
Shippers come in various forms, with a majority being female. Their behavior spans from passive to extremely toxic. They are known to engage in "ship wars" with other shippers of the same character. Also known for abusing hashtags,doxxing, raiding, and spamming their favorite ship all over the internet.
Entered the gacha circle through genshin and other mihoyo games. hoyo primarily panders to shippers. ship fanart can be considered a form of advertisement. They primarily play hoyo games but have no allegiance to any gacha game. They jump from one medium to another(anime, idols, etc.). They can be found anywhere but primarily on Weibo and Xiaohongshu.
There's a lot of CP speak I do not understand and I cannot include it all.
Female playerbase. Shares some fanbase with shippers and pufferfish. Demands more male units with much revealing clothing and a reduction in female units. Does not like it when female characters are a bit revealing. Reports to the government asking for censorship. Has very low tolerance towards any harem or ML-type game(for males). They are known to dox, harass, and raid other groups that don't agree with their views.
Entered gacha space through genshin. Primarily plays LADS,genshin, husbando games, and other mixed-toilet games. Can be found anywhere but primarily on Weibo and Xiaohongshu.
Someone will accuse me of being anti-feminist or that I am especially harsh on this group but
(image)
Now I don't believe every female player is like this but many are peer-pressured into joining this group(I will explain down below later). One eye-opening incident is when a zzz player celebrated that there are very few female players.
Extremely toxic yuri shippers. May belong to the above two groups. Gender cannot be determined but is assumed to be 50:50. Extremely hated across all fandoms and generally less tolerated. They constantly push yuri shipping in other games where there is no evidence (for example: Azure Lane). Probably the primary participants of ship wars. Also know to raid, dox, threaten, and harass other shippers and people with different views.
(image)
Primary games include Reverse 1999, Path to Nowhere, Hi3, and any game where yuri shipping is possible. They can be found anywhere on CN internet but primarily Weibo.
Yuri and girls love used to be quite rare and sweet seven years ago. When did it become like this?
I asked myself a lot of times whether I should include this group or not. But in the end, I choose to. They are essentially click farms, bot farms. Large underground businesses where you can buy likes, views, reviews, comments, etc. They are also used to raid and harass any individuals or competitors. Read this wiki article (Internet water army - Wikipedia)
I think they might be part of the gacha group because all companies and individuals might have used them. Chinese police bust these groups daily.
They are just normal. Gender does not matter. Entered the gacha space through fanart, cosplay, advertisement, waifus, husbandos, or just for gameplay. Since they have "normal" opinions that differ from everyone they are attacked. Just for example if you praise genshin you are attacked by anti-hoyo, If you criticize genshin you are attacked by mi filial sons, mi army, etc. All the other groups harass them because they refuse to choose sides. Some give up and join groups and some just leave the gacha circle. Many try to form their community like chat groups etc.
In the CN gacha circle either you are with one of the groups or you are against them. From what it seems doxxing and raiding are very common on CN.
I'm combining several different groups here because going over each of them will take time. Fundamentally they don't differ from each other. They can be considered spiritual shareholders of their favorite gacha company. They fight and defend the company and their products from criticism(This phenomenon can be observed pretty much everywhere on CN internet over idols, TV shows, artists, etc. They are very similar to console fanboys but extreme.).
Goes to war with other fanboys who they think are a threat to their company's products. Also known to dox, threaten, and hire water armies to harass critics. Almost every gacha company has its xz and companies themselves have no relation to these xz. One such example is mxz and mi Army which primarily plays mihoyo games. They are the biggest sub-group in this group.
The Arknights vs Genshin war is fought between multiple groups but primarily their fanboy circles. Probably the biggest video game rivalry that involved multiple doxxing, raids, and harassing attempts. I hope someone can document this.
Meta players of varying degrees. Probably liked doing speedruns and other challenge runs. They only care about meta and are willing to spend money for dupes, weapons, etc. Generally not a whale or high spender by nature but will only spend for efficiency(bang for the buck).
