(no subject)

[feotakahari]

The question isn’t why gacha fandom is a screaming mess, it’s why Magic: the Gathering fandom isn’t a mess in the same way.

Comments

[stardust_rifle]

My general opinion of why most gacha fandoms are screaming messes is that it's the same reason why early Tumblr Danganronpa fandom was such a screaming mess (multiple barriers to entry leads to the people being into it being much more likely to be hyper-invested, which leads to other such nightmares), and that it's not REALLY about the gacha apart from those horrible posts of people defending gacha like their lives depend on it.

Depending on how Magic lore works, this could be why.

[wingedcatgirl]

If you're just there for the lore, MTG definitely has a much lower buy-in than your average gacha game. You can look at all the MTG cards on Gatherer without paying a single cent. Only if you want to actually play the game are you obligated to build an actual card collection.

By contrast, I play Cookie Run Kingdom, which has been described as one of the most generous gacha games out there, but even this one you can't get into the story without at least interacting with the gacha on some level. Not necessarily money, but effort at the very least. More than MTG demands.

[stardust_rifle]

Interesting.

In MORE contrast, my main gacha fandom, Ensemble Stars, has only just recently gotten any kind of ENG translation. If you seriously want to get into the lore of Enstars, you have to follow like 30 different translators, all of whom have their own blogs on a variety of separate websites, and there's also the problem of there just being mountains and mountains of lore, with no real easy jumping on point*.

You can engage with the lore without paying single cent or engaging with the gacha at all, but doing so is also kind of a major hassle and practically guarantees that the only people left standing after all of that will be hyper-invested, which leads to drama.

*god, it's kind of like western superhero comics, now that i think about it.