Creating a Gacha Game is easy. Keeping it alive…is surprisingly easy too! The things that a company and developers have to do to bring a gacha game and its community to the ground are so idiotic that they board in the less logical things to do. And yet, we’ve seen countless games, some unimportant and others so big to lose, announcing their EOS and being erased completely with our characters and money. So, what stupid things can take you to see your favorite gacha game die? Here are the top 5 and with examples.
5. Rush at the premiere.
Most of the gacha games that are popular to an extent, come with a few months of delay from their counterpart in China, Japan or the main place they originate from. While we are getting the game brand new, we have 3 to 6 months of future predictions about the content that has already been released originally, except in special cases like Wuthering Waves and Honkai Star Rail.
However, that space of months can be rushed by the developers, wanting to shove all its players an amount of gacha characters, weapons, cards or whatever in the smallest amount of time as possible and get ahead to the main game.
Why is this bad? Well, let’s see Jujutsu Kaisen: Phantom Parade, a game that was released a few months ahead of its original counterpart. Picture this: You know you can pull for future characters and you have time to save money, the game’s currency and do your best to wait for that character. Now, imagine that in one month, you get an overload of banners, due to the developers wanting to catch up or make its players spend more money.
The game suffered irreparable damage and it won’t ever be the same after that insufferable show of greed and obstinance. Thanks BiliBili!
4. Take content away from the players.
For any gacha game, content is everything. You must have fresh and new experiences to offer your players, so they keep spending money maintaining the game. Some usually forget about this and think that the characters they offer for their community to pull is the content itself (looking at you, One Piece Treasure Cruise) but sometimes, it’s even worse: you steal content from players, despite already having it available.
This happened with Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius. An amazing gacha game that managed to celebrate its 9th Anniversary but had to be put on EOS in 2024. The main reason it failed and most of the players complained was that a lot of the game modes, events and even units were blocked in the global version, thus this being offered to players only at the Japanese version of the game. For some time, this was accepted, since the global game had exclusive events that the other versions do not have, but once Japan began having everything that the global game had, things went south.
The question that remained among fans was: Why not just bring the events to global? And while we won’t get an answer anytime soon, we got the short stick at the end. The global version closed, but the Japanese one is still active and without an option to transfer your global file to that version of the game, FF:BE went without glory. Maybe it wasn’t that hard to put all those events, but by not doing it, It seeded the reason why It went on EOS.
3. Become lazy.
That’s right, boys and girls, we have a second mention on One Piece Treasure Cruise. Because as a good comedian would say: Apathy is a tragedy and Boredom is a crime. And the only ones best at making their game boring as hell, is OPTC. Now, it wasn’t always like that. In the beginning, One Piece Treasure Cruise was a fun gacha game, licensed with the most famous and recognized manga of all time. It has something for everyone and a lot of events for players to never get without something to do.
Then, they decided to go in another direction and fall in the lazy content category. While the game isn’t the only one to do this (Pokemon Masters EX has done it for a while), the structure of having weekly game modes active becomes repetitive, boring and sometimes frustrating for the players. Even worse when you “force” players into getting the new characters, just to feel they were better or sucked less for that month, only to fail to get the new unit next month and feel unmotivated to keep trying.
There is nothing wrong with weekly game modes (War Of The Visions has this too and is still going strong) but making only that and have your event main section of the game, only to show it empty and lifeless, shows how lazy developers are and how much they really care for the game and its community.
2. Forget about your community.
There is something worse than being lazy with your content and is offering NO CONTENT at all and yet, still making banners to people to pull, despite having nothing to do. Here comes the gacha game that I considered the worst ever made: My Hero Academia: The Strongest Hero and this one will be short and sweet.
Because its as simple as it sounds: you forsaken your community and players by not offering new events, yet you keep making characters and convince people to pull for them. Honestly, the audacity of not going into EOS despite haven’t offering anything new is baffling. The gacha game cancer right now could be a lot of worse options like Fates: Grand Order but The Strongest Hero deserves a special spot on how little they care and how greedy its developers are. They don’t deserve to have success in this or any gacha game in the future.
1. Literally rip off and scam your players.
Believe it or not, the 2nd and 1st place are both to My Hero Academia: The Strongest Hero. Not only they forgot about its community and instead of being lazy, they straight up give up on giving them new content. But that’s not the worst! No sir, the most embarrassing thing I have ever seen in the gacha game industry is the fact that they scammed the players and they even had the nerve to tell us it was our fault.
A few weeks after the release of the game, Crunchyroll Game’s new flagship released to the world the player of Endeavor and its special 2 cards. All good, except that the cards had the information wrong and they didn’t change it or say anything about it for the first few days of release. Then, after they probably secured some profit, they came out and clarified the real buffs of the cards, except for doing it on the same day. They also tried to avoid giving any compensation and began attacking the players that began making refunds.
Seatin was the first to announce the refunds he requested for the scam, a big gacha player from that time and Hell went loose. In the blink of an eye, they were done and it was never the same. Even then, they could have rebound but they showed their intentions and stayed as the fraudulent, pathetic game that everyone knows of today.
Yes, The Strongest Hero may be the gacha game with the most infamy but never forget that the cancer of the industry is none other than Fate: Grand Order. Stay tuned on why that is and remember to return to see more about your favorite gacha games here. Until the next time!