You can say we all care about meta and make our pulling decisions accordingly, but this group is fundamentally different. They do not like when developers nerf characters.
A group that exploded in the past year and became a trend(I will take a deep dive into this topic in the next post). Did you know China has an excess of 17 million men of marriageable age? combined with youth unemployment, bride price system, women choosing to exit the dating pool, etc a group like this seems inevitable. But enough about societal issues.
I divide this group into three sub-groups. They all have agreements and disagreements between them but they have only one goal more ML-type games, content that provides emotional value, and separation of toilets.
The upper layer of what I consider the ML group. Probably the largest too. They are not as extreme as the other two sub-groups, but they generally desire ML content.
Yes, this group plays mixed-toilet games. But they want the male-characters pool to be small. They don't demand harem but they won't complain about it either.
They have thoughts similar to "If a waifu/husbando isn't into me why should I pull her?". Easily influenced by gacha dramas and ML Immortals. They can be found anywhere on CN internet. They primarily enjoy any game with ML content.
This group is also insulted with titles such as "green turtle" emojis.
The old-guards of ML, harem games. In global they are insulted as Coomer, Gooner, etc. They like and enjoy harem games.
They are eternal enemies of xxn. They too can be easily influenced by dramas. Can be found in their communities or groups. Known to play Blue Archive, Nikke, Snowbreak, etc.
This sub-group shares attributes with ML enjoyers but they are a bit extreme. Origin of slogan "Men don't play"(mlxr). The group exploded after the GFL2 drama last year. Any CN drama that you have seen in this sub since last year might be directly coming from this group(or they have a hand in it).
Extremely schizophrenic and drama-baiting in nature. Contrary to popular belief they not only hate hoyo-games but every mixed-toilet game. Another misconception is they start dramas but they actually popularize dramas and spread them everywhere.
They became like this after they had been betrayed several times(in their own words). At first, I thought this group was just funny and laughed at them(They tried to report the newest HSR artifact set to the government because they thought it related to transgender surgery?. LMAO). Until I saw a comment on Teiba that goes something like this(I forgot to take a screenshot of this I wish I did)
I have completly gave upon 3D life and choose to dedicate my life to 2D waifus and support the developers for two years(probably about genshin or hi3). But then the company backstabbed me.
Dawei knew who these people were
(image)
Now the above backstabbing has two meanings. The first one is usually getting cucked(NTR) by CP. The second one is the betrayal of the core player base by the developer. In simpler terms, developers started to expand the circle to attract a more casual fanbase. This is especially apparent in the COVID era and after the success of genshin. I will talk about this betrayal more in my next post.
What this group has successfully achieved is to plant seeds of doubt in almost every gacha player. They made many players think about their spending habits, trust in developers, etc. What cannot be ignored is the slogan "mlxr" and its impact on CN gacha.
CN internet generally makes fun of them. In some parts, they are openly hated cause they start dramas.
They support all ML games even including LADS(in a meme-y way). They can be found on teiba, NGA, etc.
Some female players generally share the same opinions as this sub-group on the other side of this conflict.
In my next post in a few days, I will define ML and discuss why it is trending. I will also talk about popular games like GFL2, Azure Promilia, LADS and Snowbreak, Arknights, Endfield, ZZZ, Core userbase, and finally some thoughts about Dawei speech.
r/gachagaming • u/Pichucandy • 1d ago
r/gachagaming • u/Whalesftw123 • 1d ago
TLDR: To find how much MiHoYo actually makes considering every source take sensor tower global stats and multiply by 3.
I recently saw a post explaining how inaccurate Sensor Tower is, which I thought was a relatively accurate depiction of MiHiYo's revenue. Being someone interested in the finances of games, I wanted to figure out how much the undeniable leader in the gacha game market was making. As a side note, I have never played any MiHoYo or gacha game in my life so this is a purely unbiased take fueled by curiosity.
The goal: Figure out how much money MiHoYo is making combining all regions and all sources of revenue (Mobile, PC, Console, Merch, etc)
Before we begin, here are some challenges with figuring this figure out.
