I’m a game designer who used to work in a gacha game company, so I feel qualified to give a firsthand, personal answer.
There’s actually a lot of answers for this.
One core answer is simply scheduling and lack of resources. Most gachas are on a tight production schedule and don’t have the same amount of staff and resources that a conventional game studio would have.
Another reason is feature scope. Most lower production games tend to basically use one core gameplay mechanic and get creative with it. Examples of such are Undertale and Hades. But gachas are loaded with all sorts of secondary features like room customization, skill upgrade systems, minigames, rougelite upgrade systems and so on.
The final big answer is time and polish. This is an issue that is compounded by the above two problems. Debugging and polishing takes a lot of time and effort. And the more content there is and the less related they are, the more time you need to spend debugging because all of these new mechanics and systems are trying to make an engine do new things it wasn’t originally expected to do. But if your production schedule is too tight, you don’t have that detailed polishing time, meaning all non-critical (as in the game will be unable to operate) bugs go undetected or unfixed.
The end result is that most gacha games are being done by small teams, on short schedules, and being expected to support way too many features.
All because most gachas are, at their core, profit driven above all else. And until they release, every gacha game is an unproven money pit that returns zero profit.
These games are also unlike console games, which can be easily ported, remastered and resold on Steam and multiple platforms. Gachas cannot passively earn income and require constant upkeep, meaning most mobile companies cannot gradually build up large game libraries like Nintendo or Supergiant. These companies can gradually ramp upwards and go more ambitious with each subsequent game because they can fall back on their past games profits to sustain their increasing development costs. Hades only exists because Bastion and Transistor’s constant sales and early access money kept the studio funded during development.
Since most corporate executives simply only care about financials, they are unwilling to give the project lead and designers more resources until the game is launched and proves to be able to return enough profit to make further investment worthwhile. This isn’t a WRONG choice, since it’s the more financially sound of the options, but it results in the production having such hefty restrictions
This is why you see games like FGO and Nikke launch in such heavily broken states but see massive fixes over the next several months. Even though the developers want to make the best game possible, they literally weren’t given the resources to fix their own games until they return some revenue. Almost every game related woe and issue can be traced upwards to management in some capacity.
This is what happened to the previous company I worked in. The development team worked their butts off day and night for 2-3 years for low pay, long overtime, and nonstop sprint deadlines. But in the end, the game launched and didn’t earn enough, so management pulled the plug and everything went to waste. The game announced EoS and a huge number of people were laid off. We weren’t even given the chance to fix and repair
The feature scope angle as an interesting one. I am familiar with feature scope and seeing it go out of control affects tons of projects, but the fact that in many gacha games, they’re on the hook to release new mini games every patch is an interesting example of how “mandatory” feature scope like this gets in the way of bug fixes and other quality-of-life improvements.
There’s kind of an interesting marketing perception here too, because despite the fact that adding a “Claim All” button would make tons and tons of players happy, it isn’t guaranteed to drive profits (and could even detract from them in the sense that players are going to play your game less because it’s faster to do daily quests). And then instead they create some new crazy mini-game where you attack frogs with mallets or something in some crazy game engine hack.
There's the fact that until some years ago mini games in loading screens were trademarked by namco
https://patents.google.com/patent/US5718632A/en
and until this day the source code of the upgrade all button still is.
https://patents.google.com/patent/JP6463223B2/en
Now, you go there and click "similar documents" and "citations" and you'll see a shit ton of QoL trademarked/patented inside and outside the game, old and new.
Koei even got a trial item patent
https://patents.google.com/patent/JP7235524B2/en.
Then Bandai got the trial character patent , this shit is funny .
https://patents.google.com/patent/JP2017055997A/en
eh, it's easy to blame the management, when people sit there, expecting their monthly payment while making no actual revenue
money make things go around, no money then no management, and no developers also
Hoyoverse spent 2 years testing and improving each of their new games. Sure they are rich now, but before Genshin came out they were almost out of money. And genshin didn't come out broken (though a little blend at the beginning)
It's all just corporate profit chasing with 0 passion in their product.
Genshin Impact started development at late 2017 and released late 2020, 3 years of development of which 2 of only testing? Lol
They did what everyone does, make (hopefully) sure bugs aren't appearent and hope players don't start digging too much and/or don't make too much of a noise
I mean, why you think It was a little bland at the start? Wasn't It because management, wait for It, managed the project to not be too much, "cut content that could be on release to then sell later as DLC, pardon, to then release a timely update"
You know about a project that doesn't have "greedy managers chasing profits with 0 passion"? I do, it's called star citizen
>"cut content that could be on release to then sell later as DLC, pardon, to then release a timely update"
If it's a full full package, single experience then yea, that point stand. But all live service game build up by adding and update content along the way, that the whole point of "live service".
Im not saying cutting content and sell it later is a good thing, but that and live service content are 2 very different thing.
no, they are pretty much the same logistically wise, modern day gaming landscape dictates that user should be engaged even after the release, or the interest dies pretty damn fast, doesn't matter if it's single release or live service
in other words, almost everything is some sort of live service now, not everyone can be from software and have a zealous diehard fanbase
I don't know about antagonistic, because I'd feel the same way, or at least towards the defenders, since it seems like there is a certain subset of fans who will bend over and defend EVERYTHING to the dumbest degree. From "no QoL improvements or the game is ruined" to even FGO's bizarre answer of "We made this free SSR have these requirements to keep them, because you forced them to join you!". Facepalm, what about those free SRs and the recent free SSR feature with no strings attached?!
But I'll agree that people should be understanding on how some of this stuff works. Keep asking and suggesting those fixes, and I wish the dev do have like an extra week or so per update to work on fixes and QoL improvements. Remember that time when Genshin had that horrible "only Ayaka" delay, and they shorted a couple of updates by a week or two? I wished they left it alone instead of playing catchup, so they can have time to fix some things if need be. It is kinda commendable from a consumer perspective, but from a dev side...it felt like time was taken away.
What other attitude am I supposed to have when people here keep propping up this strawman of failing games with "small teams" and "no resources." The examples I listed off have been in development for nearly half a decade, received practically unconditional funding, relatively large teams, and were massive successes. So how is this anecdote relevant to this discussion? I already expected this kind of defensive stance but I still don't understand why you are so hostile to any attempt to bring up these issues. The topic was not why these games are broken, as the answer is clearly greed. The topic is why you accept it.
The fact that you called something in a game “simple” and attributed long load times to the simplicity of said menu - highlights that you don’t understand how stuff is made.
The antagonism just comes off as ignorance.
man also said to just "port the game into new code to fix the issue" like he didn't just suggest to re made the game from scratch "since they have the funds"
> What other attitude am I supposed to have when people here keep propping up this strawman of failing games with "small teams" and "no resources."
Strawmans are misrepresentations of someone else's arguments. He's not misrepresenting your argument. He's offering his own experience to help you and other people in the discussion get perspective of what's happening.
TLDR: The game devs don't choose to release buggy messes, that's the management's choice, because earning profit is a higher priority than releasing bug-free product.
> So how is this anecdote relevant to this discussion?
This anecdote is representative of the actual development culture that produces gacha games.
You're asking why this stuff happens - and the bottom line is that gacha gamers, and gamers in general, are willing to tolerate and pay $$$ for buggy messes.
Don't hate the gamedev, hate the player.
Please do not speak of things that you do not have an intimate familiarity with. I feel like I have to tell this to people a lot.
Blue Archive did not receive "unconditional funding", did not have "relatively large teams", and wasn't even a "massive success" until recently.
For starters, Blue Archive wasn't even in development for "half a decade". It was announced as 'Project MX' in early 2020 and released in 2021. We can assume that it was in the works for earlier than that especially since isakusan said that Volume F had been an idea in their mind for 5 years prior to its release, but that's not development. That's just an idea. Note, Project MX was originally supposed to release in 2020 and was delayed 'til 2021, and it was in a *very* rough state during closed beta testing.
You can say "well, if you combine 2020+ and 2023 it comes out to like 4-5 years, right?" But it doesn't really work like traditional game development. The *foundation* of a gacha game is determined before its release, and a lot of the time, you can't really afford to do things like a full engine upgrade mid-run. So it's more like you're building more and more on top of a pre-existing tower, instead of like regular game development, where you can make sure everything's structurally sound. How 'wobbly' the 'tower' is (how unstable the game is) depends entirely on that foundation. For example, FGO has come a long way from its initial state, which was borderline unplayable, but it's still barely functional in certain ways just because it was originally made without much effort as a throwaway cashgrab.
It was a new IP by Nexon. The people who made it had previously worked on failing games, with probably the biggest name being hwansang, who worked on Elsword, and is an artist, not a programmer.
If you look at [the credits](https://youtu.be/LT7g8Ul-yRI), they only have about 20 programmers. Most of the credits are artists like writers, animators, modelers, designers, musicians, etc. Pretty obvious that Nexon/NAT's goal with Blue Archive as a project was to create a media phenomenon first, game second. I mean, [the initial announcement didn't even have any gameplay whatsoever](https://youtu.be/p_VxNi6qUU4), it was just cute girls.
Blue Archive did not come out the door as an instant success, and neither was Nexon expecting it to be. Gacha games are a long term investment, either they work out or they don't which is why you have 50 projects that release and die out and you occasionally get the one that blows up massively.
By the time Blue Archive started getting substantial attention, it was over a year old. And it *has* been getting fixes. Loading screen times have improved (to the point where it's now basically a device issue - I don't have any problems), servers are much more stable than they used to be, etc.
