Fate/Grand Ripoff

April 19, 2018 12:08 PM

Though Gudako is monstrous, she’s the players’ monster. She shares in their despair and elation, and she describes her relationship with the gacha as a hell from which she cannot escape. Most crucially, this creature of pure id is, like her customers, driven by an unstoppable thirst for rare anime girls.

Fate/Grand Order is a free to play gacha game where people can spent thousands of dollars to get limited edition jpegs and then mocks them for doing so with its player avatar character.
posted by MartinWisse (35 comments total)

The fact that these games aren't yet regulated as gambling is a fucking disgrace.
posted by howfar at 12:28 PM on April 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

If you want to read a gacha horror story/confession here’s a doozy from someone who claims this was even the first time they participated in P2P. It’s reddit so believe at your own risk but woof
posted by griphus at 12:28 PM on April 19, 2018 [9 favorites]

So, this is Alt-Right, the Game?
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 12:46 PM on April 19, 2018

I keep thinking we’ve reached Final Stage Capitalism, but then they always unveil a new bonus level.
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:53 PM on April 19, 2018 [9 favorites]

Otaku late-stage capitalism
posted by GuyZero at 1:00 PM on April 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

For those who don't follow free-to-play games, I can't emphasize enough that the only remarkable thing here is the open parody of the Gudako character; the core mechanic of "free, but pay if you want to advance, or pay if you want to unlock the good stuff, or pay if you want to unlock a chance to get the good stuff which in turn you need to advance at any reasonable pace" is at this point a very well-established one.

Particularly in mobile games, where the exploitative cynicism of the model is justified in part by the depressed price point of actual individual game sales. "Give it away and then charge for content piecemeal" makes more sense as a strategy in a market where any price larger than $0 has a massive negative effect on sales. Your game more or less has to be a phenomenon, or to have tremendous cachet behind it (as a result of being e.g. the mobile entry of a classic franchise) to move units that actually cost money up front. Which is a bizarre circumstance! But it's somehow where the race-to-the-bottom economics of mobile gaming have landed.

It's hard to know whether to read the Gudako thing as particularly cruel in and of itself; willing participation by any game company in this fundamentally exploitative model seems like by far the bigger problem. But it interesting to see it being played up from within the game's own marketing structure, since most games in this vein prefer to just incessantly offer the convenience of dropping ten or twenty or fifty bucks on in-game currency without remarking (why on earth would they) on what a questionable setup that is for the player.
posted by cortex at 1:03 PM on April 19, 2018 [12 favorites]

I've sunk a lot of hours playing Kairosoft games (Game Dev, Grand Prix, Mega Mall, Pocket League), but when I've tried one of their most recent F2P games (with a subscription model, not even a "pay once to unlock stuff"), I quit about four days in because it's clear the game wanted me to pay to advance and I'm not doing that.

I remember when 8 or 9 years ago every journo was pushing the idea that mobile games were going to be the future of gaming, leading to a renaissance akin to the 80s microcomputer bedroom coder boom. Hmmm hmm.
posted by lmfsilva at 1:17 PM on April 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

Capitalism: "THIS ISN'T EVEN MY FINAL FORM!"
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 1:27 PM on April 19, 2018 [15 favorites]

The model that's felt least user-exploitative to me has been the F2P games with ads, where a 1-time payment could make the game ad-free.

After that, non-random cosmetic items (outfits, etc.) seem pretty fair.

Pay-to-play has always been shitty, but the random loot shit ought to be considered gambling. I don't mind it in my games when it's free random boxes, but charging people money for that is just taking advantage of people.
posted by explosion at 1:30 PM on April 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

I only know what "gacha" means because y'all made me download Love Nikki Dress Up Queen.

I haven't spent any money yet, but I have been real tempted.
posted by slipthought at 1:31 PM on April 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

A loved one, during a recent stressful and depressing period of unemployment, grew addicted to some Final Fantasy mobile game and dropped $800 into it in the space of two weeks. The way this game is designed is absolutely horrendous - I mean, as an ethical human being, I would think “okay this person has thrown a few hundred dollars into our shity mobile game, I’m going to stop asking them for more and just let them play now, they’ve paid their fair share”. But no - with this, the more you buy, the more frequently you get shown the ads - $160 a pop, every few minutes.

