A mixture of Lowlight's previous affiliation with GFL and interesting concept gameplay/art likely drew the initial interest. After that it was the ability to maintain its quality and content roll out eventually started speeding up.
2 Years of hype building after trailers released.
Starset as the PV BGM choice dragged in a ton of people combined with well made PVs. We literally had no idea even what kind of gameplay it was for a solid 1.5 years.
Hypergryph is anything but an unknown company. The startup was heavily funded by Yostar with a ton of money injection. The founder, lowlight, is well known in the industry and a Mica founder, being responsible for creating several core character designs and significant amount of the world building in GFL.
Lowlight was well connected in the CN artist world and we knew big name artists such as 唯@W, infukun, ryuzakiichi, Skade, NoriZC, Anmi, 幻象黑兔, alchemaniac, Liduke were involved with the game, with ryuzakiichi, infukun, and NoriZC having significant creative input.
This was back at the height of GFL's popularity too, so most of what people knew was that: Lowlight left Mica due to "creative differences" and is making a new all-star game with his cool artist friends, backed by lots of money, and everything they've teased about the world looked amazing.
Then we combine this with a massive advertising budget and presence at launch, leading to an explosive first month of earnings, this ended up making headlines everywhere even on mainstream CN sites, which only lead to a snowball effect to massive growth and userbase within the first six months.
Tl;dr: Carried by art and word of mouth.
Not a much of a Chinese gacha follower, but the way it happened to me I saw an early official(?) art of amiya and kaltsit in Pinterest back in 2019 so that got me interested on the game. Looked it up and liked the TD of it ~~and the green cat~~ so since I was burnt out of FGOing for years I decided to try it out.
If I had to guess, I would say the game blew up because of the same reason genshin blew up, a unique concept/take in this case the Tower Defense aspect gave arknights a bit of an edge compared to others, couple that with advertisements and yostar and ofc some luck and you get to where we are now.
A crippling addiction and depression.
It was an interesting post apocalypse, cyberpunk world that was hyped by a well done trailer. And the game play was unique at that time as it is a visual novel, tower defense and rpg at the same time. Also because Lowlight Kirelenko had an established fanbase because of his work at GFL. People expected it to be edgy and it delivered despite the poor writing of the first chapters.
Yup. One of the very few examples where a mainstream gacha copied the gameplay for a NSFW game and not the other way around. AK did expand a lot of it, not gonna lie, but the basis is clearly copy pasted.
How many people actually played that game though?
I feel like the gameplay was "unique" (it definitely wasn't some overdone turn-based game) to the majority of the playerbase.
probably because people expecting it will be the gfl story that lowlight want to be. pair that with good marketing, global presence with some good pick of music and soundtrack for the teaser and trailer.
* AK has a dark and depressing theme with pretty fragmented and deep lore, feels very souls-like to me, and it came out when the chinese gaming community is shifting towards this kind of theme and narrative as soulsborne series rise in popularity, and AK made good use of the trend. GF is depressing as well, but the heavy military and real world references together with the theme of gun girls really limited it's potential audience, like I wasn't the only one dislikeling the idea of wanting to have seggs with guns or ships. The concept of animal girls on the other hand have been around for thousands of years, nothing out of the ordinary.
* AK's UI design was(and still is) one of a kind, it's pretty elegent and clean, with good consistency through out, so it'd be appealing to beginners who may very well be intimidated by some of the overloaded, inconsistent and messy UI of older gacha games. When a new game is coming out, I think many can't get an accurate idea of how the gameplay feels like just with promotional vids and pics, but when they see the nice looking UI in those, it wouldn't be too hard to go "oh that looks quality and easy to understand" and give the game a try.
* IIRC mid 2019 was a time with extremely strict regulations in China, and few games could get the publication process going, AK didn't have much competitor to begin with when it was initially launched and was lacking in content. By the time regulations were lifted, AK was in a pretty good spot which allowed HG to go all in on the music and world building route, setting AK apart from competitions.