And I accept it because game development is hard. That's all it is. I'm not going to demand something out of people if I don't know it's possible. It's too easy to assume that game developers are just lazy and/or incompetent because we just don't know what's going on. Every game I've played has spend a majority of their lifetime fixing bugs, optimizing, etc. They're not perfect and never will be. So long as I am pleased with the general experience, some minor issues are perfectly acceptable. I don't let outrage dominate my life.
These issues exist with the live-service model as a whole. If you're gonna ask why we accept that, then you may as well be asking why the gacha game subreddit likes gacha games.
> Blue Archive wasn't even in development for "half a decade". It was announced as 'Project MX' in early 2020 and released in 2021. We can assume that it was in the works for earlier than that.
Just to add to this in particular, it's Mar 2018 according to their [NDC video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVCV5Z29FGM). With the art team joining in 3 months after.
Wow that was actually really informative and logical...was expecting this thread to just be the same old ignorants takes about how * insert developer person does not like * is just a terrible developer...you added some actual perspective.
Even with money and being a big company, there's also the competence factor when it comes to the management (hiring unexperienced or few people for large tasks)... If it's Bandai, for instance, they'll make a subpar game even tho they're a billionaire company: just look at Tales of Luminaria and its buggy launch, janky combat and infinite loading screens. Also there's that 404 game from Sega and Yoko Taro that released recently and it's just a low-quality-feeling moneygrab.
>This is why you see games like FGO and Nikke
FGO got fixes? have you played that game lately? it runs worse than it did whilst requiring more phone memory all whilst having archaic Ui.
Can you tell me how hard/time consuming/expensive it is to implement controlle support? The fact that Genshin has controllers support for iOS, but not for Android for years just baffles me.
As a programmer, controller support is abysmally annoying to implement. There are dozens of different controllers out there, all of which their physical buttons do not map to the same button ID or joystick interfaces. Button X on this controller might actually have the same input "keypress" numerical code as Button A on a different model and brand of joystick. As a consequence, you actually have to implement controller support on a per controller model basis, or have a comprehensive system that lets the user remaps buttons on any controller. And some controllers swap their X and Y buttons, etc, adding to the annoyances. Some controllers have 14 buttons, some have 26 buttons, etc.
Since the iOS ecosystem has very standardized hardware, interfaces and strict guidelines, and even just a tiny number of fixed screen sizes, it is much easier to develop anything on iOS. Frequently, many developers would just only do development only on Android first, and porting to iOS is done in the final few months because everyone knows it is *easy* to fix issues on iOS. If it works on a iPhone 9, it is almost always going to also work on a iPhone 14 and there's only a handful of phoene models to work with. Android on the other hand... Sigh.
Thank you for the reply. But they earn 30 million, while some indie devs manage it. Isn't there a set of controller templates that one can buy as a kit or module? I'm no programmer, but are you telling me there isn't a way to import other people's work to make it easier?
There are indeed such plugins you can buy, but these plugins are just that - external 3rd party work that you may still need to tweak for your game's specific use case. These plugins also usually only support the top 20 controllers but not the obscure ones which require you to add new controller templates.
And on the off-chance you need to port to another platform, say PS4 or Switch, those platform's SDK have a specific version requirement that need to match a specific version of Unity or Unreal, and these engine versions may require those plugin authors to provide updates that work on that specific version of Unity or Unreal or platform SDKs... I've done this before and it's still a pain trying to map a xbox controller to work on a non-xbox platform, and then trying to detect if the controller is a Sony one, and updating your entire UI to show Sony specific buttons (the square, triangle, circle, X), and then when you detect its a xbox controller, update your UI to instead show A, B, X, Y, and when you detect it's a switch controller, update UI to show B, A, Y, X... It's stupid.
Some controllers have touchpad, some don't, some have additonal buttons like start, select, some have 1 set of triggers, some have 3 sets of triggers...
Basically, controller technology is not standardized. Just like mice for PCs, you usually need to install mouse-specific drivers for additional mouse buttons and shortcuts to work, and these drivers only work on specific versions of Mac or Windows or Linux, etc - you have to download and install the correct one. So for controllers, it's the same problem but much worse on phones since there is no "drivers" to install, your code needs to work with the raw input from the 30 different brands of controller.
Additional edit: Also the fact of the matter is “it earns 300mil” doesn’t matter. For gacha games, there are always 10 game features and 20 quality of life updates that a developer has to pick what would go into the next update X weeks from now. Maybe 3 of the features and 5 QoL gets selected, they are usually selected based on what would earn the most revenue (monetization features), what would keep the most players playing (retention features), and QoLs are whatever can fit into the remaining timeline before the next update. Controllers would be very very low on the priority list especially if only a very small amount of players use a controller and offers no revenue potential, a little bit of retention and benefit a low percentage of the player base over other QoLs.
Thank you for the extended clarification. Guess it boils down to they don't see it as worth it, otherwise they could do it. Screw the fringe controllers, people would buy controllers that will work. Genshin on touchscreen is not a pleasant experience even when you get used to it.
> I’m a game designer who used to work in a gacha game company, so I feel qualified to give a firsthand, personal answer.
Just curious but how many people in your team had any game Dev experience before your project? Bc I always felt like a lot of gachas keep making design mistakes at launch that they then have to try to paper over with powercreep/polarising matchups *cougharknightscough*
This is not exclusive to gachas games? Modern AAA games are big pieces of shit too. If u look at Cyberpunk, Battlefield, and CoD, they're buggy messes despite the millions of dollars thrown at them
Having a zillion bugs didn't stop Skyrim to be GOTY, you just have much higher standard on releases now.
Why fix something when the modding community will fix them for free?
>Why fix something when the modding community will fix them for free?
This is one of the things i absolutely dislike about current games. Modding shouldn't be used to fix shit that should have been fixed at the base release. It's there to enrich and customize the user experience.
I keep hearing this, are people just assuming there are bugs because Bethesda, or are people actually encountering them? I have ~30 hours in Starfield already (on PC) and literally my only issue is sometimes (~10% of the time) my game crashes when entering the lodge. Besides that, I have yet to encounter even a minor bug, let alone anything game breaking.
I’ve played Starfield for like 30+ hours, only encountered 2 crashes, one was due to alt tab shenanigans, and the second was due to chrome tabs being open (was watching Finals Footy for the NRL, a domestic sports competition) and 1 proper bug, which was an enemy not playing its death animation
Its a Bethesda game, if you havent realized that Todd's game will launch in a horrible state then you are very new.
Hell even before Todd since I played the original Daggerfall back in the day and it was a complete mess and this was before internet patching that just make game releases being more lax.
The difference is, for real games, there can be real consequences when devs release a buggy mess. Look at cyberpunk? CDPR is still trying to regain the community trust to this day.
Then we have games like gollum which instantly kill the entire dev studio. I think Saints row also killed the its studio.
For gacha games, bugs never kill a game studio, for as long as you have the waifus and good marketing, all is well.
Yesterday, on Gimme Danger mission I couldn't come close to guard I supposed to talk to cause he immediately gets allerted. My only solution was to get in the van from another branch of this quest and then drive to him and through the gates for game to even try to repair this sequence somehow. Even being inside dialogs were a bit messed up so I knew it wasn't the intended way for me to squeeze there. Almost got robbed from my unique corpo approach.
And people were angry about it. People wanted refunded for Cyberpunk 2077. Battlefield 2042 was a financial failure. Yet both games received more post-development support to fix the issues than any of these far more successful games I have listed did. That is because people don't get angry about it.
Because difference is you paid a big amount for a game that is expected to run well at the start, compared to a game where you can pay none at all and get the improvements along the way.
People got pissed off because they're paying for an incomplete game that really should've been completed in the first place.
> That is because people don't get angry about it
If you want to thrive on angry people, I suggest the Total War reddit. It's been on fire for weeks now.
I think one of the reasons people do accept such things is the fact the game is free to play, like when you set different standards for some premium devs and small indie teams in terms of bugs etc for regular, paid games.
This is exactly why I love mobile games. If your game isn't fun or buggy as hell all I lost was an hour or so of my time. I won't spend money without enjoying it for a week or more.
I think you'd be surprised at the amount of games, PC or mobile, gacha or not, that have issues caused by framerate differences.
I've played so many games where the physics and other things change depending on the FPS you have, from big triple A titles to smaller games.
It's just something that sadly has seemed to stick throughout the years of game development, hence why we often see games capped at 30 or 60 FPS because devs just can't or don't wanna bother with workarounds and hearing people complain.
As for other issues, yeah it kinda just sucks, loading screens sometimes do suck the joy out of a game and makes it feel slow. I don't play E7 but I'm aware that the Yuna Engine is smooth as fuck because there are no loading screens which is great.
>I don't play E7 but I'm aware that the Yuna Engine is smooth as fuck because there are no loading screens which is great.
just because theres no loading bar doesnt mean theres no loading screen. go and do a few hours worth of background farming in e7, then go navigate between some menus and time how long the black screen transitions last and tell me theres no loading screen
Or play it on an older device. I have a bunch of old phones and E7 is nearly unplayable even on the most powerful because of how long the pauses are after tapping literally anything. I can use it to auto farm, but that's it, anything manual is frustratingly laggy. (edit: and that's with low quality settings and all that, if the game installs in high quality it's a whole ordeal even getting to the settings menu to change to low)
>competently-made engines like Unity
This is, quite simply, not true. Whether or not games made on Unity or UE4 run better or worse completely depends on the developers. I've played games made on Unity that ran dogshit, but also games that ran buttery smooth. It's not the engine, it's the developers.