It’s been said so many times before - engineers, programmers, there is an ethical element to what you do. If you’re being forced to code this shit, please think about the impact you are having.
posted by Jimbob at 1:36 PM on April 19, 2018 [16 favorites]

This + the MLM post are a powerhouse of how to grift.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 1:37 PM on April 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

these are literally designed to be addictive, they have teams of psychologists and statisticians with PhDs making sure of it. it’s the same set of techniques as used for slot machines in casinos.

as a personal choice, i have decided never to pay for randomized loot. (i’m usually okay with paying for in-game stuff if you know up front what you’re getting.)

i don’t think i’d have a tendency to get hooked, but you never know, and even spending small amounts of money validates the business model.
posted by vogon_poet at 1:44 PM on April 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

Free to play stuff is a strange world. I played a lot of Planetside 2 a couple years back — amazing game, huge world with epic battles going on all the time, great graphics and teamwork, and totally free. All the stuff you needed you could earn in game, and I felt proud when I spent my creds on a great new gun or vehicle upgrade that I knew would help my faction out. I never spent a buck on that game and got hundreds of hours of fun out of it. No doubt I'm the worst case scenario for the publisher.

But they did right by the community for the most part: you could spend money to skip the grind, the style that people refer to as "pay not to play," but all the expensive stuff was a sidegrade. You could get a sub machine gun with a high rate of fire but it had super bad accuracy. Great for infiltrators coming out of cloak but really no more lethal than the gun you start with. Items catered to a style of play, not winning.

That's not always the case, not by half. The loot box thing (gacha) has made it gambling instead of steadily working towards a goal. I knew that if I wanted that 1000-cred gun, I'd have to play hard for hours. But if I only have a 1 in 100 chance of getting the gun out of a randomized loot box, and I can earn a loot box every half hour or so, that means I might play for 50 hours on average before getting it, while someone else might get it on their first try. That's fundamentally unfair to the player for gameplay-related items (hats and skins are different), and you can see how it makes people crazy.

A few people will pay hundreds to get a cool avatar or a special effect when they teleport, but when you gate real gameplay effects — the best characters, the best guns, the best upgrades — behind randomized loot boxes it just immediately sours the entire experience because everybody is being screwed except for people with tons of money.

I guess art imitates life, but yeah. This style of gaming is horrible and I hope it gets quashed by some kind of regulation a la gambling. Not only are people vulnerable to the psychological hacking it involves, but it just plain makes for bad games. It's sad that developers are pursuing it and I hope they stop, or are stopped, very soon.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 1:45 PM on April 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

I haven't spent any money yet, but I have been real tempted.

I got off the train a few days ago, also without spending anything. Got up to level...37? 38? Mostly it was that I finally finished the grind on chapter 7 and then realized I wasn't actually at that point looking forward to the grindier-yet hell of chapter 8 that was forecast in the MeFi association chat.

And yet for all that Love Nikki's left less bad an impression on me than a lot of the games I've nosed around in. I think the thematic variation goes a long way there; I've had my fill of cookie cutter match-3 and small-scale tactics and linear monster crawlers, not so much of paper dolls, so it got some traction on that front.
posted by cortex at 1:45 PM on April 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

I hope they stop, or are stopped, very soon.

Why would they? That's like saying you hope casinos will stop having slot machines just because they financially ruin the lives of thousands of senior citizens every year. These people know perfectly well that their product is absolutely ruinous for the whales whose carefully-nurtured addictions supply these companies with their bread and butter. Their entire business model depends on it.
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The at 1:57 PM on April 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

> as a personal choice, i have decided never to pay for randomized loot. (i’m usually okay with paying for in-game stuff if you know up front what you’re getting.)

