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Oct. 14th, 2019 06:40 pmSometimes the mobile game business model reminds me of weird porn.
A lot of free porn games try to draw in donations by offering commissions. Donate so much, and your waifu will become a character in the game. Keep donating more money, and they’ll write more and more scenes revolving around your waifu and the extremely specific fetish she fulfills. Less time and effort will be devoted to expanding the game in other ways, and anyone in the fanbase who isn’t there for the waifu will start to get fed up, but the dev tends not to care. After all, so long as this one weirdly rich person keeps commissioning waifu scenes, he’s still getting paid.
This model can play out to some extent in many other games. There’s a certain degree of pandering to the $10,000 Kickstarter backer, or to the people who buy the $200 collectors’ edition. But for most games, the focus is on selling to the average customer, and as an average customer, that means I have no less influence than the rest of the masses. To the extent that games are about satisfying an audience, I am a part of that audience, and the developers care if I dislike their game and decline to buy the next one.
In freemium mobile games, so much of the language I hear is about the “whales.” Catching the attention of “whales.” Keeping “whales” playing. Identifying which of your players are most likely to be “whales.” It seems like if I’m not one of these people who spends $150,000 on gacha pulls, then I essentially don’t matter. If the game isn’t to my taste, then I can go shove off, because I’m not what they were looking for anyway.
(I’ve gotten the impression that Fate game is a waifu game AND a gacha game, for double the get-the-hell-out.)
A lot of free porn games try to draw in donations by offering commissions. Donate so much, and your waifu will become a character in the game. Keep donating more money, and they’ll write more and more scenes revolving around your waifu and the extremely specific fetish she fulfills. Less time and effort will be devoted to expanding the game in other ways, and anyone in the fanbase who isn’t there for the waifu will start to get fed up, but the dev tends not to care. After all, so long as this one weirdly rich person keeps commissioning waifu scenes, he’s still getting paid.
This model can play out to some extent in many other games. There’s a certain degree of pandering to the $10,000 Kickstarter backer, or to the people who buy the $200 collectors’ edition. But for most games, the focus is on selling to the average customer, and as an average customer, that means I have no less influence than the rest of the masses. To the extent that games are about satisfying an audience, I am a part of that audience, and the developers care if I dislike their game and decline to buy the next one.
In freemium mobile games, so much of the language I hear is about the “whales.” Catching the attention of “whales.” Keeping “whales” playing. Identifying which of your players are most likely to be “whales.” It seems like if I’m not one of these people who spends $150,000 on gacha pulls, then I essentially don’t matter. If the game isn’t to my taste, then I can go shove off, because I’m not what they were looking for anyway.
(I’ve gotten the impression that Fate game is a waifu game AND a gacha game, for double the get-the-hell-out.)