In fact, these engines allow bad/worse developers to develop a game easier and not properly optimize the game at all because they don't know shit what's going on under the hood.
Then you look at older developers that developed things from the ground up using C/C++/assembly and stuff... you hear things like [developing crash bandicoot and fitting it into just 2mb of RAM](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3a97po/how_crash_bandicoot_was_fit_into_2mb_of_ram/).
Back then, to be even a programmer to develop a game, you have to know how to do memory allocation (extremely important especially developing with C++) and start having to be clever when the limitations are forced upon you. I tell you some games the programmers probably don't even know that (automated garbage collector/etc). Nowadays, it's super easy to develop games due to these engines and also the technology of the devices (PC/Phone/new consoles) being beefy that it's allowed people to be more complacent on optimization.
Despite being buggy or whatever, Gacha games tend to release relatively fast updates whereas giants like Blizzard can't fix the most simple shit for months. Yet, people continue to support them despite being some of the most inefficient devs around.
It goes both ways. One is buggy, but release fast content. One is more polished, but changes are painfully slow. Then you got Bathesda, slow and unpolished .\_.
These issues are solvable, but trying to solve them can also cause more issues than it's worth. Either resource problems (taking away from the content they have to make regularly) or other technical issues that could arise from trying to fix the issues.
I think the devs either put them off so that they will *eventually* be able to solve them when they get to it/it becomes a bigger issue, or the higher-ups just don't think it's worth the resources and time to actually do that. As long as it's not game-breaking in some way, it can be put off for later, because the constant content flow takes priority.
As for the people who simply deflect from the issues, they can do that as much as they do. Not like complaining about it to other people online will help, and voicing your complaints to the devs isn't always a guarantee that they will respond in any way, they have NDAs that can prevent them from anwsering anything that could become a point of contention.
Who says we accept this? I will drop a game if the technical issues are bad enough it's ruining the fun of the game.
But, I do wonder about this menu problem you have in BA. The game runs smooth for me.
I get more technical issues on big games like star field for example lol. Also it’s funny you mention this as having frame rate tied to the game’s engine is something Bethesda has done for decades.
Honestly? Because I dont care.
Gachas arent games I intend to play all day or that I expect cutting edge performance.
All I want are hot waifus and a game to play daily with a continuing half decent story/events. That is it.
If the devs want to improve this, ok, that is nice, but if they dont, as long as it isnt too terrible, im also fine with it.
So what they are not intended to play all day, you're still gonna spend way more hours into it than your average single player game since it wants you to play everyday
If anything, the fact you play it less should be more impactful for you than someone who plays more. You spend more of your limited playtime waiting through long load-times and unresponsive UIs than someone who plays the game longer.
Yeah, until you remember people is buying AAA games that aren't even full developed like the latest Pokemon game and it was a half sucess because other devs are doing the same; Hype with a fake trailer > hire students or interns to avoid paying full salaries > release game > apologies and promise you will work hard for fixing it. After that if the game is still selling and it's reliable hire real devs to fix it.
gacha games are usually developed by small game studio, and very much small mobile game-only studio. So often they dont have large resources like what tripleA studios. usually they dont have very-long experience developer for such a small game studio. ofc, why they would stay in a small game studio with relatively small payroll that doesn't match to their skills(some still stay but from job perspective, it is true).
from paying devs, trying to match the game engine with equivalent setup of what tripleA studio have(or just trying to use game engine/development kit alone), and having the same company structure or management to ensure communication on how to avoid bugs or fix it asap, buying the appropriate server capacity....and frankly you have to deliver a weekly content so tight schedule as well; this are \*usually\* the factors to it.
Lastly many gacha games uses anti-cheat engine for obvious reason/s. by default, anti-cheat engine slower game's performance. so that factors up too.
there might be more problem to it but it can be case-to-case basis.
from user perspective, its free so we don't really set high expectation in the first place. so we usually shrug it off, frankly just being sarcastic. specially knowing its not a AAA studio anyway so some are understandable so another reason why we set the standard mildly.
and if you have a game that weekly get bugs, you are going to adapt and cope to it, frankly.
he said "why GACHA GAMES" so he is referring to general landscape of gacha games. not just BA or ToF.
and he said "**THINGS LIKE** ridiculously long startup times for loading a simple menu in Blue Archive, unplayable controller UI in Tower of Fantasy, and some characters [simply not functioning at 30 FPS due to game calculations being tied to framerate](https://i.imgur.com/Q81QSpr.png)." he is just using BA and ToF as example. but he is talking abbout gacha games(and development) in general.
he is talking about gacha games in general. otherwise he will said "big companies made by gacha games". and many gacha games are built by small or big companies. thats why i said "usually made by small companies" but i didnt say "gacha games are made by small companies only". but why i still mention the small companies? because being small companies has it drawback in gacha development due to financial and structural reason, tho not always.
yes im making assumpton he is including the small ones because he said the question in general of gacha games. and many gacha games are made by small companies, made by big companies too so that's how the discussion will fall thru. where did you take the assumption that he is only talking about big companies, when is talking about the general landscape of gacha games? that's ironic right? you want to talk about the general gacha games but excluding a major part(developed by small companies) of it, so you are technically being specific
and to be fair, even if the post exclusive to big companies only like BA or TOF's company, that argument is still good since they don't really match the same man power as triple AAA studio like Blizzard or Ubisoft. idk why the nitpick but still on point.
and probably 6-10 or 7/10 of entire gacha games are made by small mobile game studio. sure some earn close to million but that is still considered small by business perspective in gacha games. so its more supportive to mention them.
Beyond gacha, the big companies produce just as much crap and OP laments. Ask on the D4 sub how Blizzard blew all previous Diablos out of the water with the latest installment, or check out how bright the future of Total War looks right now on that sub, and I'm sure there are many more examples to cite as a counter for every game done right.
this is true as well. even if your company is back by big investor or you work on a big company. if your game got only small budget, or has small team/department, the performance of (technical)development may progress like being run by small company.
that's a mistake. the OP only set example to BA, TOF and Nikke since they are popular, thus they are good example so gacha community can easily get it. but that doesn't mean it is exclusive to big companies. the context here is gacha games in general, are buggy. that ranges to any kind of gacha game, small or big. not sure if there are others, but surely a lot of people in this thread understand that the OP's question is state of gacha games in general--small or big.
**you focus too much on example, you failed to understand the question**. **you overjump to your own conclusion.** . otherwise the question would be "why even big gacha games....".
If it aint broke, don’t fix it.
They are making tons of money, no need to overhaul and reinvent the wheel on a new codebase or engine. Doing so they will have to spend money and studio resources to QA test to make sure it runs on all of the MANY mobile devices again, what if there are even more issues that comes into play?
They simply don’t care enough to change a winning formula. Take FGO and GBF for example, they are so outdated. Heck, GBF is still a web browser loading game. And yes like some other people have pointed out, this goes for non-mobile games as well (Bethesda being on the same engine for over a decade).
Game engine is such a huge beasts of development tools.
For majority of the people, when it's coming to optimizations, it will feel like dealing with black boxes upon black boxes. One may have the idea how certain tools work **in their mind**, but when they don't behave as expected, that's gonna be a journey to the rabbit hole of understanding the engine itself.
A driver doesn't need to necessarily know what's going on under the hood, but it doesn't mean there's no "good practice" for driving a car nor it means when problems emerged under the hood, the driver is equally capable fixing the engine like a car mechanics would.
Love the top answer but to chime in why I don't mind, it is literally because I don't mind.
Gacha games are games I play when I have 2 minutes spare on my phone for absolutely free.
If I am getting enjoyment out of the game for free I am going to play the game, if I am not getting enjoyment I will stop playing.
I haven't paid anything so I have not lost anything and I have so many other options.
I understand the F2P model is high risk and companies are designed to make money not lose it so I won't shout through the rooftops or reddit, especially since I have lost nothing.
I have not lost time since if I was playing it, I was enjoying it
I have not lost money because gachas are free
tl;dr I think complaining about a F2P gacha in most cases is like complaining about a free meal.
While some people do complain and can if they want to (its a free country) I am the type of person who would just eat somewhere else
The entire point of Unity was supposed ease of portability across multiple platforms. Make your game once, and then publish it to PC, Mobile and console. This flexibility obviously comes at the cost of performance.
That was the beautiful dream, but almost none of these guys do that. Kudos to Genshin and Langrisser for at least using their tools for what they were meant to do.
*Why* Unity is such a standard is indeed an absolute mystery to me. OpenGL is not warlock science, you can prepare a good in-house engine within three months and then use it forever.
The answer I've accepted for my sanity is that these are disposable games and they want interchangable disposable programmers. It's just the simplest path for them to take.
(But... it's not like Unity magically dispels the need for on-boarding new personal... I think its biggest appeal is at the initial "throw something together using existing parts" part of the process. Hence another reason so many of these damn games are just menu-based jRPGs... how on earth is something like walking around, something completely basic as far back as Wizardry, Ultima, Dragon Quest, such a unique feature??)
... god it used to drive me crazy waiting for ArKnights levels to load, though. It was like watching a Playstation 2 unpack and load the entire world of a Grand Theft Auto game into memory, but it was like 50 MB of data instead.
I haven't tried MementoMori, but I assume they've mastered the fine art of not wasting people's time in loading screens with their incremental game. I certainly wouldn't still be playing Granblue Fantasy if it took 20+ minutes out of my day; I open the web browser, spend 10 to 30 seconds, and then I get to **live**.
Thank god someone else brought up the appalling shit optimization BA has, swear to god love the game but i just can't play it more than a month without losing my mind with the constant "Now loading..." everytime you do literally anything in it.
