From our other sites
The story
A post from overseas pointing out that “people who pour $500 into a free-to-play gacha game turn around and complain about a $35 DLC that adds 100 hours of content” went viral on X (formerly Twitter), and it also became a hot topic on a thread on 5ch’s Console Wars board. In the thread, some argued that gacha games mainly target big spenders with loose wallets, so a high price is accepted without complaint, while others countered that, unlike gacha — where all your paid-for assets drop to zero the moment the service shuts down — a one-time-purchase DLC stays with you for good. The discussion spread beyond a simple “which one’s pricier” into a more nuanced debate.
↑
A dead-on take from overseas blows up worldwide lmaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Source: x.com / Original post here
What people said
What's it feel like going all-in on that same gacha just to defend it now?
It's just pointing out that it's dumb for someone already doing something dumb on PlayStation (pulling gacha and flushing $500 down the drain) to nitpick a measly $35, right?
Do you not get that the whole premise — that free-to-play game itself — is what's being mocked here?
But if you complain that spending hundreds of thousands of yen a month on a mobile game to fully max out a character ('kanton,' getting every duplicate) is 'too expensive!', you get laughed at as a broke loser — even here in Japan.
Makes no sense.
Guess it's just a different crowd — probably old-school pachinko addicts or shills.
Getting people to pay up and feel satisfied even at a high price is what wins as a business.
Once the service ends, everything you'd built up suddenly drops to zero — as both an IP and a system.
So with gacha and mobile games, it all comes down to 'how much monetization could they squeeze out' as the real metric.
When your main customers are people with absurdly loose wallets, calling it 'good sales tactics' is a stretch.
At best it's just about how hard they can make you fall for a character, or running a nonstop power-creep festival to get people pulling for new or limited characters.
You must regret it once the service ends, right?
Japan's the weird one here.
Are there really that many people who regret it?
People who spend on mobile games tend to feel like 'well, I had fun up until now, so it's fine.'
There's probably a flash of regret like 'ugh, I blew all that money,'
but if you played all the way until the service ended, I doubt you'd regret the act of having played itself.
If anything, I think this is about as much volume as you could get away with releasing as a boxed retail product.
and dumping cash into mobile game gacha.
Back in the day none of that really existed, so unless you were in genuine poverty, money was never really an issue.
I really feel this.
And on top of that they're paying for Amazon Prime, Netflix, and every other subscription going.
Makes you think they're idiots.
With that in mind, rushing out DLC right away isn't great.
If you're going to release DLC from day one, putting out something like a Complete Edition instead gives a much better sense of value.
They're just bad at that part.
But the 4-route addition is still more than a year out,
so you can just make the call once it actually arrives.
So now you've got Xenoblade-completionist syndrome on top of Fire Emblem-completionist syndrome?
You're gonna die of complications at this rate, man…
Come again?
Explain what you mean in detail.
What do you mean 'denying brand-name goods'?
Now I'm even more confused about what Re: #54 was getting at.
Person B says the DLC is too expensive.
A and B are not the same person (or group).
Also worth noting: if all you're doing is complaining, you don't have to belong to either A or B.
Right — no need to belong to either.
There's no such thing as 'brand' in gacha anyway.
That's just, like, your opinion, man (classic dismissive 5ch stock phrase).
With gacha, 3,000 yen barely buys you any chance at a hit, so that's just sad.
But the premise is you already own the base game — that alone doesn't get you anywhere close to having grounds to complain about the DLC.
Skip the random image you grabbed off the internet —
I'll specify a scene, so upload that one.
You're persistent.
Like I said, skip the generic screenshot —
I'll specify the exact scene, so try uploading that.
Now that AI can generate stuff like this, it hit me that these things have lost all value as actual proof.
This is already the 5th time.
Hurry it up.
I'll screenshot the playtime for whatever game you pick, so go ahead and choose.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
At first glance, gacha games and one-time-purchase DLC both look like “paying for extra content,” but their structures differ. With gacha, if the operator shuts the servers down, the paid assets (characters, items) you’ve built up simply vanish, whereas a purchased DLC stays on your device for good. The thread’s point that “your assets suddenly hit zero once the service ends” gets at exactly this difference. Meanwhile, the view that “gacha games are just good at sales because their main customers have unusually loose wallets” and the critique that “releasing a Complete Edition from the start would feel more justified than rushing out DLC” both show that even with the same kind of add-on monetization, how worthwhile it feels to consumers depends heavily on the sales approach. The discussion branched out into personal spending habits and generational gripes, but no clear consensus emerged on which deal is actually better — if anything, it just highlighted how differently people see it.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from a thread on 5ch’s Hardware/Industry (“Console Wars”) board: “Overseas: ‘You’ll drop $500 on a gacha game but complain about a $35 DLC that adds 100 hours of content?’“
Leave a Reply