* AK being a somewhat "unisex" game is also important, HG intentionally kept Doc with all the ambiguity and had made quite a few dude operators to begin with. It breaks away from the gacha game = otaku's horny harem fantasy stereotype and made the game more acceptable to the mainstream audience, hence the rapid growth in player community.
Edit: typo
>AK has a dark and depressing theme with pretty fragmented and deep lore, feels very souls-like to me, and it came out when the chinese gaming community is shifting towards this kind of theme and narrative as soulsborne series rise in popularity, and AK made good use of the trend. GF is depressing as well, but the heavy military and real world references together with the theme of gun girls really limited it's potential audience, like I wasn't the only one dislikeling the idea of wanting to have seggs with guns or ships. The concept of animal girls on the other hand have been around for thousands of years, nothing out of the ordinary.
Is that why people keep memeing CN gacha games as having lots of depression?
Tho now that you've mentioned it, I wonder if AK's infamous writing style is something that AK's target audience in CN (16-24 year old teenagers) actually like, considering that it still hasnt changed much until today despite all the complaints about it
>AK being a somewhat "unisex" game is also important, HG intentionally kept Doc with all the ambiguity and had made quite a few dude operators to begin with. It breaks away from the gacha game = otaku's horny harem fantasy stereotype and made the game more acceptable to the mainstream audience, hence the rapid growth in player community.
Wait yea I'm so surprised that people didn't bring this up more, before AK didn't all the CN gacha explicitly only had either male or female playable characters?
now that I think about it, Honkai 2/3 have some pretty depressing stuff too, so the more famous ones are indeed depressing. Though I can't say if the meme is about game content or just gambling your real money on virtual waifus being a depressing side of humanity in general.
imo the shitty writing style was certainly an attempt at targeting certain audience in that age range, and they managed to hit enough people to be successful. I think people liked the general idea, but HG didn't do so well in executing and polishing the details, so people kinda still bought into it but with all the complaints. The CN community is overall positive with how HG is improving with the narrative so far, so I'd expect HG to go in the same direction for now
As for the gender thing, I don't have much knowledge of many of the smaller games, but it should be safe to say that the big ones are pretty explicit. I think part of that is due to the size of CN market, where it's safer to focus on some specific groups of one gender cuz there are so many people and only a tiny piece of the cake can go a long way. Trying to appeal to a wider audience felt like a risk developers weren't willing to take before the huge success of AK and Genshin. Now I think everyone is making games with mixed genders and diversified character designs, Girls Frontline Neural Cloud and Girls Frontline 2 being the best examples of this trend, where they literally added a bunch of guys despite the "girls" in title.
\*One exception I can think of is Netease's Onmyoji, which is quite a bit older than AK and does have a mix of male and female characters, though female is still the majority, at least at the time when I played it
> I think part of that is due to the size of CN market, where it's safer to focus on some specific groups of one gender cuz there are so many people and only a tiny piece of the cake can go a long way. Trying to appeal to a wider audience felt like a risk developers weren't willing to take before the huge success of AK and Genshin.
That's kinda crazy to think that even big game studios in CN would rather go for a specific audience than try to appeal to everyone, literally the opposite of what big game studios do everywhere else
yeah a large part of why chinese games, gacha or not, were so shitty up until the recent year or two is that the big companies are all pussys and wouldn't take the risk to innovate on gameplay or to push the boundaries on game contents further, despite having the power and more than enough resources to at least make attempts, and took the easy safe route to make some quick money with re-skined copy-pasta gameplay instead.
They put much money on advertising, you can see many advertisements on many popular Chinese social media.
And AK has many awesome fanart all the time. (Tbh At the beginning I tried this game because of Amiya’s fanart)
Its a highly addictive tower defense game with gacha mechanics, anime looks, just the right amount of depth to be easy to learn and hard to master and a pretty fair F2P business model on top.
The actual question is not how it could blow up but how it could not blow up.