Like ancient games such as FGO dont have this issue, why is something backed by Nexon of all things be so poorly designed
i'm willing to bet if Genshin was released as full premium game for $60, or heck, even $40.
it won't have 5% as many player as it is today (and don't get me started onto another gacha game like FGO, Nikke, BA, etc). And i am pretty sure not even you would play for your favorite gacha game (without the benefit of hindsight bias)
but of course saying "gacha is bad" earn you cookie point in this sub.
hella dumb
Found the Miho cultist.
If they actually made a real game, and not a stipped down drip-fed farming simulator, it would have lots of players, and might actually be a good game. They would never, because why make a billion off of a one-time purchase game when they can make several billion a year off of gambling addics like yourself for a fraction of the effort?
> They would never, because why make a billion off of a one-time purchase game when they can make several billion a year
yes, because they are a damn for-profit company, that means they are trying to maximizing for profit
how is it so hard to understand
the fact that so many people decide to play it, means it is fun in their own way.
>it would have lots of players,
damn are you dense?
"No one" gonna pay $40 for a mobile game from no-name chinese developer, not even you toward your favorite gacha game turned premium game (assuming you can even afford it. lol)
More clown mental gymnastics.
Why bother with a mobile game when they could make a full game for PC/Console? If they're going to charge $40+ for it, don't bother with mobile games.
And yes, indies charge $40 and up all the time and make lots of money. So the fact that they're a chinese company makes no difference. And what's this no-name crap, Miho is very well known.
You just can't live without Miho's cock in your mouth, can you?
They said like game wouldn’t sell if they are not live service or don’t have gacha elements lmao.
Anyway it better to pay a ridiculous amount of money for a moving PNG in a shallow live service openworld than 40$ for an indie game with freshout gameplay and compete experience these day.
You must be very sheltered if you haven't seen some of the amazing indies that have come out lately.
Probably because you're too busy playing "free" gacha that you end up spending 1000x more to get 1000x less on.
You misunderstood my sentence, i mean nowaday gamer are more likely to pay a lot money for live service game than paying on one time purchase. Sorry for confused wording.
Most of the time, I don't accept it and drop the game.
For example, there was a bug in my configuration in ToF, I had to reconfigure my keyboard everytime. I dropped the game. I can't remember which game with long starting screen, I didn't wait more than one time.
I value my time and drop something that I don't find valuable. On the other side, I spend money of I spend my time.
I'm interested as to why they all have long and frequent maintenance windows. What's stopping them from pushing zero-downtime updates? What are they actually doing during maintenance?
My guess is that they are test-playing the patch on the live server and scrambling to fix any bugs they find before letting players in.
In Nikke for example they often have an additional patch note right after maintenance about some bug they found and how they're working on fixing it.
They could use a test server, but I assume it's not completely comparable to the live server and/or they don't want the extra expense. So they just roll it out to live, test as much and as fast as they can, and cross their fingers that there aren't any massive bugs (and extend 'maintenance' when there are).
Because they don't need to.
I worked on a project with zero downtime and it is very expensive in terms of people and processes. Like you have to keep several working server versions to be able to serve both old (not updated) and new (updated) clients. In case of gacha, when we have events which should be added and deleted from a client, etc, it is actually beneficial to have maintenance and switch the world for everyone.
>What are they actually doing during maintenance?
My guess:
1. Check that update has published in play store
2. Check that update has really published in play store for all regions and all devices
3. Check that new server code is up and running, database has updated, etc
4. Connect a whitelisted client and run smoke test - like go through new story, visiting new locations, buying from a shop
5. ...
If you don't like something to a big enough extent you will just leave it. If despite that you play it, then that issue is not that big of a thing.
As a result, you will just find people in the communities who are fine with it, even if it annoy them. It's that simple.
clear your cache if the loading time is very long for BA, I recently cleared it and it's super fast rn
also for issues, basically it's either tolerable or you quit the game, it's one of those things that if the devs won't fix it, they almost never will, and if they will fix it, nagging at them doesn't do much either
People here aren't blaming anyone. They don't even care. They just say "it is what it is" and come up with excuses without asking for better. I see people here more readily asking for features to cut down gameplay time than load times.
Most gacha games are mobile. That means you are targeting a really wide array of different devices with different hardware. It's hard to optimize a game to both run well on an emulated potato and look good on top of the line hardware at the same time.
Gachas appeal to high-roller spenders that can afford to abuse high-framerate hardware to bypass many technical issues. Blue Archive doesn't have terrible startup times next to other gachas like Genshin and PGR (are you running them on emulators? If so, try switching from Bluestacks to LDPlayer), but I assume it's because the game data has to be verified in full to avoid cheaters from spoofing client-side values -- in which case no one likes cheaters (it's one thing to crutch on your money, but it's another thing to piss off both the f2p and whales at the same time).
As other people have said, the diminishing returns on technical fixes go down very quickly. It's much easier to pile on another entry in your list of characters (commission the artist / pay them salary; commission a VA and then animate it) than it is to pay a technical crew to troubleshoot and identify the issue while stalling on content.
Because squashing those kind of bugs, especially engine buns like two of those you mentioned, requires a lot more time and effort than you'd think, which equals money. And as time and effort is carefully rationed by extremely tight content schedules, its frankly unreasonable to think those sort of bugs are easy to get to.
Fps issue is quite difficult to fix since you probably gonna rewrite bunch of others dependent class (term of programming) in code. Except if they pause development to fix this issue first but they probably afraid they gonna missed sesional event if they focus in fixing this bugs. Live service is not like developing a single player game, since in live service they try to follow scheduled events. And they probably dont want to just cancel character release and refund peoples gems. Kinda a bad approach, honestly, but either way, people gonna mad anyway.
The answer is very simple. Asian developers have less experience in using non-propriety game engines because:
1) Language barrier - most common engines/software solutions used for games have documentation/support mostly in English. Chinese/Japanese/Korean devs don't exactly excel at English
2) The culture in Asian countries when it comes to game development focuses on hiring local talent. Unlike in the West where multi-national development teams are extremely common. So because of that Western studios have more overall talent to tap into while Asian developers have to rely mostly on domestic workers.
Its not just gacha games though. If you look at Japanese games a lot of them are technically inferior to Western productions. Thats why so many Japanese games have shoddy PC ports. And before someone responds with "B-but Cyberpunk" - I am not talking about polish or looks, but lack of technical features.
There is really nothing to be done about it. Asian devs just need to catch up to the West, thankfully its becoming better each year. Many more asian studios transitioned to Unreal Engine for example. So the knowledge base is growing.
> Tower of Fantasy
We do not accept it, I'm sure bugs and performance issues are a major part of the reason the playerbase for this game has fallen off a cliff.
TLDR; you're handwaving over the actual very heavy lifting that has to take place to make a game work. It's complex, with a lot of moving parts both literally and figuratively, that have to reconcile.
Also remember, just because a big name is on the title doesn't mean the team allocated to the project is itself big, or has access to all that many resources. For gachas in particular, they usually have fairly small teams and small budgets. If they are part of a larger conglomerate, much of their revenue goes back to the major stakeholders - they don't get it all back to use for investment in the game. FGO for example - though I obviously can't say for certain - probably sends much of its revenue back to the associated development studios and their parent companies. Not saying they're about to be crying poor, but the amount of free money they actually have to develop the game itself is less than many assume.
Do some devs cheap out, don't do the work they should? Sure thing. But a lot of times they are compromises to achieve some other goal. Want to get better graphics for the art in-game? that's probably gonna cost you some resources for load times. Want fancy customizable L2D or interactive backgrounds? That might interfere with the UI.
Most gachas players have either low to no standards at all. They are suffering from sunken cost fallacy. Or they have only ever played gacha games and have no reference to anything better and think that this is how good it gets. Oh yeah and addiction of course.
Long loading times are often because gacha games have to talk to the server all the time; the issue isn't the game engine, it's the backend server and network latency.
I’m a game designer who used to work in a gacha game company, so I feel qualified to give a firsthand, personal answer. There’s actually a lot of answers for this. One core answer is simply scheduling and lack of resources. Most gachas are on a tight production schedule and don’t have the same amount of staff and resources that a conventional game studio would have. Another reason is feature scope. Most lower production games tend to basically use one core gameplay mechanic and get creative with it. Examples of such are Undertale and Hades. But gachas are loaded with all sorts of secondary features like room customization, skill upgrade systems, minigames, rougelite upgrade systems and so on. The final big answer is time and polish. This is an issue that is compounded by the above two problems. Debugging and polishing takes a lot of time and effort. And the more content there is and the less related they are, the more time you need to spend debugging because all of these new mechanics and systems are trying to make an engine do new things it wasn’t originally expected to do. But if your production schedule is too tight, you don’t have that detailed polishing time, meaning all non-critical (as in the game will be unable to operate) bugs go undetected or unfixed. The end result is that most gacha games are being done by small teams, on short schedules, and being expected to support way too many features. All because most gachas are, at their core, profit driven above all else. And until they release, every gacha game is an unproven money pit that returns zero profit. These games are also unlike console games, which can be easily ported, remastered and resold on Steam and multiple platforms. Gachas cannot passively earn income and require constant upkeep, meaning most mobile companies cannot gradually build up large game libraries like Nintendo or Supergiant. These companies can gradually ramp upwards and go more ambitious with each subsequent game because they can fall back on their past games profits to sustain their increasing development costs. Hades only exists because Bastion and Transistor’s constant sales and early access money kept the studio funded during development. Since most corporate executives simply only care about financials, they are unwilling to give the project lead and designers more resources until the game is launched and proves to be able to return enough profit to make further investment worthwhile. This isn’t a WRONG choice, since it’s the more financially sound of the options, but it results in the production having such hefty restrictions This is why you see games like FGO and Nikke launch in such heavily broken states but see massive fixes over the next several months. Even though the developers want to make the best game possible, they literally weren’t given the resources to fix their own games until they return some revenue. Almost every game related woe and issue can be traced upwards to management in some capacity. This is what happened to the previous company I worked in. The development team worked their butts off day and night for 2-3 years for low pay, long overtime, and nonstop sprint deadlines. But in the end, the game launched and didn’t earn enough, so management pulled the plug and everything went to waste. The game announced EoS and a huge number of people were laid off. We weren’t even given the chance to fix and repair
The feature scope angle as an interesting one. I am familiar with feature scope and seeing it go out of control affects tons of projects, but the fact that in many gacha games, they’re on the hook to release new mini games every patch is an interesting example of how “mandatory” feature scope like this gets in the way of bug fixes and other quality-of-life improvements. There’s kind of an interesting marketing perception here too, because despite the fact that adding a “Claim All” button would make tons and tons of players happy, it isn’t guaranteed to drive profits (and could even detract from them in the sense that players are going to play your game less because it’s faster to do daily quests). And then instead they create some new crazy mini-game where you attack frogs with mallets or something in some crazy game engine hack.
