The market is just way too saturated. It's at this point the older games like WuWa, Hoyo games for the big budget 3D games have established their audience and it's free falling from there with the next big thing (Ananta, Silver Palace) going to cannibalize the playerbases of games that are still getting their foot out the door. Of course this is all armchair speculation since for all we now they're doing completely fine with the relatively new model where mobile isn't the end all be all for earning
Analysts definitely realize this, better than we do. As they study market trends and social trends. It's very likely why we've been seeing 2026-2027 titles abandoning most of the gacha elements (maybe cosmetic gachas or have 100% banners or guaranteed pities much sooner). They aren't going to reel in those audiences without making compromises that may appeal to players. They'd rather make decent money than EoS out of attempted greed. Ananta and Silver Palace are popular enough to probably do fine. Maybe Azur Promilia and Honkai Nexus Anima due to IP/dev trust. Most others will struggle (Astrae Oratio, Sea of Remnants, Kaleido Rider, several others) because lack of familiarity.
I concur, I think Ananta managed to get the "normie" attention going by the people I've seen talking about it, Silver Palace has the advantage of being the first big budget Korean gacha game so that might give it an edge over other CN games especially in the story department since I've heard China has some restrictions on what's allowed to be portrayed, and Nexus Anima is both a Hoyo game and a Honkai so at least that guarantees a lot of people are gonna try it when it comes out. I'm a bit worried about Promilia tho, haven't heard a lot of buzz around it and the devs don't seem very interested in the western market at all but we'll see.
There are so many gachas out there now that it's becoming increasingly harder to get new players to pick up your game, even if they try it, it becomes an issue of wether it's worth it dropping one you're currently playing, an issue of the gacha market is that unlike with full-price games you aren't competing with just the current releases but every gacha game ever released, I've seen people drop WuWa to play FGO.
Other Hoyo games I agree, but I feel like Genshin is pretty much immune to falling off at this point. It is way too big to considerably drop in the foreseeable future. Easily the biggest player retention of any game in history, even most players that quit come back at some point to spend on their favorite characters and a lot of players buy the welkin (there is like 60-70 million monthly players iirc, I could be wrong, but that figure is just massive on its own, so let's say 5-10% players at least buy welkin, that's at least 3+ million welkin buyers which would translate to at least 15 million in welkin monthly revenue alone, not to mention the big spenders)
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u/smoothtv99 6h ago edited 4h ago
The market is just way too saturated. It's at this point the older games like WuWa, Hoyo games for the big budget 3D games have established their audience and it's free falling from there with the next big thing (Ananta, Silver Palace) going to cannibalize the playerbases of games that are still getting their foot out the door. Of course this is all armchair speculation since for all we now they're doing completely fine with the relatively new model where mobile isn't the end all be all for earning