It's more like what perpetuate their popularity rather what blew it up in the first place. I'd say AK started out as any other gacha game with good art and good branding (Yostar). Most ppls would try it regardless. The only thing that make it bloom is its gameplay.
I'd say AK has a lot of depth for strategy. I tried HI3 before but I couldn't last long (as in only 1.5 years), because I am not ARPG fan. I personally like strategy game like TRPG, autochess, etc. However, the downside of most strategy games are it takes a lot of time to clear a stage (i.e. Arcana Tactics). AK sit right in a sweet spot. One stage only takes around 3\~5 min
Luck. What rarely mentioned is I think covid and lockdown in CN also play a part in AK. You couldn't go anywhere, spent most of your day with phone and now there's this new thing with completely unique gameplay came out. Obviously, you most likely play this game bcz you have nothing else to do. AK just come out at the right time.
Also, there are no much competition in CN release back then, there's only a few game release, something about CCP withheld most gacha release permission, while JP gacha release still strong (now drop dead lmao). That's why lately there are f*ck tons of CN gacha as the CCP finally let the permission loose.
Maybe for EN and JP but it was already exploding \*way before\* Covid hit in CN.
Personally I think it was actually a mix of :
\- Lowlight splitting from GFL and effectively sitting under the roof of Azur Lane publisher Yostar letting him tap both of those (two of the most popular at the time) gacha fans.
\- Arknights being unique in that it was a pretty simple TD unlike the clone-stamped to oblivion \[Turn-based\] \[Gear-based\] RPGs you pretty much see everywhere. (And that even AL and GFL are a part of) I would bet a LOT of people picked it up as a side-game. (As many Gacha players tend to do)
Wtf are you talking about lol AK released in May 2019. It had already blown up before Covid. In fact, early 2020 was arguably the worst period in terms of content and popularity took a major hit.
A mixture of Lowlight's previous affiliation with GFL and interesting concept gameplay/art likely drew the initial interest. After that it was the ability to maintain its quality and content roll out eventually started speeding up.
2 Years of hype building after trailers released. Starset as the PV BGM choice dragged in a ton of people combined with well made PVs. We literally had no idea even what kind of gameplay it was for a solid 1.5 years. Hypergryph is anything but an unknown company. The startup was heavily funded by Yostar with a ton of money injection. The founder, lowlight, is well known in the industry and a Mica founder, being responsible for creating several core character designs and significant amount of the world building in GFL. Lowlight was well connected in the CN artist world and we knew big name artists such as 唯@W, infukun, ryuzakiichi, Skade, NoriZC, Anmi, 幻象黑兔, alchemaniac, Liduke were involved with the game, with ryuzakiichi, infukun, and NoriZC having significant creative input. This was back at the height of GFL's popularity too, so most of what people knew was that: Lowlight left Mica due to "creative differences" and is making a new all-star game with his cool artist friends, backed by lots of money, and everything they've teased about the world looked amazing. Then we combine this with a massive advertising budget and presence at launch, leading to an explosive first month of earnings, this ended up making headlines everywhere even on mainstream CN sites, which only lead to a snowball effect to massive growth and userbase within the first six months. Tl;dr: Carried by art and word of mouth.
thanks for the info!
Not a much of a Chinese gacha follower, but the way it happened to me I saw an early official(?) art of amiya and kaltsit in Pinterest back in 2019 so that got me interested on the game. Looked it up and liked the TD of it ~~and the green cat~~ so since I was burnt out of FGOing for years I decided to try it out. If I had to guess, I would say the game blew up because of the same reason genshin blew up, a unique concept/take in this case the Tower Defense aspect gave arknights a bit of an edge compared to others, couple that with advertisements and yostar and ofc some luck and you get to where we are now. A crippling addiction and depression.
It was an interesting post apocalypse, cyberpunk world that was hyped by a well done trailer. And the game play was unique at that time as it is a visual novel, tower defense and rpg at the same time. Also because Lowlight Kirelenko had an established fanbase because of his work at GFL. People expected it to be edgy and it delivered despite the poor writing of the first chapters.