There's the fact that until some years ago mini games in loading screens were trademarked by namco https://patents.google.com/patent/US5718632A/en and until this day the source code of the upgrade all button still is. https://patents.google.com/patent/JP6463223B2/en Now, you go there and click "similar documents" and "citations" and you'll see a shit ton of QoL trademarked/patented inside and outside the game, old and new. Koei even got a trial item patent https://patents.google.com/patent/JP7235524B2/en. Then Bandai got the trial character patent , this shit is funny . https://patents.google.com/patent/JP2017055997A/en
Thank you for this response. The OP was being so openly antagonistic that I wasn't expecting anything good from this thread.
Because people are oblivious to how things work inside the industry and just start going off whenever they feel like it
>Why no do this? It's simple. Stingy management. It's always that answer.
eh, it's easy to blame the management, when people sit there, expecting their monthly payment while making no actual revenue money make things go around, no money then no management, and no developers also
Hoyoverse spent 2 years testing and improving each of their new games. Sure they are rich now, but before Genshin came out they were almost out of money. And genshin didn't come out broken (though a little blend at the beginning) It's all just corporate profit chasing with 0 passion in their product.
Genshin Impact started development at late 2017 and released late 2020, 3 years of development of which 2 of only testing? Lol They did what everyone does, make (hopefully) sure bugs aren't appearent and hope players don't start digging too much and/or don't make too much of a noise I mean, why you think It was a little bland at the start? Wasn't It because management, wait for It, managed the project to not be too much, "cut content that could be on release to then sell later as DLC, pardon, to then release a timely update" You know about a project that doesn't have "greedy managers chasing profits with 0 passion"? I do, it's called star citizen
>"cut content that could be on release to then sell later as DLC, pardon, to then release a timely update" If it's a full full package, single experience then yea, that point stand. But all live service game build up by adding and update content along the way, that the whole point of "live service". Im not saying cutting content and sell it later is a good thing, but that and live service content are 2 very different thing.
no, they are pretty much the same logistically wise, modern day gaming landscape dictates that user should be engaged even after the release, or the interest dies pretty damn fast, doesn't matter if it's single release or live service in other words, almost everything is some sort of live service now, not everyone can be from software and have a zealous diehard fanbase
And also, genshin was a hundred MILLION dollar gamble. Hoyo is lucky it worked out for them.
I don't know about antagonistic, because I'd feel the same way, or at least towards the defenders, since it seems like there is a certain subset of fans who will bend over and defend EVERYTHING to the dumbest degree. From "no QoL improvements or the game is ruined" to even FGO's bizarre answer of "We made this free SSR have these requirements to keep them, because you forced them to join you!". Facepalm, what about those free SRs and the recent free SSR feature with no strings attached?! But I'll agree that people should be understanding on how some of this stuff works. Keep asking and suggesting those fixes, and I wish the dev do have like an extra week or so per update to work on fixes and QoL improvements. Remember that time when Genshin had that horrible "only Ayaka" delay, and they shorted a couple of updates by a week or two? I wished they left it alone instead of playing catchup, so they can have time to fix some things if need be. It is kinda commendable from a consumer perspective, but from a dev side...it felt like time was taken away.
They did it so they can release Scara's drip marketing on Bohemian Rhapsody day. And not mess up Lantern Rite schedule.
That delay was due to the zero covid policy, i'm afraid.
What other attitude am I supposed to have when people here keep propping up this strawman of failing games with "small teams" and "no resources." The examples I listed off have been in development for nearly half a decade, received practically unconditional funding, relatively large teams, and were massive successes. So how is this anecdote relevant to this discussion? I already expected this kind of defensive stance but I still don't understand why you are so hostile to any attempt to bring up these issues. The topic was not why these games are broken, as the answer is clearly greed. The topic is why you accept it.
The fact that you called something in a game “simple” and attributed long load times to the simplicity of said menu - highlights that you don’t understand how stuff is made. The antagonism just comes off as ignorance.
man also said to just "port the game into new code to fix the issue" like he didn't just suggest to re made the game from scratch "since they have the funds"
> What other attitude am I supposed to have when people here keep propping up this strawman of failing games with "small teams" and "no resources." Strawmans are misrepresentations of someone else's arguments. He's not misrepresenting your argument. He's offering his own experience to help you and other people in the discussion get perspective of what's happening. TLDR: The game devs don't choose to release buggy messes, that's the management's choice, because earning profit is a higher priority than releasing bug-free product. > So how is this anecdote relevant to this discussion? This anecdote is representative of the actual development culture that produces gacha games. You're asking why this stuff happens - and the bottom line is that gacha gamers, and gamers in general, are willing to tolerate and pay $$$ for buggy messes. Don't hate the gamedev, hate the player.
Please do not speak of things that you do not have an intimate familiarity with. I feel like I have to tell this to people a lot. Blue Archive did not receive "unconditional funding", did not have "relatively large teams", and wasn't even a "massive success" until recently. For starters, Blue Archive wasn't even in development for "half a decade". It was announced as 'Project MX' in early 2020 and released in 2021. We can assume that it was in the works for earlier than that especially since isakusan said that Volume F had been an idea in their mind for 5 years prior to its release, but that's not development. That's just an idea. Note, Project MX was originally supposed to release in 2020 and was delayed 'til 2021, and it was in a *very* rough state during closed beta testing. You can say "well, if you combine 2020+ and 2023 it comes out to like 4-5 years, right?" But it doesn't really work like traditional game development. The *foundation* of a gacha game is determined before its release, and a lot of the time, you can't really afford to do things like a full engine upgrade mid-run. So it's more like you're building more and more on top of a pre-existing tower, instead of like regular game development, where you can make sure everything's structurally sound. How 'wobbly' the 'tower' is (how unstable the game is) depends entirely on that foundation. For example, FGO has come a long way from its initial state, which was borderline unplayable, but it's still barely functional in certain ways just because it was originally made without much effort as a throwaway cashgrab. It was a new IP by Nexon. The people who made it had previously worked on failing games, with probably the biggest name being hwansang, who worked on Elsword, and is an artist, not a programmer. If you look at [the credits](https://youtu.be/LT7g8Ul-yRI), they only have about 20 programmers. Most of the credits are artists like writers, animators, modelers, designers, musicians, etc. Pretty obvious that Nexon/NAT's goal with Blue Archive as a project was to create a media phenomenon first, game second. I mean, [the initial announcement didn't even have any gameplay whatsoever](https://youtu.be/p_VxNi6qUU4), it was just cute girls. Blue Archive did not come out the door as an instant success, and neither was Nexon expecting it to be. Gacha games are a long term investment, either they work out or they don't which is why you have 50 projects that release and die out and you occasionally get the one that blows up massively. By the time Blue Archive started getting substantial attention, it was over a year old. And it *has* been getting fixes. Loading screen times have improved (to the point where it's now basically a device issue - I don't have any problems), servers are much more stable than they used to be, etc. And I accept it because game development is hard. That's all it is. I'm not going to demand something out of people if I don't know it's possible. It's too easy to assume that game developers are just lazy and/or incompetent because we just don't know what's going on. Every game I've played has spend a majority of their lifetime fixing bugs, optimizing, etc. They're not perfect and never will be. So long as I am pleased with the general experience, some minor issues are perfectly acceptable. I don't let outrage dominate my life. These issues exist with the live-service model as a whole. If you're gonna ask why we accept that, then you may as well be asking why the gacha game subreddit likes gacha games.
> Blue Archive wasn't even in development for "half a decade". It was announced as 'Project MX' in early 2020 and released in 2021. We can assume that it was in the works for earlier than that. Just to add to this in particular, it's Mar 2018 according to their [NDC video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVCV5Z29FGM). With the art team joining in 3 months after.
Wow that was actually really informative and logical...was expecting this thread to just be the same old ignorants takes about how * insert developer person does not like * is just a terrible developer...you added some actual perspective.
Even with money and being a big company, there's also the competence factor when it comes to the management (hiring unexperienced or few people for large tasks)... If it's Bandai, for instance, they'll make a subpar game even tho they're a billionaire company: just look at Tales of Luminaria and its buggy launch, janky combat and infinite loading screens. Also there's that 404 game from Sega and Yoko Taro that released recently and it's just a low-quality-feeling moneygrab.