Assumptions
The holy grail
Basically every single source online has zero credibility or is extremely limited in region or revenue source scope. Except for one.
https://news.gmw.cn/2023-06/08/content_36616884.htm
This is a Chinese state-owned media that offers likely the best and most accurate insight into MiHoYo's accounting we will ever receive.
In 2022, net revenue was 27.34 billion yuan or 3.89 billion USD (All revenue in China is net)
In 2022, net income (Profit) was 16.415 billion yuan or 2.30 billion USD
Profit margin was 59% which is fucking insane.
I wasn't satisfied since we likely won't get this ever again and since then, MiHoYo has released 2 more games (HSR, ZZZ) and has seemed to only get bigger and better.
New goal: Find a ratio between sensor tower figures and actual revenue
If we can find the ratio between the sensor tower 2022 revenue and the actual revenue from the Chinese source, we have a decent start.
Unfortunately, this was actually not so easy. Also keep in mind, sensor tower figures on reddit pre-2024 often excluded China while showing a global symbol. This fucked me up a lot.
Mobile only (doesn't include PC and console revenue)
This seems like a pretty decent sensor tower source. Unfortunately it doesn't align with
Source 2: https://sensortower.com/blog/genshin-impact-three-billion-revenue
Which mentions 567 mn revenue in Q1 2022, while the reddit one shows far less.
I believe this is due to source 1 not including Non-IOS in China while source 2 does.
Sensor Tower posts on reddit follow source 1 so we will actually use source 1 but this shows some of the inaccuracies with sources.
Preliminary Ratio
3,890,000,000/1,294,000,000
Which equals 3.0062 so basically 3.
In other words we arrive at a very nice preliminary result where you take sensor towers global number and multiply it by 3 for actual revenue. Then you can multiply it by 0.59 for estimated profit.
Unfortunately I cannot find 2023 figures that are sensor tower global since the reddit charts are often excluding China. Consistency with including global only started in January 2024 (I think you can dig deeper tho).
Also MiHoYo introduces Games in the middle of the year so I will attempt to find the average revenue giving the active games and combine for a years revenue. It would be awesome if I had a better way of doing this but I'm just working with what I have.
Revenue estimate for Genshin
107.833 million from January 2022 to December 2022
323.499 million adjusted for ratio
Revenue estimate for Genshin + HSR
177.617 million from January 2024 to June 2024
532.851 million adjusted for ratio
Revenue estimate for Genshin + HSR + ZZZ
144.76 million from July 2024 to September 2024 - Sample size is tiny, probably trends low
434.28 million adjusted for ratio
Preliminary 2023 estimate (Half had HSR):
Using these numbers, 2023 had an average of 142.833 million per month.
Total 2023 revenue estimate using ratio: 5.14 billion USD
Preliminary 2024 estimate (Half had ZZZ):
Total 2024 revenue estimate using ratio: 5.80 billion USD
May be a bit higher than estimated.
Profit
I actually believe MiHoYo's profit margins will not be as high as they were in 2022. Given that both years introduced a new game and they would still have to maintain Genshin. I would estimate profit margins for 2023 and 2024 would be closer to 45-50% (Still absurdly high)
Using 0.50, MiHoYo's profit in 2023 and 2024 would be 2.57 billion USD and 2.9 billion USD respectively. Very solid profit growth.
Other sources and questioning the ratio
Here I'll address some other sources I've found online and discuss whether I feel they are valid and how close/far they are to my estimations.
"MiHoYo's" 2023 net revenue is between 4.2 and 5.6 billion USD"
Fit's pretty well with my estimation of 5.14 billion USD.
2024 H1 (First half) MiHoYo Global Revenue All Sources
So there's zero credibility and part of a clickbait Chinese top 10 video, however, I believe there is definitely some thought placed into this.
They estimate 24.9245 billion Yuan for the first 6 months of 2024.
This is about 3.55 billion USD or 590.67 million USD per month.