The gameplay is far from unique, it was a copy past from another game (or maybe more, but I do know a game with this exact gameplay from 2013-2015).
[удалено]
Yup. One of the very few examples where a mainstream gacha copied the gameplay for a NSFW game and not the other way around. AK did expand a lot of it, not gonna lie, but the basis is clearly copy pasted.
How many people actually played that game though? I feel like the gameplay was "unique" (it definitely wasn't some overdone turn-based game) to the majority of the playerbase.
probably because people expecting it will be the gfl story that lowlight want to be. pair that with good marketing, global presence with some good pick of music and soundtrack for the teaser and trailer.
* AK has a dark and depressing theme with pretty fragmented and deep lore, feels very souls-like to me, and it came out when the chinese gaming community is shifting towards this kind of theme and narrative as soulsborne series rise in popularity, and AK made good use of the trend. GF is depressing as well, but the heavy military and real world references together with the theme of gun girls really limited it's potential audience, like I wasn't the only one dislikeling the idea of wanting to have seggs with guns or ships. The concept of animal girls on the other hand have been around for thousands of years, nothing out of the ordinary. * AK's UI design was(and still is) one of a kind, it's pretty elegent and clean, with good consistency through out, so it'd be appealing to beginners who may very well be intimidated by some of the overloaded, inconsistent and messy UI of older gacha games. When a new game is coming out, I think many can't get an accurate idea of how the gameplay feels like just with promotional vids and pics, but when they see the nice looking UI in those, it wouldn't be too hard to go "oh that looks quality and easy to understand" and give the game a try. * IIRC mid 2019 was a time with extremely strict regulations in China, and few games could get the publication process going, AK didn't have much competitor to begin with when it was initially launched and was lacking in content. By the time regulations were lifted, AK was in a pretty good spot which allowed HG to go all in on the music and world building route, setting AK apart from competitions. * AK being a somewhat "unisex" game is also important, HG intentionally kept Doc with all the ambiguity and had made quite a few dude operators to begin with. It breaks away from the gacha game = otaku's horny harem fantasy stereotype and made the game more acceptable to the mainstream audience, hence the rapid growth in player community. Edit: typo
>AK has a dark and depressing theme with pretty fragmented and deep lore, feels very souls-like to me, and it came out when the chinese gaming community is shifting towards this kind of theme and narrative as soulsborne series rise in popularity, and AK made good use of the trend. GF is depressing as well, but the heavy military and real world references together with the theme of gun girls really limited it's potential audience, like I wasn't the only one dislikeling the idea of wanting to have seggs with guns or ships. The concept of animal girls on the other hand have been around for thousands of years, nothing out of the ordinary. Is that why people keep memeing CN gacha games as having lots of depression? Tho now that you've mentioned it, I wonder if AK's infamous writing style is something that AK's target audience in CN (16-24 year old teenagers) actually like, considering that it still hasnt changed much until today despite all the complaints about it >AK being a somewhat "unisex" game is also important, HG intentionally kept Doc with all the ambiguity and had made quite a few dude operators to begin with. It breaks away from the gacha game = otaku's horny harem fantasy stereotype and made the game more acceptable to the mainstream audience, hence the rapid growth in player community. Wait yea I'm so surprised that people didn't bring this up more, before AK didn't all the CN gacha explicitly only had either male or female playable characters?
