From our other sites
The story
On 5ch’s hardware/industry board (nicknamed “Geha”), a thread titled “Aren’t buy-to-play games not really all that fun anymore?” sparked an ongoing debate between fans of free mobile games and fans of premium, pay-once titles. The free-mobile-game camp defended their side by citing games like Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail, pointing to how easy daily quests are, the sheer volume of story content, and strong value for money. The buy-to-play camp countered that their games cost less than a single gacha “pity” pull yet let you play without restrictions, that you’re not chained to daily chores, and that there’s no artificial difficulty inflation designed to push players toward gacha spending. Opinions also split over how to classify free competitive shooters like Apex Legends and Overwatch, and the thread never reached a consensus, ending in a stalemate.
What people said
If it's story-driven, falling behind is actually a plus — the story never runs out, and no matter how many gacha stones you collect, you never run out of those either. It's basically perfect.
I don't think it's even that subtle, honestly.
OP (Re: #1) is probably some undisclosed shill for a Chinese-game publisher.
Go tell that to China.
Genshin especially.
Can't speak for Genshin, but as far as Star Rail goes, the gameplay itself is just average — nothing great, nothing bad, so take your turn-based-RPG complaints elsewhere.
What's surprising is the sheer volume of quests, and how dense the story is. Some side quests are more substantial than what you'd get in a buy-to-play game, and some even have full voice acting on par with main-story quests.
The main story is genuinely good too — it really does live up to its reputation as the poster child of mobile RPGs.
What's fun is the dopamine hit you get when you pull the gacha.
That's a waste, quit it.
You're better off just buying a premium game.
And once the service shuts down, it's all for nothing anyway.
That just means you can enjoy it endlessly — and even if it does end, the experience itself stays with you.
By that logic, any experience-based content becomes meaningless.
If you're going to call that a waste, then every game ever made is a waste.
That just means story-driven games aren't your thing.
Even within mobile games, there's just as much genre variety as there is among buy-to-play games.
You haven't shown anything either — just vague praise and the word "fun" repeated a bunch of times.
The moment dailies are involved, it's a non-starter.
Depends on the title, but if a daily that averages 5 minutes doesn't feel "easy" to you, you're done with gaming entirely, not just buy-to-play. Rest well.
Don't things like dailies feel like the least fun part of the game to you?
Most Japanese players don't even read the story — they're just there for the cute art and the thrill of pulling gacha.
Sure, that's part of it, and I won't deny the effect is huge.
So what? Buy-to-play games have no fun factor and no thrill of their own either.
What are you going to do about that going forward?
Everything since then has been live-service games.
A live service that keeps getting updated forever is the best.
Are you seriously fine with that garbage being the last one you played…?
You're the one who started trashing buy-to-play games in the first place. Why are you acting like the victim now?
Benefits of buy-to-play games:
・Pay the price of a single game (far less than one gacha pity pull) and play without any restrictions
・Not tied down by daily chores — play at your own pace whenever you feel like it
・No artificial difficulty inflation designed to push you into pulling gacha
I mean, nobody asked you to, though.
That's how it is on PC.
Just like buy-to-play games, mobile games have their own "tiers" too.
That's not a counterargument.
Resleri isn't the point — the point is that it got shut down.
That's a clean boomerang right back at you.
Then the thread title and the body contradict each other.
Why are you contradicting yourself?
They're clearly more fun than stuff like Splatoon or Mario Tennis.
>How do you explain free games like Apex, Valorant, eFootball, Overwatch, and Delta Force?
>They're clearly more fun than stuff like Splatoon or Mario Tennis.
Competitive shooters were already the dominant genre on both PC and PlayStation to begin with (Overwatch sold something like 60 million copies even as a paid game) — most of them just went free-to-play afterward. It's a wide-and-shallow monetization model: play for free, but buy skins if you want your character to stand out. The gameplay itself still comes down entirely to player skill, exactly the same as any paid game.
That's a completely different animal from "gacha games," which sell through gambling-style gacha thrills and story padding designed to keep you pulling — even though both are technically "free games."
Steam has plenty of free games too, but a market so embarrassingly dominated by "cute-girl Chinese gacha games" that they hog the entire top of the charts is really only a thing on the Japanese PlayStation market.
People who play games like that aren't the type to pick up a controller just to sit through cutscenes.
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
As background, in recent years the PC gaming market has seen Chinese-made gacha-driven mobile games (like Genshin Impact and Star Rail) increasingly dominate the top of the sales charts, and this thread appears to have been started in response to that trend. The debate split into two main camps: one arguing that free mobile games win on value since they’re free to play and packed with story content, and the other countering that buy-to-play games can be played for a flat one-time fee without being tied to daily routines, and don’t have their balance artificially inflated just to drive gacha spending — the two sides never found common ground. One point worth clarifying, since it’s easy to misread: several commenters noted that free competitive shooters like Apex Legends and Overwatch run on a completely different revenue model and style of play from the gacha-monetized “ソシャゲ” (mobile gacha games) that were the thread’s actual focus. It’s also worth noting that the PC sales-chart screenshots cited as evidence of a title’s popularity were challenged as just a snapshot from a period when few premium titles happened to be releasing, leaving room for debate about how meaningful that popularity comparison really is.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry, “Geha”) thread “The Problem of Buy-to-Play Games Not Being All That Fun Anymore, Hardware Aside.”
Leave a Reply