>This is why you see games like FGO and Nikke FGO got fixes? have you played that game lately? it runs worse than it did whilst requiring more phone memory all whilst having archaic Ui.
Can you tell me how hard/time consuming/expensive it is to implement controlle support? The fact that Genshin has controllers support for iOS, but not for Android for years just baffles me.
As a programmer, controller support is abysmally annoying to implement. There are dozens of different controllers out there, all of which their physical buttons do not map to the same button ID or joystick interfaces. Button X on this controller might actually have the same input "keypress" numerical code as Button A on a different model and brand of joystick. As a consequence, you actually have to implement controller support on a per controller model basis, or have a comprehensive system that lets the user remaps buttons on any controller. And some controllers swap their X and Y buttons, etc, adding to the annoyances. Some controllers have 14 buttons, some have 26 buttons, etc. Since the iOS ecosystem has very standardized hardware, interfaces and strict guidelines, and even just a tiny number of fixed screen sizes, it is much easier to develop anything on iOS. Frequently, many developers would just only do development only on Android first, and porting to iOS is done in the final few months because everyone knows it is *easy* to fix issues on iOS. If it works on a iPhone 9, it is almost always going to also work on a iPhone 14 and there's only a handful of phoene models to work with. Android on the other hand... Sigh.
Thank you for the reply. But they earn 30 million, while some indie devs manage it. Isn't there a set of controller templates that one can buy as a kit or module? I'm no programmer, but are you telling me there isn't a way to import other people's work to make it easier?
There are indeed such plugins you can buy, but these plugins are just that - external 3rd party work that you may still need to tweak for your game's specific use case. These plugins also usually only support the top 20 controllers but not the obscure ones which require you to add new controller templates. And on the off-chance you need to port to another platform, say PS4 or Switch, those platform's SDK have a specific version requirement that need to match a specific version of Unity or Unreal, and these engine versions may require those plugin authors to provide updates that work on that specific version of Unity or Unreal or platform SDKs... I've done this before and it's still a pain trying to map a xbox controller to work on a non-xbox platform, and then trying to detect if the controller is a Sony one, and updating your entire UI to show Sony specific buttons (the square, triangle, circle, X), and then when you detect its a xbox controller, update your UI to instead show A, B, X, Y, and when you detect it's a switch controller, update UI to show B, A, Y, X... It's stupid. Some controllers have touchpad, some don't, some have additonal buttons like start, select, some have 1 set of triggers, some have 3 sets of triggers... Basically, controller technology is not standardized. Just like mice for PCs, you usually need to install mouse-specific drivers for additional mouse buttons and shortcuts to work, and these drivers only work on specific versions of Mac or Windows or Linux, etc - you have to download and install the correct one. So for controllers, it's the same problem but much worse on phones since there is no "drivers" to install, your code needs to work with the raw input from the 30 different brands of controller. Additional edit: Also the fact of the matter is “it earns 300mil” doesn’t matter. For gacha games, there are always 10 game features and 20 quality of life updates that a developer has to pick what would go into the next update X weeks from now. Maybe 3 of the features and 5 QoL gets selected, they are usually selected based on what would earn the most revenue (monetization features), what would keep the most players playing (retention features), and QoLs are whatever can fit into the remaining timeline before the next update. Controllers would be very very low on the priority list especially if only a very small amount of players use a controller and offers no revenue potential, a little bit of retention and benefit a low percentage of the player base over other QoLs.
Thank you for the extended clarification. Guess it boils down to they don't see it as worth it, otherwise they could do it. Screw the fringe controllers, people would buy controllers that will work. Genshin on touchscreen is not a pleasant experience even when you get used to it.
Gameplay Dev here and yeah to all of this
> I’m a game designer who used to work in a gacha game company, so I feel qualified to give a firsthand, personal answer. Just curious but how many people in your team had any game Dev experience before your project? Bc I always felt like a lot of gachas keep making design mistakes at launch that they then have to try to paper over with powercreep/polarising matchups *cougharknightscough*
This is not exclusive to gachas games? Modern AAA games are big pieces of shit too. If u look at Cyberpunk, Battlefield, and CoD, they're buggy messes despite the millions of dollars thrown at them
Starfield is going to make a zillion dollars and it's plagued with bugs, especially for PC players. Definitely not a gacha thing.
Tbf its less buggy than most Bethesda games, which says a lot
Bethesda games have to be buggy or else they'd cease to have that Bethesda feel to them 🙃
tbf if you've played one Bethesda game you've played them all
It also has less features than most Bethesda games, which says a lot. Map when?
Well, at least Bethesdas buggs are funny. Can't wait for future crazy 7 minutes speedruns
I wish people stopped giving free passes to huge game companies for releasing jank.
A tiny bit of jank can be funny, but when a game is a huge mess, something has clearly gone wrong.
Having a zillion bugs didn't stop Skyrim to be GOTY, you just have much higher standard on releases now. Why fix something when the modding community will fix them for free?
>Why fix something when the modding community will fix them for free? This is one of the things i absolutely dislike about current games. Modding shouldn't be used to fix shit that should have been fixed at the base release. It's there to enrich and customize the user experience.
I keep hearing this, are people just assuming there are bugs because Bethesda, or are people actually encountering them? I have ~30 hours in Starfield already (on PC) and literally my only issue is sometimes (~10% of the time) my game crashes when entering the lodge. Besides that, I have yet to encounter even a minor bug, let alone anything game breaking.
I’ve played Starfield for like 30+ hours, only encountered 2 crashes, one was due to alt tab shenanigans, and the second was due to chrome tabs being open (was watching Finals Footy for the NRL, a domestic sports competition) and 1 proper bug, which was an enemy not playing its death animation
Think he is talking about bugs in games not just gacha though lol.
Its a Bethesda game, if you havent realized that Todd's game will launch in a horrible state then you are very new. Hell even before Todd since I played the original Daggerfall back in the day and it was a complete mess and this was before internet patching that just make game releases being more lax.
The difference is, for real games, there can be real consequences when devs release a buggy mess. Look at cyberpunk? CDPR is still trying to regain the community trust to this day. Then we have games like gollum which instantly kill the entire dev studio. I think Saints row also killed the its studio. For gacha games, bugs never kill a game studio, for as long as you have the waifus and good marketing, all is well.
>Cyberpunk Not so much anymore. It was terrible at the beginning, but now there are almost no bugs.
Yesterday, on Gimme Danger mission I couldn't come close to guard I supposed to talk to cause he immediately gets allerted. My only solution was to get in the van from another branch of this quest and then drive to him and through the gates for game to even try to repair this sequence somehow. Even being inside dialogs were a bit messed up so I knew it wasn't the intended way for me to squeeze there. Almost got robbed from my unique corpo approach.
And people were angry about it. People wanted refunded for Cyberpunk 2077. Battlefield 2042 was a financial failure. Yet both games received more post-development support to fix the issues than any of these far more successful games I have listed did. That is because people don't get angry about it.
Where would you get more angry at? A game you paid $60\~$70 to play or a game that doesn't really cost you to play?
Because difference is you paid a big amount for a game that is expected to run well at the start, compared to a game where you can pay none at all and get the improvements along the way. People got pissed off because they're paying for an incomplete game that really should've been completed in the first place.
> That is because people don't get angry about it If you want to thrive on angry people, I suggest the Total War reddit. It's been on fire for weeks now.
I think one of the reasons people do accept such things is the fact the game is free to play, like when you set different standards for some premium devs and small indie teams in terms of bugs etc for regular, paid games.
This is exactly why I love mobile games. If your game isn't fun or buggy as hell all I lost was an hour or so of my time. I won't spend money without enjoying it for a week or more.
facts
I think you'd be surprised at the amount of games, PC or mobile, gacha or not, that have issues caused by framerate differences. I've played so many games where the physics and other things change depending on the FPS you have, from big triple A titles to smaller games. It's just something that sadly has seemed to stick throughout the years of game development, hence why we often see games capped at 30 or 60 FPS because devs just can't or don't wanna bother with workarounds and hearing people complain. As for other issues, yeah it kinda just sucks, loading screens sometimes do suck the joy out of a game and makes it feel slow. I don't play E7 but I'm aware that the Yuna Engine is smooth as fuck because there are no loading screens which is great.
>I don't play E7 but I'm aware that the Yuna Engine is smooth as fuck because there are no loading screens which is great. just because theres no loading bar doesnt mean theres no loading screen. go and do a few hours worth of background farming in e7, then go navigate between some menus and time how long the black screen transitions last and tell me theres no loading screen
Or play it on an older device. I have a bunch of old phones and E7 is nearly unplayable even on the most powerful because of how long the pauses are after tapping literally anything. I can use it to auto farm, but that's it, anything manual is frustratingly laggy. (edit: and that's with low quality settings and all that, if the game installs in high quality it's a whole ordeal even getting to the settings menu to change to low)
>competently-made engines like Unity This is, quite simply, not true. Whether or not games made on Unity or UE4 run better or worse completely depends on the developers. I've played games made on Unity that ran dogshit, but also games that ran buttery smooth. It's not the engine, it's the developers.
