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Thursday, March 28, 2024

The Genshin Impact Backlash Is Here

Streamers, YouTubers, and TikTokers have glommed onto Chinese role-playing game Genshin Impact like it’s a magic top hat unspooling an endless rope of content. On the surface, it’s an excellent game, a free-to-play, anime Breath of the Wild, with crowd-pleasing world-building and charismatic characters. In less than two weeks after its late September release, it grossed over $100 million and took the title of the most popular Chinese release ever in the West. It was the number one mobile game by consumer spend globally in October, according to app analytics company App Annie.

One recent TikTok video might explain that success. A group of seven men screaming like lit-up football spectators huddle around a Genshin Impact player at his PC. His mouse hovers over the game’s “Wish” button, which converts in-game currency into chances to receive rare items and playable waifus or husbandos. With a click, he redeems 10 wishes. As his roommates cheer him on with cries of “con-tent, con-tent, con-tent,” 10 glowing streamers appear in the sky, each signifying a randomized reward. One is orange—a rare item. That’s when the screaming starts. He got Venti. There was a less than 1 percent chance.

In an interview with WIRED, Genshin Impact developer MiHoYo attributed its good fortune to its free-to-play model and presence on PC, PlayStation 4, Android, and iOS. Players and critics think that’s naive. As one of the most popular “gacha” games ever in the United States, Genshin Impact is forcing players to grapple with a game mechanic long described as “predatory.”

Gacha is a term traditionally reserved for “pulling” or “spinning for” characters or items in (often free-to-play) mobile games from China, Japan, and South Korea. A version of the mechanic has existed in Western games for over a decade in the form of random rewards or weapon skins in first-person shooters. In Overwatch, for example, you can buy in-game currency, redeemable for loot boxes, which may contain character skins or player icons. And top-grossing apps like Marvel Contest of Champions similarly invite players to spend real money on long-shot chances at better characters.

Genshin Impact costs nothing to play, and even without spending cash on wishes players can enjoy the bucolic scenery and fantasy plot lines. But it’s hard not to get FOMO when the correlation between money and fun is so obvious, especially when popular Twitch streamers and YouTubers have made such sport out of it. And while players can earn free wishes by reaching certain benchmarks, to get and max out all 23 characters or experience the full game, they have to open their wallets.

There's no exact conversion, but wishes other than those you earn by playing generally cost players a few dollars each. You’re guaranteed a five-star item or character every 90 wishes, but otherwise they appear a vanishingly slim 0.6 percent of the time. One Redditor said he spent $2,400 maxing out Venti. Last week, the YouTuber Mtashed quit spending money on the game after dropping $5,440.

“I refuse to promote the gacha system in this game anymore,” Mtashed says in a recent video. “There are very addictive practices in this game. I am sorry if I ever baited you into wishing yourself.” He is on the verge of tears.

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Mtashed has made thousands of dollars off his videos and can write off Genshin Impact wishes on his taxes. For his fans, the only upside is unlocking more of the game. They could end up having some major financial regrets. Twitch streamer Lacari recently shared the same sentiment when a viewer asked how he could have spent so much in such a short amount of time. “If you’ve spent over a thousand dollars in this game and you’re not streaming it, I suggest you don’t spend any more,” he said. “And it’s not content at all. You’re actually just getting scammed.”

Anxiety about the similarities between loot boxes and gambling boiled over in 2017, especially in games that Americans considered “pay-to-win.” Western audiences chafed at the direct, obvious line between money spent on loot box items and in-game power in titles like Shadow of War and Star Wars Battlefront II. Players criticized these games as predatory, digital Skinner boxes accessible even to children—unlike games like Fortnite, which also offer in-game cosmetic purchases that don’t impact gameplay.

The idea that Genshin Impact could be a “scam” may be rooted in cultural expectations around gaming. While it’s the most downloaded game in the United States as of Sunday, the top four countries by consumer spend are China, Japan, South Korea, and the US, according to App Annie. Last month, Seattle University communications professor Christopher Paul published a book on what he calls a “bias” among Westerners against free-to-play games: Free-to-Play: Mobile Video Games, Bias, and Norms. “I started thinking about why League of Legends, which is a free-to-play game, gets a pass on everything, but these other games don’t,” Paul says.

“I think it comes, in part, from the economic system in which our games have existed for a while,” Paul says, referring to the business model where everybody pays a $60 entry fee for a title. “And I think it's also in part cultural in how we see competition working; I think it's tied to the meritocratic ideal that we should be able to be judged based on our skill rather than what we inherit. And that gacha games are a constant reminder that your skill isn't the only thing that matters. The size of your wallet does, too.” The millennial generation of Western gamers largely grew up on cartridge games, he adds, not arcade games like Gauntlet, in which you’re constantly inserting coins in an effort not to die. Putting out a game like Star Wars Battlefront II, which cost $60 and incentivizes paying more, can start to feel predatory.

In other countries, though, paying for advancement or advantage in a game is perfectly normal, says Florence Chee, a professor at Loyola University’s School of Communication. Concern over gacha mechanics, she says, “is just the latest incarnation of an old debate over legitimate modes of play.” Some of the controversy around Genshin Impact in particular boils down to its Western audience’s lack of familiarity with the business model. “In a way, the Asian audiences may have more of an idea that they are indeed 'gambling,' with all that comes with that. In North America, these activities are usually discussed and regulated separately, and ‘gamers’ and ‘gamblers’ are regarded as separate audiences,” she says. In South Korea, she adds, entertainment statistics don’t count them as separate categories.

“It makes sense that those who are newer to the ins and outs of this model are going to view it with more suspicion—when they may have been completely OK with equally predatory business models in other activities,” Chee says. It helps that in several Asian countries, and China in particular, regulations force developers to disclose the odds of receiving certain in-game items. Western countries have been slower to regulate loot boxes and the like, although recently major console makers committed to pushing developers to communicate a player’s odds in those situations.

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Genshin Impact presents its odds right inside the Wish system, but that hasn’t deterred players from calling them unfair or ungenerous. The game’s developers describe it as “free-to-play friendly.” Players can decide how casually they’d like to play and how much money they want to spend, if they want to spend any at all. “This game gives you an enormous degree of freedom, and it absolutely does not force you to pay,” said a MiHoYo representative over email. The developer would not share the average dollar number players spend in-game.

The developers similarly disputed that most players might feel compelled to purchase many wishes to max out their characters. “Some prefer to roam across the massive land of Teyvat to enjoy the scene and open-world exploration, some enjoy the companions from friends and team up to tackle co-op challenges,” a representative said. “Some players enjoy constantly collecting new characters and leveling them up.”

How does that more-casual style of play jibe with what Christopher Paul calls “the meritocratic ideal?” For a lot of people, it’s plain confusing. If you’re used to freely exploring Breath of the Wild, meeting all the characters, leveling up in step with your dedication, gacha mechanics are an extra hurdle to accomplish rat-brain gaming goals. There are good reasons why players unaccustomed to gacha mechanics popular in an open-world role-playing game are playing Genshin Impact as if it’s possible to collect everything and everyone. Especially when top streamers make it look like so much fun.

“I was looking at my credit card history. I have spent $5,000 on Genshin so far,” said YouTuber Tenha in a video about his quest to get the five-star character Diluc. “I asked myself: Are you satisfied? I said no. I want that Diluc.” Under the video, in which he pulled Diluc after spending hundreds of dollars on wishes, a commenter writes, “90% Gacha 10% gameplay. This is the content I want!!!”

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