HoYoverse’s New Game ‘Nodusfall’ Is Free-to-Play — No Gacha for Characters

Background and Key Points

HoYoverse is the entity behind Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, and Zenless Zone Zero — titles whose revenue model rests on gacha pulls for playable characters, a system that has generated billions of dollars globally and drawn regulatory scrutiny in places like Japan, where gacha-style “kompu gacha” mechanics were partially banned by the Consumer Affairs Agency back in 2012. Nodusfall, unveiled at gamescom as a co-op action RPG about fighting beasts and dragons, breaks from that pattern: characters are earned through play rather than paid pulls, with the studio saying appearance-changing (skin) items will instead anchor monetization. For a company whose entire business has been built on character gacha, that’s a notable pivot, and it’s why posters reacted with open disbelief rather than celebration.

The thread’s actual fault line wasn’t whether the change is good — nearly everyone agreed pay-to-win systems are worth avoiding — but whether “no character gacha” actually means anything once skin purchases enter the picture. Commenters repeatedly guessed that performance could still be gated behind cosmetic-locked gear, or that “action point” (stamina) purchases, a staple of Japanese mobile gacha design, would quietly reintroduce a spending treadmill. That skepticism, not optimism about a fairer model, dominated.

What the thread never addressed is that “skin gacha” itself is a common workaround in Chinese live-service games — skins distributed via randomized pulls rather than direct purchase — so a system billed as gacha-free for characters could still contain gacha mechanics elsewhere. Readers unfamiliar with that industry pattern might assume “free-to-play, no gacha” implies a conventional cosmetics shop, when HoYoverse’s own precedent suggests otherwise.