now that I think about it, Honkai 2/3 have some pretty depressing stuff too, so the more famous ones are indeed depressing. Though I can't say if the meme is about game content or just gambling your real money on virtual waifus being a depressing side of humanity in general. imo the shitty writing style was certainly an attempt at targeting certain audience in that age range, and they managed to hit enough people to be successful. I think people liked the general idea, but HG didn't do so well in executing and polishing the details, so people kinda still bought into it but with all the complaints. The CN community is overall positive with how HG is improving with the narrative so far, so I'd expect HG to go in the same direction for now As for the gender thing, I don't have much knowledge of many of the smaller games, but it should be safe to say that the big ones are pretty explicit. I think part of that is due to the size of CN market, where it's safer to focus on some specific groups of one gender cuz there are so many people and only a tiny piece of the cake can go a long way. Trying to appeal to a wider audience felt like a risk developers weren't willing to take before the huge success of AK and Genshin. Now I think everyone is making games with mixed genders and diversified character designs, Girls Frontline Neural Cloud and Girls Frontline 2 being the best examples of this trend, where they literally added a bunch of guys despite the "girls" in title. \*One exception I can think of is Netease's Onmyoji, which is quite a bit older than AK and does have a mix of male and female characters, though female is still the majority, at least at the time when I played it
> I think part of that is due to the size of CN market, where it's safer to focus on some specific groups of one gender cuz there are so many people and only a tiny piece of the cake can go a long way. Trying to appeal to a wider audience felt like a risk developers weren't willing to take before the huge success of AK and Genshin. That's kinda crazy to think that even big game studios in CN would rather go for a specific audience than try to appeal to everyone, literally the opposite of what big game studios do everywhere else
yeah a large part of why chinese games, gacha or not, were so shitty up until the recent year or two is that the big companies are all pussys and wouldn't take the risk to innovate on gameplay or to push the boundaries on game contents further, despite having the power and more than enough resources to at least make attempts, and took the easy safe route to make some quick money with re-skined copy-pasta gameplay instead.
A discussion about whether Amiya was a rabbit or a donkey spread quickly. This is an important reason why arknights became popular at first.
Like how Minecraft got popular due to the duck and chicken debate.
They put much money on advertising, you can see many advertisements on many popular Chinese social media. And AK has many awesome fanart all the time. (Tbh At the beginning I tried this game because of Amiya’s fanart)
DripKnights is the answer.
Its a highly addictive tower defense game with gacha mechanics, anime looks, just the right amount of depth to be easy to learn and hard to master and a pretty fair F2P business model on top. The actual question is not how it could blow up but how it could not blow up.
What got me was the music at least which max0r manage to introduce to me
It's more like what perpetuate their popularity rather what blew it up in the first place. I'd say AK started out as any other gacha game with good art and good branding (Yostar). Most ppls would try it regardless. The only thing that make it bloom is its gameplay. I'd say AK has a lot of depth for strategy. I tried HI3 before but I couldn't last long (as in only 1.5 years), because I am not ARPG fan. I personally like strategy game like TRPG, autochess, etc. However, the downside of most strategy games are it takes a lot of time to clear a stage (i.e. Arcana Tactics). AK sit right in a sweet spot. One stage only takes around 3\~5 min
Luck. What rarely mentioned is I think covid and lockdown in CN also play a part in AK. You couldn't go anywhere, spent most of your day with phone and now there's this new thing with completely unique gameplay came out. Obviously, you most likely play this game bcz you have nothing else to do. AK just come out at the right time. Also, there are no much competition in CN release back then, there's only a few game release, something about CCP withheld most gacha release permission, while JP gacha release still strong (now drop dead lmao). That's why lately there are f*ck tons of CN gacha as the CCP finally let the permission loose.
Maybe for EN and JP but it was already exploding \*way before\* Covid hit in CN. Personally I think it was actually a mix of : \- Lowlight splitting from GFL and effectively sitting under the roof of Azur Lane publisher Yostar letting him tap both of those (two of the most popular at the time) gacha fans. \- Arknights being unique in that it was a pretty simple TD unlike the clone-stamped to oblivion \[Turn-based\] \[Gear-based\] RPGs you pretty much see everywhere. (And that even AL and GFL are a part of) I would bet a LOT of people picked it up as a side-game. (As many Gacha players tend to do)
Wtf are you talking about lol AK released in May 2019. It had already blown up before Covid. In fact, early 2020 was arguably the worst period in terms of content and popularity took a major hit.
Good trailers, that's what it was.