Dividing by my ratio would mean 196.89 million USD per month for the first 6 months which is about a 10.85% difference from the sensor tower estimate of 177.62 million USD per month combined with my ratio.
Their sensor tower ratio would be 3.325
With how much uncertainty we are working with, this is actually decently close.
July 2024 MiHoYo Global Revenue All Sources
Also zero credibility but let's analyze it.
They estimate 4.666 billion Yuan for the month of July 2024
This is about 660 million USD for that month
Dividing by my ratio would mean 220 million USD for the month of July or a 31.11% difference from the sensor tower estimate of 167.8 million USD per month combined with my ratio.
Their sensor tower ratio would be 3.933
This is quite a difference. It should be noted that the ratio of games to MiHoYo's total revenue for the month is pretty close.
Given that both of the sources are higher than mine, I am tempted to say I am probably slightly underestimating revenue however I believe people always tend to overestimate revenue so I suspect I might actually be closer. However they may be considering things I have never thought of considering.
I just realized they might be considering total revenue not net revenue which means that their numbers would be reduced by around 30% for net which makes it very close to mine.
However at this point I am confident writing off anything that significantly deviates from my estimation.
Any source claiming below 4.5 billion and above 8 billion are completely wrong.
Any source below 5.5 billion and above 7 billion would be outliers.
Conclusion
MiHoYo is absolutely insane and I'm very interested in keeping up with their gacha game dominance.
Analyzing MiHoYo's growth is a completely different story and I could probably write an essay on whether I think MiHoYo can continue growing or if they will plateau. The dynamics between the games and how much a new MiHoYo game impacts the other's revenues is super interesting. Things like balancing down times are what MiHoYo is an absolute master at. But there are limits and always diminishing returns and ZZZ may be an indicator of this beginning.
Genshin only: 100m Genshin + HSR: 177m Genshin + HSR + ZZZ: 144m
However that's a post for another time.
Feel free to bring up counterpoints or other data points I might not be aware about.
r/gachagaming • u/Roanst • 1d ago
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Every month, lots of people on the internet like to engage in online fights about whether their favourite game made more money than someone else’s favourite game.
This is a PvP event: player versus player online combat where people fight each other for what is basically just internet bragging rights.
And where there are strong and regularly occurring opinions on the internet, you can guarantee that content creators are soon to follow to use this to create content.
It’s (mostly) harmless fun. But the analysis involved can be… questionable at times.
But can you really blame people when they don’t know better?
There is a lack of good resources to understand revenue analysis using market intelligence. Being upset at this would be like being upset that people were bad at saving for retirement if the only education available was /r/WallStreetBets.
I feel strongly about helping people get better. So let’s do something about this. Let’s get better together at understanding SensorTower data, why it’s useful, and how to use it.
The focus of this essay is about SensorTower. However, the insights and conclusions apply to all forms of market intelligence more broadly.
You may find this easier to read on my companion blog due to Reddit formatting restrictions (such as the inability to natively embed graphs and images).
Yes.
Yes.
For example, let’s say you needed to know how big the US population was.
You could for example just make up a number and say “Ehhhh a billion sounds big so let’s go with that.” This is, of course, a very wrong number.
You could also decide to say:
Now, this is also clearly wrong. For example, many US states have more than 2 cities. And what about all the people who don’t live in cities? Are we just pretending they don’t exist?
And yet… the US Census Bureau says the US population is currently 334M. So our estimate is actually pretty usable for basic calculations even if it is wrong.
This is what it means to have different “levels of wrongness”.
Numbers can be wrong, but still practical and usable. As long as the data is “good enough” to be usable, then you can use it so long as you appreciate its limitations.
Even if you aren’t sophisticated enough to correct SensorTower’s flaws (e.g. lack of data, lack of people to work on this task, not worth it to actually bother, etc.) the data is still valuable.
But the same way you wouldn’t claim that the US population is exactly 300M, you shouldn’t claim that any specific game’s revenue is exactly whatever SensorTower reports it as.