I've mentioned before a racing game on iOS and AppleTV that I'm varying degrees of addicted to. It's a freemium game with not one, not two, but *three* different in-game currencies, two of which are purchasable and the third of which is only accumulated through events that you basically can only win by buying boosts with other game currency. It's kind of nuts.

Now, completing any race earns you a little of one of the in-game currencies. Obviously winning gets you the most money, but even last place pays a little. The only way to race without earning anything is by being disqualified. There are a couple tracks which a car can complete without any user control; the car will idle its way around the course, bouncing off walls and scraping around turns. If the car is sufficiently over-ranked for the race it's in, it can safely complete the course at idle speed without being disqualified for taking too long.

Where I live, the TV room is within eyeshot of the kitchen. I do most of the cooking and cleaning in the kitchen every day. So I set up a race, do a couple minutes of food prep, restart the race, do more prep or wash some dishes, and so on. The game money slowly accumulates without me playing it, for an hour or maybe two every day. At this point I've probably had the same car idling the same course over a thousand times. I'm guessing I've been enough of a behavioral blip in the game company's analytics because they've subtly tweaked the track I usually use, to force an idling car to take much longer to complete it (and, therefore, increase the odds of disqualifying, which pays nothing). But at this point I've bought enough boosts for the cars that they can still safely complete while nerfed and idling.

I probably wouldn't have begrudged paying ten or twenty bucks for the game on initial purchase. So at times I've been tempted to buy some in-game money just to make up for it. But the premium cars keep getting more expensive and acquisition requires increasing amounts of grinding just to qualify for random lootbox chits good for 1/70th of a car, and I get cranky when I feel like I'm getting manipulated, and anyway twenty bucks only buys me as much in-game currency as I could passively earn while cooking a couple dinners. So there's not even a point to bothering. Thanks for the good times, guys, I hope they continue.
posted by ardgedee at 2:07 PM on April 19, 2018 [4 favorites]

I enjoy gatcha games to some extent but by the time I get to the part where you pretty much have to start paying for stuff, I'm pretty bored of the game and just move on to the next hot thing. I don't really understand the draw of paying to get a more powerful X so that I can keep grinding when there's yet another freemium game with lots more easy dopamine hit entry levels.

TL;DR if we are all mice in a worldwide psychology experiment, I'm the lazy mouse who settles for the bland cracker delivered frequently, not the motivated mouse who keeps hitting that lever over and over for 1/100 of a chance of some premium quality cheese.
posted by muddgirl at 2:31 PM on April 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

I'm okay with paying for nonrandom stuff--my rule of thumb is that any game I'm going to spend any real time on is worth about ten bucks by default, a game that keeps me playing for more than a couple weeks may warrant more. But the random part? The random part is dangerous. I can't do it. But even if you aren't talking about money, the scary part about these games to me is that I have friends who are investing huge amounts of time in lieu of the money, but that what they are getting for that time is not "hours of enjoyment playing the game" but "hours of tedium in the service of getting that one thing they need to pull".
posted by Sequence at 2:45 PM on April 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

That's not always the case, not by half. The loot box thing (gacha) has made it gambling instead of steadily working towards a goal. I knew that if I wanted that 1000-cred gun, I'd have to play hard for hours. But if I only have a 1 in 100 chance of getting the gun out of a randomized loot box, and I can earn a loot box every half hour or so, that means I might play for 50 hours on average before getting it, while someone else might get it on their first try. That's fundamentally unfair to the player for gameplay-related items (hats and skins are different), and you can see how it makes people crazy.

The question that occurs to me in this context is how (if at all) this (specifically: earning loot boxes by play, not by pay) differs from, say, the classic MMO situation, where you can spend hours battling through a raid and then you get a random selection of loot. One player gets the prized mount/pet/outfit/weapon on their first try, others don't get it for hundreds of tries.
posted by Four Ds at 2:55 PM on April 19, 2018

I was wrong to say I " don't understand" the draw of paying for lootboxes in freemium games. I should have said I don't feel the draw instead.
posted by muddgirl at 3:06 PM on April 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

I never spent a buck on that game and got hundreds of hours of fun out of it. No doubt I'm the worst case scenario for the publisher.