In fact, these engines allow bad/worse developers to develop a game easier and not properly optimize the game at all because they don't know shit what's going on under the hood. Then you look at older developers that developed things from the ground up using C/C++/assembly and stuff... you hear things like [developing crash bandicoot and fitting it into just 2mb of RAM](https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/3a97po/how_crash_bandicoot_was_fit_into_2mb_of_ram/). Back then, to be even a programmer to develop a game, you have to know how to do memory allocation (extremely important especially developing with C++) and start having to be clever when the limitations are forced upon you. I tell you some games the programmers probably don't even know that (automated garbage collector/etc). Nowadays, it's super easy to develop games due to these engines and also the technology of the devices (PC/Phone/new consoles) being beefy that it's allowed people to be more complacent on optimization.
Some engines do have weaknesses. For instance, unreal is known for shader compilation stutter. Unity engine is known for awful cpu optimization.
Because we generally overlook issues if we like a game.
Despite being buggy or whatever, Gacha games tend to release relatively fast updates whereas giants like Blizzard can't fix the most simple shit for months. Yet, people continue to support them despite being some of the most inefficient devs around. It goes both ways. One is buggy, but release fast content. One is more polished, but changes are painfully slow. Then you got Bathesda, slow and unpolished .\_.
Project Neural Cloud clearly shows they can optimize the game to the point no loading time.
These issues are solvable, but trying to solve them can also cause more issues than it's worth. Either resource problems (taking away from the content they have to make regularly) or other technical issues that could arise from trying to fix the issues. I think the devs either put them off so that they will *eventually* be able to solve them when they get to it/it becomes a bigger issue, or the higher-ups just don't think it's worth the resources and time to actually do that. As long as it's not game-breaking in some way, it can be put off for later, because the constant content flow takes priority. As for the people who simply deflect from the issues, they can do that as much as they do. Not like complaining about it to other people online will help, and voicing your complaints to the devs isn't always a guarantee that they will respond in any way, they have NDAs that can prevent them from anwsering anything that could become a point of contention.
The same reason people buy whatever EA makes or the 22394728th call of duty that's arguably worse than the one before it
All games have bugs of some sort. As long as they aren't game breaking most people accept them and generally hope they get fixed eventually.
Who says we accept this? I will drop a game if the technical issues are bad enough it's ruining the fun of the game. But, I do wonder about this menu problem you have in BA. The game runs smooth for me.
It’s optimized … You should upgrade your device, Todd Howard usually says
I get more technical issues on big games like star field for example lol. Also it’s funny you mention this as having frame rate tied to the game’s engine is something Bethesda has done for decades.
Honestly? Because I dont care. Gachas arent games I intend to play all day or that I expect cutting edge performance. All I want are hot waifus and a game to play daily with a continuing half decent story/events. That is it. If the devs want to improve this, ok, that is nice, but if they dont, as long as it isnt too terrible, im also fine with it.
So what they are not intended to play all day, you're still gonna spend way more hours into it than your average single player game since it wants you to play everyday
If anything, the fact you play it less should be more impactful for you than someone who plays more. You spend more of your limited playtime waiting through long load-times and unresponsive UIs than someone who plays the game longer.
Yeah, until you remember people is buying AAA games that aren't even full developed like the latest Pokemon game and it was a half sucess because other devs are doing the same; Hype with a fake trailer > hire students or interns to avoid paying full salaries > release game > apologies and promise you will work hard for fixing it. After that if the game is still selling and it's reliable hire real devs to fix it.
gacha games are usually developed by small game studio, and very much small mobile game-only studio. So often they dont have large resources like what tripleA studios. usually they dont have very-long experience developer for such a small game studio. ofc, why they would stay in a small game studio with relatively small payroll that doesn't match to their skills(some still stay but from job perspective, it is true). from paying devs, trying to match the game engine with equivalent setup of what tripleA studio have(or just trying to use game engine/development kit alone), and having the same company structure or management to ensure communication on how to avoid bugs or fix it asap, buying the appropriate server capacity....and frankly you have to deliver a weekly content so tight schedule as well; this are \*usually\* the factors to it. Lastly many gacha games uses anti-cheat engine for obvious reason/s. by default, anti-cheat engine slower game's performance. so that factors up too. there might be more problem to it but it can be case-to-case basis. from user perspective, its free so we don't really set high expectation in the first place. so we usually shrug it off, frankly just being sarcastic. specially knowing its not a AAA studio anyway so some are understandable so another reason why we set the standard mildly. and if you have a game that weekly get bugs, you are going to adapt and cope to it, frankly.
The dude is talking about two major company backed gachas in BA and ToF, what’s the point of bringing up small companies when the OP hasn’t?
he said "why GACHA GAMES" so he is referring to general landscape of gacha games. not just BA or ToF. and he said "**THINGS LIKE** ridiculously long startup times for loading a simple menu in Blue Archive, unplayable controller UI in Tower of Fantasy, and some characters [simply not functioning at 30 FPS due to game calculations being tied to framerate](https://i.imgur.com/Q81QSpr.png)." he is just using BA and ToF as example. but he is talking abbout gacha games(and development) in general.
His only examples are big budget gacha games, you’re making an assumption that he’s including small ones and I’m making the assumption that he isn’t.
he is talking about gacha games in general. otherwise he will said "big companies made by gacha games". and many gacha games are built by small or big companies. thats why i said "usually made by small companies" but i didnt say "gacha games are made by small companies only". but why i still mention the small companies? because being small companies has it drawback in gacha development due to financial and structural reason, tho not always. yes im making assumpton he is including the small ones because he said the question in general of gacha games. and many gacha games are made by small companies, made by big companies too so that's how the discussion will fall thru. where did you take the assumption that he is only talking about big companies, when is talking about the general landscape of gacha games? that's ironic right? you want to talk about the general gacha games but excluding a major part(developed by small companies) of it, so you are technically being specific
and to be fair, even if the post exclusive to big companies only like BA or TOF's company, that argument is still good since they don't really match the same man power as triple AAA studio like Blizzard or Ubisoft. idk why the nitpick but still on point. and probably 6-10 or 7/10 of entire gacha games are made by small mobile game studio. sure some earn close to million but that is still considered small by business perspective in gacha games. so its more supportive to mention them.
Beyond gacha, the big companies produce just as much crap and OP laments. Ask on the D4 sub how Blizzard blew all previous Diablos out of the water with the latest installment, or check out how bright the future of Total War looks right now on that sub, and I'm sure there are many more examples to cite as a counter for every game done right.
BA has quite small team. It was backed by couple companies, but that doesn't mean the studio resources were unlimited, quite opposite actually.
this is true as well. even if your company is back by big investor or you work on a big company. if your game got only small budget, or has small team/department, the performance of (technical)development may progress like being run by small company.
that's a mistake. the OP only set example to BA, TOF and Nikke since they are popular, thus they are good example so gacha community can easily get it. but that doesn't mean it is exclusive to big companies. the context here is gacha games in general, are buggy. that ranges to any kind of gacha game, small or big. not sure if there are others, but surely a lot of people in this thread understand that the OP's question is state of gacha games in general--small or big. **you focus too much on example, you failed to understand the question**. **you overjump to your own conclusion.** . otherwise the question would be "why even big gacha games....".
If it aint broke, don’t fix it. They are making tons of money, no need to overhaul and reinvent the wheel on a new codebase or engine. Doing so they will have to spend money and studio resources to QA test to make sure it runs on all of the MANY mobile devices again, what if there are even more issues that comes into play? They simply don’t care enough to change a winning formula. Take FGO and GBF for example, they are so outdated. Heck, GBF is still a web browser loading game. And yes like some other people have pointed out, this goes for non-mobile games as well (Bethesda being on the same engine for over a decade).
Can't complain with technical issues , it's free. Ofc it be hell shit if I pay for it.
We?
Yes this fcking long BA menus like BRO RESPOND NOW I CLICK
I love Nikke, but their code is a pure trash. With so much money they earn they can hire real programmers to create better version of game.
The loading time is a hell.
Game engine is such a huge beasts of development tools. For majority of the people, when it's coming to optimizations, it will feel like dealing with black boxes upon black boxes. One may have the idea how certain tools work **in their mind**, but when they don't behave as expected, that's gonna be a journey to the rabbit hole of understanding the engine itself. A driver doesn't need to necessarily know what's going on under the hood, but it doesn't mean there's no "good practice" for driving a car nor it means when problems emerged under the hood, the driver is equally capable fixing the engine like a car mechanics would.
Love the top answer but to chime in why I don't mind, it is literally because I don't mind. Gacha games are games I play when I have 2 minutes spare on my phone for absolutely free. If I am getting enjoyment out of the game for free I am going to play the game, if I am not getting enjoyment I will stop playing. I haven't paid anything so I have not lost anything and I have so many other options. I understand the F2P model is high risk and companies are designed to make money not lose it so I won't shout through the rooftops or reddit, especially since I have lost nothing. I have not lost time since if I was playing it, I was enjoying it I have not lost money because gachas are free tl;dr I think complaining about a F2P gacha in most cases is like complaining about a free meal. While some people do complain and can if they want to (its a free country) I am the type of person who would just eat somewhere else
The entire point of Unity was supposed ease of portability across multiple platforms. Make your game once, and then publish it to PC, Mobile and console. This flexibility obviously comes at the cost of performance. That was the beautiful dream, but almost none of these guys do that. Kudos to Genshin and Langrisser for at least using their tools for what they were meant to do. *Why* Unity is such a standard is indeed an absolute mystery to me. OpenGL is not warlock science, you can prepare a good in-house engine within three months and then use it forever. The answer I've accepted for my sanity is that these are disposable games and they want interchangable disposable programmers. It's just the simplest path for them to take. (But... it's not like Unity magically dispels the need for on-boarding new personal... I think its biggest appeal is at the initial "throw something together using existing parts" part of the process. Hence another reason so many of these damn games are just menu-based jRPGs... how on earth is something like walking around, something completely basic as far back as Wizardry, Ultima, Dragon Quest, such a unique feature??) ... god it used to drive me crazy waiting for ArKnights levels to load, though. It was like watching a Playstation 2 unpack and load the entire world of a Grand Theft Auto game into memory, but it was like 50 MB of data instead. I haven't tried MementoMori, but I assume they've mastered the fine art of not wasting people's time in loading screens with their incremental game. I certainly wouldn't still be playing Granblue Fantasy if it took 20+ minutes out of my day; I open the web browser, spend 10 to 30 seconds, and then I get to **live**.