The point of 3rd party data sources such as Nielsen, Alexa, Forrester, etc. is to provide a consistent methodology to aggregate hard to measure data over time to analyze trends and movements.
The movement and trends are far more critical versus the actual underlying number itself.
For example, it’s not important if SensorTower tells you that the player count for Blue Archive was 2.1M or 2.2M players. What matters is how this compares to other periods in time.
So if Blue Archive’s player count jumped from 2.1M to 5.3M year-on-year, then you can reasonably argue that the game has grown. If it shifted from 2.1M to 2.2M, then you can reasonably argue that the player base is stable.
The fact that 3rd party data sources use a consistent methodology means that the numbers they report are systematically wrong.
It is because these numbers are systematically wrong that we can perform trend analysis and can be comfortable despite the fact we know the numbers are all “wrong”. As I said in 2ci., numbers can be wrong but still practical and useful.
The average person does not buy expensive data feeds from market intelligence companies. Companies and data analysts buy data feeds from market intelligence companies. And a good team of data analysts at a competitive intelligence department can do a lot with even incomplete and “wrong” data.
Let’s say for example you are the Head of Data Analytics at a major gaming company. Let’s call this imaginary company YoHoMi. (My lawyers say I have to tell you that any resemblance to real persons or other real-life entities is purely coincidental. All characters and other entities appearing here are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, dead or alive, or other real-life entities, past or present, is purely coincidental.)
YoHoMi gives you a research budget and you buy a massive pile of data from SensorTower. As the Head of Data at YoHoMi, you notice that SensorTower is wrong. This is because SensorTower doesn’t actually know YoHoMi’s “true” revenue.
But YOU know what the “true” value is: You work at YoHoMi after all! So just call your friend in Finance and ask for it!
With enough data, you can probably reverse engineer why SensorTower is wrong and correct the flaws. And… here comes the catch: Remember that SensorTower applies the same flawed methodology to everyone!
So once you know how to correct SensorTower’s flaws, you can now reverse engineer all the “true” values for all your competitors.
Oh. Oh ho ho.
So with enough work, you as the Head of Data at YoHoMi every month can now legally buy and reverse engineer the revenue of all of your competitors without needing to commit crimes like breaking into their offices and kidnapping your competitor’s CFO.
This is part of why 3rd party data sources can be highly valued by companies: Market intelligence is difficult to obtain. A provider that can provide you with enough information to generate your own more accurate intelligence is valuable even if their data is “wrong”.
I will be frank. Most of the discussion around SensorTower revenue online is terrible. It is like watching MMO trash mobs flail against other trash mobs.
What I want to do in this section is help you better understand how to approach analyzing revenue data. This applies both for the monthly PvP as well as how to think about analyzing revenue in a real marketing or revenue analytics job.
I can’t promise I can turn you into a revenue analysis raid boss. But at least you can be a lvl 35 Boss instead of a lvl 1 Crook.
For all of the following analysis, data is from SensorTower data (pulled in September 2024). China Android revenue has been estimated as 1.5x iOS.
Looking at the monthly revenue numbers for new games is a popular hobby for people.
It is common knowledge that most games often have a significant “pop” at launch, and that future revenue often does not achieve the same heights as the initial launch. So people will often look to see where revenue settles longer term.
However, looking at monthly numbers alone is misleading.
Gacha game monetization is often driven by limited time purchases, which is often released at a fixed rate over time following a game’s launch.
The date the game launches and the timing of new content releases is not required to follow the Gregorian calendar. This means that direct monthly revenue analysis can be deeply deceptive.
It is also more helpful to understand how volatile player spending behaviour is. Volatile player spending implies some combination of factors such as player churn and lack of product-market fit. Volatile revenue also increases risk for developers and reduces the ability to plan ahead.
What you ideally would like to understand is:
So let’s have a look at that then. Here’s the daily revenue trends for a selection of games for the first 180 days after launch. All values are calculated on a 7-day rolling average and rebased to 100 to facilitate direct comparisons across game titles regardless of the absolute $ revenue values.