I wouldn't think so. You're content for the whales - the "product being sold' as we say in these parts.
posted by Sparx at 3:24 PM on April 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

I think it differs in significant part in how that farm/grind cycle is placed within the design of the game. The real grindy set-chasing stuff in MMOs has generally been end-game content: once you've hit max level, once you've played through all the hours and hours of (however thin) narrative content, once you've churned through all the character class content, then there's this treadmill of end-game grind if you still want more, still want to claw your way up.

A big part of what feels like a canonization of Very Bad Design with these f2p mobile things in particular is the way they skip directly to the end-game treadmill. Instead of being 100 or 200 hours of gameplay followed by a filler treadmill, the put out an hour or two of gameplay and then the treadmill is right there. The bit you can play through without any kind of in-app purchase or gachapon pressure is rarely more than an extended tutorial, give you a taste of the gameplay while training you in the systems in which the time-value of spending money vs. not will then be very clear.

Personally I've never been a fan of MMOs as game design products either, but they have at least traditionally (a) resembled actual games qua gameplay and (b) put a big emphasis on social interaction which has a lot of value in its own right for folks. This mobile f2p stuff drapes a game over a grifting engine more than vice versa and the social aspects are generally nominal at best and themselves often used to reinforce the pitch to buy in with cash (you wouldn't want to let your friends/team/group down by falling behind, etc).
posted by cortex at 3:29 PM on April 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

If you want to try one of these games without the risk of going broke, try the Yo Kai Watch game Wibble Wobble for iOS and Android. It is risk free because they turned off in-app purchase when they announced the death of the US and European versions of the game a few weeks ago. The servers get turned off at the end of May but until then you can play for free and they are issuing each player 9000 credits a day of the game currency to try to placate the community.

Note that they are killing a game that some people have put thousands of dollars into, mainly when trying to get the characters they want from the vending machine, and build up a powerful team. Even people that never paid to play, put their time into it, thousands of hours in many cases, grinding to get in-game money to get characters. It’s based on an entertaining anime series that runs on Disney XD here, which never took off much outside Japan, where it was huge.

When they killed the game, the reaction was split between people like me who felt cheated but relieved that their annoying addiction was suddenly cured, and the players who are just moving to the original Japanese version of the game, called Puni Puni. They are starting again from scratch with no credit for their work in Wibble Wobble, everything is in Japanese, and the competition from the entrenched Japanese players is overwhelming. I was addicted but I know when to take my cure and move on.
posted by w0mbat at 3:32 PM on April 19, 2018 [2 favorites]

There are lots of mobile games that I could be happy to spend $10 or $20 or $50 on. Unfortunately, they mostly seem to follow exactly the same path: I try to grind for free for as long as possible, until I get frustrated or tempted into spending a little money. I discover that a little money doesn't actually make me more competitive, or enable me to play the game in a less-frustrating way - you need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars for that. I get mad and never pick the game up again.

I played Love Nikki a lot for a while, even after I realized how many outfits you had to spend eighteen thousand dollars of real money to unlock, but doing those calculations was the thing that started to sour me on it.

Who's the audience for these games? Few people are extremely rich, and few people manage to get way over their heads in gacha debt, so... is it really more profitable to go after one person who's going to spend $800 than 80 people who are going to spend $10? How long are games going to compete over the person who's going to spend $800 rather than making a game where it's really enjoyable to spend $10 but there's no point in spending $800?
posted by Jeanne at 6:19 PM on April 19, 2018

This reminds me of the Eververse microtransaction shop in Destiny 2. Not the free-to-play aspect (D2 is anything but free-to-play) but the mockery: the shopkeeper is called Tess Everis ("avarice"), she produces a stream of meaningless marketing drivel if you stand anywhere near her ("Eververse isn't just a name, it's a family philosophy. Always another mile, and forever another tomorrow!") and as far as anyone can tell her collaborator Fenchurch gets most of the shop's stock by stripping it from the corpses of soldiers who died defending Earth.