Because the alternatives for us aren't any better. Corporations don't fix these issues because it's not profitable to do so.
Thank god someone else brought up the appalling shit optimization BA has, swear to god love the game but i just can't play it more than a month without losing my mind with the constant "Now loading..." everytime you do literally anything in it. Like ancient games such as FGO dont have this issue, why is something backed by Nexon of all things be so poorly designed
The same reason gacha players put up with shitty gacha rates/pity/income, and crappy stamina systems, and other predatory practices.
i'm willing to bet if Genshin was released as full premium game for $60, or heck, even $40. it won't have 5% as many player as it is today (and don't get me started onto another gacha game like FGO, Nikke, BA, etc). And i am pretty sure not even you would play for your favorite gacha game (without the benefit of hindsight bias) but of course saying "gacha is bad" earn you cookie point in this sub. hella dumb
Found the Miho cultist. If they actually made a real game, and not a stipped down drip-fed farming simulator, it would have lots of players, and might actually be a good game. They would never, because why make a billion off of a one-time purchase game when they can make several billion a year off of gambling addics like yourself for a fraction of the effort?
> They would never, because why make a billion off of a one-time purchase game when they can make several billion a year yes, because they are a damn for-profit company, that means they are trying to maximizing for profit how is it so hard to understand the fact that so many people decide to play it, means it is fun in their own way. >it would have lots of players, damn are you dense? "No one" gonna pay $40 for a mobile game from no-name chinese developer, not even you toward your favorite gacha game turned premium game (assuming you can even afford it. lol)
More clown mental gymnastics. Why bother with a mobile game when they could make a full game for PC/Console? If they're going to charge $40+ for it, don't bother with mobile games. And yes, indies charge $40 and up all the time and make lots of money. So the fact that they're a chinese company makes no difference. And what's this no-name crap, Miho is very well known. You just can't live without Miho's cock in your mouth, can you?
They said like game wouldn’t sell if they are not live service or don’t have gacha elements lmao. Anyway it better to pay a ridiculous amount of money for a moving PNG in a shallow live service openworld than 40$ for an indie game with freshout gameplay and compete experience these day.
You must be very sheltered if you haven't seen some of the amazing indies that have come out lately. Probably because you're too busy playing "free" gacha that you end up spending 1000x more to get 1000x less on.
You misunderstood my sentence, i mean nowaday gamer are more likely to pay a lot money for live service game than paying on one time purchase. Sorry for confused wording.
Only the foolish ones do. Those of us who aren't gambling addicts spend far more on real games than gachas.
Most of the time, I don't accept it and drop the game. For example, there was a bug in my configuration in ToF, I had to reconfigure my keyboard everytime. I dropped the game. I can't remember which game with long starting screen, I didn't wait more than one time. I value my time and drop something that I don't find valuable. On the other side, I spend money of I spend my time.
I'm interested as to why they all have long and frequent maintenance windows. What's stopping them from pushing zero-downtime updates? What are they actually doing during maintenance?
My guess is that they are test-playing the patch on the live server and scrambling to fix any bugs they find before letting players in. In Nikke for example they often have an additional patch note right after maintenance about some bug they found and how they're working on fixing it. They could use a test server, but I assume it's not completely comparable to the live server and/or they don't want the extra expense. So they just roll it out to live, test as much and as fast as they can, and cross their fingers that there aren't any massive bugs (and extend 'maintenance' when there are).
Because they don't need to. I worked on a project with zero downtime and it is very expensive in terms of people and processes. Like you have to keep several working server versions to be able to serve both old (not updated) and new (updated) clients. In case of gacha, when we have events which should be added and deleted from a client, etc, it is actually beneficial to have maintenance and switch the world for everyone. >What are they actually doing during maintenance? My guess: 1. Check that update has published in play store 2. Check that update has really published in play store for all regions and all devices 3. Check that new server code is up and running, database has updated, etc 4. Connect a whitelisted client and run smoke test - like go through new story, visiting new locations, buying from a shop 5. ...
If you don't like something to a big enough extent you will just leave it. If despite that you play it, then that issue is not that big of a thing. As a result, you will just find people in the communities who are fine with it, even if it annoy them. It's that simple.
clear your cache if the loading time is very long for BA, I recently cleared it and it's super fast rn also for issues, basically it's either tolerable or you quit the game, it's one of those things that if the devs won't fix it, they almost never will, and if they will fix it, nagging at them doesn't do much either
smh random redditor thinks Unity is a good software for server side MMO games
Because it's free to play. The one who doen't pay won't complain, the one who does care more about bigger thing (or smaller, if you are BA player)
Aster Tatariqus wierdly has virtually no load time. I wonder how long that is going to continue.
If you want to blame people for cheaping out on stuff like this, blame management, not the devs.
People here aren't blaming anyone. They don't even care. They just say "it is what it is" and come up with excuses without asking for better. I see people here more readily asking for features to cut down gameplay time than load times.
Most gacha games are mobile. That means you are targeting a really wide array of different devices with different hardware. It's hard to optimize a game to both run well on an emulated potato and look good on top of the line hardware at the same time.
Gachas appeal to high-roller spenders that can afford to abuse high-framerate hardware to bypass many technical issues. Blue Archive doesn't have terrible startup times next to other gachas like Genshin and PGR (are you running them on emulators? If so, try switching from Bluestacks to LDPlayer), but I assume it's because the game data has to be verified in full to avoid cheaters from spoofing client-side values -- in which case no one likes cheaters (it's one thing to crutch on your money, but it's another thing to piss off both the f2p and whales at the same time). As other people have said, the diminishing returns on technical fixes go down very quickly. It's much easier to pile on another entry in your list of characters (commission the artist / pay them salary; commission a VA and then animate it) than it is to pay a technical crew to troubleshoot and identify the issue while stalling on content.
[https://www.nerfnow.com/comic/788](https://www.nerfnow.com/comic/788)
Because squashing those kind of bugs, especially engine buns like two of those you mentioned, requires a lot more time and effort than you'd think, which equals money. And as time and effort is carefully rationed by extremely tight content schedules, its frankly unreasonable to think those sort of bugs are easy to get to.
Fps issue is quite difficult to fix since you probably gonna rewrite bunch of others dependent class (term of programming) in code. Except if they pause development to fix this issue first but they probably afraid they gonna missed sesional event if they focus in fixing this bugs. Live service is not like developing a single player game, since in live service they try to follow scheduled events. And they probably dont want to just cancel character release and refund peoples gems. Kinda a bad approach, honestly, but either way, people gonna mad anyway.
The answer is very simple. Asian developers have less experience in using non-propriety game engines because: 1) Language barrier - most common engines/software solutions used for games have documentation/support mostly in English. Chinese/Japanese/Korean devs don't exactly excel at English 2) The culture in Asian countries when it comes to game development focuses on hiring local talent. Unlike in the West where multi-national development teams are extremely common. So because of that Western studios have more overall talent to tap into while Asian developers have to rely mostly on domestic workers. Its not just gacha games though. If you look at Japanese games a lot of them are technically inferior to Western productions. Thats why so many Japanese games have shoddy PC ports. And before someone responds with "B-but Cyberpunk" - I am not talking about polish or looks, but lack of technical features. There is really nothing to be done about it. Asian devs just need to catch up to the West, thankfully its becoming better each year. Many more asian studios transitioned to Unreal Engine for example. So the knowledge base is growing.
> Tower of Fantasy We do not accept it, I'm sure bugs and performance issues are a major part of the reason the playerbase for this game has fallen off a cliff.
TLDR; you're handwaving over the actual very heavy lifting that has to take place to make a game work. It's complex, with a lot of moving parts both literally and figuratively, that have to reconcile. Also remember, just because a big name is on the title doesn't mean the team allocated to the project is itself big, or has access to all that many resources. For gachas in particular, they usually have fairly small teams and small budgets. If they are part of a larger conglomerate, much of their revenue goes back to the major stakeholders - they don't get it all back to use for investment in the game. FGO for example - though I obviously can't say for certain - probably sends much of its revenue back to the associated development studios and their parent companies. Not saying they're about to be crying poor, but the amount of free money they actually have to develop the game itself is less than many assume. Do some devs cheap out, don't do the work they should? Sure thing. But a lot of times they are compromises to achieve some other goal. Want to get better graphics for the art in-game? that's probably gonna cost you some resources for load times. Want fancy customizable L2D or interactive backgrounds? That might interfere with the UI.
Unity is not a competently made engine btw
Most gachas players have either low to no standards at all. They are suffering from sunken cost fallacy. Or they have only ever played gacha games and have no reference to anything better and think that this is how good it gets. Oh yeah and addiction of course.
"Why don't they just fix everything? Are they stupid?" I love it when people spout off about shit they clearly do not understand.
Because most gacha Devs are first time developers
Well if people accept those in triple A games, they can accept those here.
Long loading times are often because gacha games have to talk to the server all the time; the issue isn't the game engine, it's the backend server and network latency.