[GRAPH OF FIRST 180 DAY REVENUE FOR MULTIPLE GAMES]
This is pretty messy. So let’s go through this a few games at a time.
[GRAPH OF FIRST 180 DAY REVENUE FOR BLUE ARCHIVE AND NIKKE]
Blue Archive and Nikke offer a good example of the generic curves you might expect to see for a generic game:
You can compare this to a game such as Tower of Fantasy to see what an inability to develop cyclical spending behaviour can look like.
[GRAPH OF FIRST 180 DAY REVENUE FOR TOWER OF FANTASY]
Mihoyo is highly interesting for several reasons. What stands out the most to you when you see this graph compared to all of the previous graphs?
[GRAPH OF FIRST 180 DAY REVENUE FOR MIHOYO GAMES AND WUWA]
Firstly, Mihoyo’s revenue cycles are incredibly stable and predictable. This is ideal for stable budget planning and investment decisions. It also reflects a very strong IP loyalty and attach rate with players.
Secondly, Genshin Impact is one of the few games where player interest did not appear to significantly decline during the first 6 months. If anything, having multiple continuous content releases that exceeded the initial launch peak is incredible.
Thirdly, future games such as Honkai Star Rail (HSR) and ZZZ do not appear to have the initial hump that is common to most game launches. The ability to cross-advertise within Mihoyo’s existing customers meant that these games drove massive immediate Day 1 adoption rather than taking several days to gain traction.
While the revenue peaks in future cycles are lower than Genshin, this is mostly due to the outsized Day 1 launch effects from internal promotion to existing Mihoyo customers.
There will likely also have been higher churn from players who did not like the new game genres. Analyzing the exact numerical values of these peaks is therefore not meaningful.
What is important to take away here is that HSR eventually settled into a stable and predictable cyclical pattern. This revenue reliability is critical in establishing a margin of safety for on-going business operations.
Note that this did not happen instantaneously. Looking at the first four banner cycles for HSR alone would imply that revenue is continuously declining. This is why a 6-month or longer time period is better to establish a firm trend.
This is also why I caution against casual online analysis that draws spurious conclusions about individual game level performance using only monthly data over a short period of time.
For example, ZZZ first month data would capture the first two cycles, but the second month’s data would only capture the third cycle and miss the fourth. This means that you would draw incorrect conclusions about the game’s revenue performance.
Likewise, I would not rush to make conclusions about WuWa based on the revenue data alone. While the peaks are apparently declining over time, it is still too early to draw any substantial conclusions. What is most critical is to see whether over the next 90 days or so, the game can achieve a stable and predictable revenue cycle or if revenue will continue to be volatile.
It is also helpful to understand which markets are the most important for a new game. This is because the largest markets will likely have an outsized impact on feedback for a game’s development.
[GRAPH OF REVENUE BY REGION FOR SEVERAL GAMES]
Some key observations that should be flagged:
These region-level differences are also important because the revenue potential of customers in each region is different.
Analysis of revenue differences by region, and which regions are the most valuable, will be covered in Section 3d.
For long-running games, we are mainly interested in understanding how game revenue has evolved over time. FGO is one of the longest running games, so let’s use this as our example.
We know that FGO is heavily driven by Japan spending, so we can split the data by Japan vs non-Japan revenue. Here’s our first cut with an all-history view:
[GRAPH OF FGO HISTORIC REVENUE]
This is messy, but we can start to see some seasonality and trends in the data:
None of this will come as surprising news for FGO players. We can however delve a bit deeper in understanding the anatomy of what FGO’s slow gradual decline looks like.
Let’s look at a comparison of FGO’s revenue by year stacked against each other so we can compare performance by month:
[GRAPH OF FGO HISTORIC REVENUE BY MONTH]
This is pretty hard to read. So let’s break this up into two eras: One for 2015 to 2019, and one for 2019 to present day.