It's hard to tell whether Bungie is mocking themselves, Activision or the people playing the game. Probably all three.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 8:11 PM on April 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

It's interesting to me as I grew up playing magic and now play hearthstone, both of which have a card pack model of new card acquisition which means you get x random cards everytime you open a pack. I'm never sure how much to equate these with gacha games generally, because the pack system really had a lotto aspect. i guess in both cases the cards are either worth real money (depending on the card) or "dust" a resource that lets you craft other cards. But maybe it's not so different after all.
posted by Carillon at 8:53 PM on April 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

It would be nice if Polygon covered the game like it is actually awful, instead of making that slight wink. If you're not sticking to the pl/ain facts, help put the house in order.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:47 AM on April 20, 2018

That's because it's an op-ed from a guest writer about how a game company is overtly taunting their players for being suckers. There is a discussion of the loot drop mechanics (and how players are pipelined into depending on them as quickly as possible) to provide a foundation for what's going on, but the gameplay itself isn't the thing at issue.

Polygon's staff hasn't done a game review yet.
posted by ardgedee at 3:26 AM on April 20, 2018

What the op-ed doesn't examine is that each 4-koma is really just used as a silly introduction into a "how to play" article that seems to emphasize how to optimize your loot box gambles, so in a way it's intended to play off the ruinously reckless player (Gudako) against the careful and cunning one (Mafia Kajita); you're supposed to sympathize with the first but ally yourself with the latter.

I don't feel like this blunts the op-ed much, since the point of the essay is really how awful the loot drop mechanics are, to the point that player agony has itself become a meme. But it does diminish the author's assertion that Sony is openly mocking their customers and calling them suckers, because the Learning With Manga subsite is more like a Goofus and Gallant setup.
posted by ardgedee at 5:09 AM on April 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

as a personal choice, i have decided never to pay for randomized loot. (i’m usually okay with paying for in-game stuff if you know up front what you’re getting.)

@vogon_poet do you define games like Diablo or The Division that way? Div lets you run missions knowing you'll get a certain rarity type/armor slot/level of armor but not what specific item. Diablo just shovels loot at you. Getting the perfect gear is pretty much the point of the game to do harder and harder content. I don't think you can remove stuff like that without breaking the game. Case study: Destiny 2 made all weapons have the same roll for that weapon so getting new ones was like NO THANKS, GAME.
posted by OnTheLastCastle at 6:56 AM on April 20, 2018

I feel like Hearthstone is pretty fair in that there is A) a mechanism for building the cards you want (dust) rather than relying on pure chance and B) a clear floor for dust income and non-escalating costs for the "good" cards, in that you're guaranteed 40 dust for a pack of cards and an average of one pack every other day, assuming you do the daily quests, and there are always about the same number of deck-build-worthy legends that always cost the same (1600 dust). If you really want to be competitive, you can pretty easily build a copy of the "best" deck (or the deck you want) well within the timeframe needed to meaningfully compete, and you never have to pay if you don't want to. Heck, in many cases the "best" decks have had one or zero legends at all.

It's about as fair as it can be and still adhere to the form of a collectible card game. (One might question whether they should even do that, but at least they're doing it fairly ethically.)
posted by Scattercat at 7:05 AM on April 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

i’m talking about the gacha model where you pay real currency for a random item.
posted by vogon_poet at 8:35 AM on April 20, 2018

is it really more profitable to go after one person who's going to spend $800 than 80 people who are going to spend $10?

I seem to recall a story from a few years ago where a company was using personal information and social media stalking of individual, hand-picked “whale” players to introduce items into a game that were very-specifically targeted to that player’s interests, with a huge price tag. Clearly going after the whales is profitable.
posted by Jimbob at 1:41 PM on April 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

There was a thing last fall about Activision's patent on manipulative loot stuff, though that sounds like a different vein or exploitative corporate psychology.
posted by cortex at 2:15 PM on April 20, 2018