This is actually expected for many gacha games as they operate on a boom/bust cycle. But this is not apparent to many gacha game newcomers. Gacha games periodically do revenue spikes with limited banners and events, about 1 per Quarter. You'll have 2. 5 months that look "dead" and then a 2-week banner that makes them the majority of money that quarter. Typically, the spikes will be: Launch/Anniversary, Christmas/New Year Banner, A spring limited character often supported by a large story addition to bring in new players, and a Summer Skin event. In between these events are the smaller expansions of content to keep people invested but not big enough to drain a player's wallet dry before the next big event. Conclusion I hope this has brought light to some factors about gacha games that may not have been apparent on the surface. In closing I would like to say that while many complaints about this game are valid some, like it being a scam, are not. Mihoyo has a noted investment in player retention and if we look at their other games like Honkai Impact 3rd we will see some similarities.
This is called dupes. The dupe mechanic is meant both as a anti-frustration feature for pulling another copy of something you already own as well as a further incentive to pull more to power up your characters. The second monetization usage this game uses is the stamina feature, This is most obvious in the form of Resin, though other forms exist such as time gating. This strategy places an artificial limit on the amount of direct progression can be taken in a single play session. Players can use gacha currency to expand this limitation temporarily (through purchasing resin) but it soon gets prohibitively expensive for all but the most hardened spenders. Here I want to stress that this mechanic, while frustrating, is essential for the continued operation of a gacha game. Without artificial limitations on progression most of the players that do not play casually (spending or not) would blow through most of the content available in a gacha within a matter of days. This limitation serves to keep players interested as well as keeping the gap between players relatively close together in the terms of progression.
Part 3 – But why keep pulling and playing? Something I have seen here recently is a relatively vocal part of the community stating that the slow implementation of content and characters is going to kill the game. Let me briefly explain how gacha games keep players interested, and also why not to look just at a single month's revenue in the future to judge how successful the game is being. For starters there is the content cycle. Genshin Impact is slated for a 6 week development cycle. This is slightly slower than the standard gacha cycle which is about 4 weeks but not too far outside the norm considering there is a lot more things to do in Genshin Impact at launch than many gacha games. Every development cycle a gacha game will typically introduce between 1-3 of the following things. Story Content Expansion. Game World Expansion. A new boss fight or hard encounter. A repeatable resource gathering location (dungeon, escalating difficulty fight, minigame). New loot to an existing encounter.
I'm so mad at myself, because I knew it was going to end badly from the very beginning, especially when I'm still so emotional after having the baby. But I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, and hope he had changed. I'm just so mad at myself.