[GRAPH OF FGO REVENUE FOR 2015 TO 2019]
The progression over time is Black (2015) → Dark Blue (2016) → Light Blue (2017) → Dark Yellow (2018) → Light Yellow (2019)
Very roughly speaking, FGO’s performance in each month is broadly speaking better than the prior year for almost every single month. You can see things start to slip in 2019 however, and total revenue is very slightly down versus 2018.
We see almost the exact opposite pattern from 2019 onwards.
[GRAPH OF FGO REVENUE FOR 2019 TO 2024]
The progression over time is Light Yellow (2019) → Black (2020) → Purple (2021) → Mauve (2022) → Dark Orange (2023) → Red (2024)
We can see here that, broadly speaking, each successive year is lower in revenue compared to the prior year.
The FGO developers have not shown the consistent capabilities or capacity to develop new innovative gameplay systems. Their monetization methods also heavily depend on the New Year GSSR Campaign and Anniversary releases to stimulate spending.
As such, the primary lever they have left to address revenue decline is squeezing the players harder. And so we get announcements such as the NP8 announcement this year.
Companies with a portfolio of games should operate differently from companies with a single blockbuster hit title.
The primary benefits of having a portfolio of IP are:
I have previously talked about how Mihoyo is organizing their content releases across their games to prevent direct competition between their games.
This is why comparing Genshin vs HSR revenue or their revenue ranking is rather meaningless.
It doesn’t matter if Genshin revenue declined and HSR increased in any given month (or vice versa) if that is exactly what Mihoyo planned to happen in the first place to prevent cross-game competition!
So we need to measure companies with portfolios differently from other companies. Here are two approaches you can take.
Because the revenue split across Mihoyo’s games are somewhat artificially constructed by Mihoyo, analysis should be performed for Mihoyo at an aggregate level.
So let’s do that. Here is the monthly revenue of Mihoyo’s main games across their full lifetime:
[GRAPH OF HISTORIC MIHOYO REVENUE]
What can we learn from this?
Adding the total values across Mihoyo games is therefore the bare minimum any commentary of Mihoyo’s performance requires. Any commentary that fails to do this should be immediately viewed with hostile suspicion.
This does feel somewhat unsatisfying however. So what if… we could go even further beyond?
Ultimately, Mihoyo does not care if you spend $50 on Genshin or $50 on HSR or $50 on ZZZ. They do care if you spend $50 on something not Mihoyo.
As such, what you really want to measure is Share of Wallet. As the name suggests, Share of Wallet is how much of someone’s overall spending you capture.
The basic methodology is as follows:
This is a very helpful metric to track because it reflects the priority that your customer places on you as well as adapts to broader economic changes.
For example, Japan is a major market for gacha games. Real wages in Japan have also been declining for 26 straight months. The previous record was a 23 month long period in 2007 to 2009, just after the financial crisis. It would make sense if consumer spending in Japan might decrease during this period.
So let’s say that an average Japanese consumer used to spend $50 a month on your game, but now spends $30. Does this reflect a problem with your game? A basic analysis of only revenue would say yes.
But let’s say the average person’s entertainment budget shrank from $100 to $50 a month due economic pressure. This person went from spending 50% of their entertainment budget on your game to spending 60% of their entertainment budget on your game. Despite having less money, they chose to prioritize your game over other choices.
Using the share of wallet metric therefore reveals that your game is actually succeeding!
This is why a basic reading of revenue numbers can be incredibly deceptive and more sophisticated methods are needed.
A share of wallet analysis is also helpful when you run a portfolio business.
Your first product or service will capture a large share of wallet. However, each incremental product or service will only capture an incremental marginal share of wallet. What you care about is understanding what the marginal changes are, and how customer behaviour changes.
This approach can be applied for both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-customer (B2C or retail) companies. The broad principles and approach are the same although there may be industry specific differences.
So let’s do a basic and simple calculation for Mihoyo to demonstrate the principle. For this example, I will be using the China / Japan / US markets and using publicly available economic data only.
[GRAPH OF CHANGE IN SHARE OF WALLET]
Several key trends worth noting include:
Obviously if you actually worked at Mihoyo, you would be able to perform this analysis at a much greater level of detail. For example, you could:
What doesn’t get talked about as much, but should, is the app download and active user data. This is less sexy than arguing about money, but is critical to understanding the health of a game.
Different games attract different types of players. By understanding the demographics of the player base, we can understand and then try to predict the future financial state of a game.
Here is a overview of app downloads for various games by region:
[GRAPH OF APP DOWNLOADS BY REGION FOR SEVERAL GAMES]
You will notice that the proportions in this graph differ significantly from those shown earlier in Section 3aii, where I showed revenue by Region. I will reproduce that graph below for ease of comparison.
[GRAPH OF REVENUE BY REGION FOR SEVERAL GAMES]
This is why earlier on I said that the revenue potential of customers in each country is different.
We can explicitly quantify this using the Revenue per Download (RPD) metric. Here is the different RPD across these games and regions:
Region | Genshin Impact | Honkai Star Rail | Zenless Zone Zero | Wuthering Waves | Fate/Grand Order |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Japan | 103 | 148 | 46 | 53 | 328 |
HKTW | 40 | 67 | 30 | 34 | 95 |
China | 20 | 39 | 35 | 11 | 148 |
USA | 17 | 25 | 8 | 22 | 89 |
APAC (exc. CNJP) | 4 | 7 | 9 | 21 | 28 |
EMEA | 4 | 5 | 2 | 8 | 83 |
Americas (exc. USA) | 2 | 3 | 3 | 5 | 24 |
A few key observations:
Let’s try and do something fun. What can we do if we combine RPD data with the raw download data
Please note that the following commentary is going to be much more speculative in nature.
Let’s start with the download by region for each of the games we looked for RPD.
[GRAPH OF DOWNLOADS BY REGION FOR SELECTION OF GAMES]
Some of this is not surprising (e.g. FGO having the lowest downloads, WuWa having >50% of downloads in China despite <50% revenue from China indicating its revenue weakness in that country).
However, the Mihoyo download numbers are interesting.
These download statistics are for August 2024, which is the premier release of Patch 5.0 and Natlan. So your first instinct is that the Genshin numbers are heavily inflated.
But no, they’re not:
[GRAPH OF HISTORIC MIHOYO APP DOWNLOADS]
This is quite interesting. Because outside of the initial release hyper for other Mihoyo games, Genshin consistently achieves 1.5 to 2x in downloads compared to the other games. And as far as I am aware, Mihoyo’s doesn’t overbias their marketing spend on Genshin versus their other games either.
So what’s going on?
Genshin is likely at the stage where it will maintain a consistent cultural impact in the gaming / anime space. It is functionally “too big to fail”.
This is supported by cultural phenomena such as a dominating presence at conventions and community anime / gaming events [citation needed].
If so, what are some fun things we can do about this from a business strategy and planning perspective?
[TO FIT WITHIN REDDIT CHARACTER LIMITS, THIS SECTION HAS BEEN REMOVED. YOU CAN INSTEAD READ IT HERE ON MY BLOG.]
Essentially, it’s a plan to grow a Chinese version of Disney through a games-focused approach.
The next time you see a monthly PvP event or need to analyze data at your job, remember the following lessons:
Section 2: Does SensorTower or any other market intelligence provider wrong and use made up numbers?
Section 3: Techniques to analyze data
r/gachagaming • u/Aiden-Damian • 3d ago
r/gachagaming • u/zndjskskdkfk • 3d ago
obviously we kind of know how the system works when devs create characters for their gacha game.
they release characters, different elements such a fire water etc, (traditional element system)
then you might have stuff like single target or multi target units,
You have you different classes basically is what I'm trying to get at.
Now my question is, how do gacha games that have been around for a very long time combat the issue after they've released pretty much every archetype there is to think of?
because after some point you'll have a dps, one of each element, one of each type etc.
The only way I can think of is adding more elements.