Yeah, I think that's why Hoyo is diversifying with Nexus Anima going "Pokemon" style and Nodusfall going Souls/Monster Hunter style. The usual formula for open world gacha games just doesn't cut it anymore.
Yeah I can imagine A LOT of casual players downloading it because its ‘Hoyo Pokemon’ and deleting it in two hours when they realise its an auto-chess game.
people can hate hoyo as much as they want but we need to applaud hoyo for always two steps ahead of other company. they can see what others dont and end up leading market while every other company is just playing catchup
how is creating an adjacent to an existing game or genre being two steps ahead? for the chinese market sure but in general that's like saying CI Games is ahead of the curve because they made LotF which is just a mash of existing soulslikes and action rpgs
are we forgetting the botw clone for phone roots?
you can say I'm a hater, but there's a reason why the immediate gaming community response outside the gacha sphere to anything Hoyo puts out on a game show is lukewarm at best.
EDIT: and for those who downvoted me and moved on without commenting, I'm sure you have your reasons. But wake me up when hoyo or any modern gacha company rather creates something that isn't just XYZ but gacha/hoyo/kuro/whatever. Oh and keep in mind I never talked about the game quality itself, just market position and uniqueness.
Had to paimonially feed you that edit to make sure that was understood
ah i mean they are two steps ahead in gacha game industry to be specific. i cant comment on gaming as a whole yet. mihoyo made once an buy 2 play game genre into sucesfull live service game. live service game is the holy grail for all game devs and publisher. one time big investment, endless ammout of money.
mihoyo has twice cause competitors to join with same genre trying to compete for the market (PGR, Aether Gazer against HI3rd and all the current and upcoming open world gane against GI). when someone trying to "copy" you, that means you lead far enough to shape up market and what makes it two steps ahead is when they still busy trying to copy you, you already made new thing those company didnt think of yet.
Hoyo dare to take risk and be the first dip feet in the water, other company just follow and play it safe. iirc GI is hoyo do or die project, if GI flop back then they basically bankrupt. Not many comoany dare take risk like that and Hoyo become leader cause they take risk, get rich so much that their next big project carry less risk
I think what Hoyo does is synthesis. The difference with LoTF vs Souls is they didn't do anything different so it was just a jankier Souls game. Hoyo at least usually does something different enough to make it fresh on some level. Because they did make a BOTW clone, but adding the cute anime girls you could acquire in and of itself was, at that time, a fresh development that captured an audience, as well as taking a 60 dollar box price open world game and making it free to play. And Genshin attracted a huge audience that way. We forget because it's all old hat now how many of the things Genshin did at the time that WERE fresh, even while being an obvious BOTW reskin. China devs in general are really good at making something just different enough that it becomes an appealing new thing, such as Wukong being, by far, the most successful non-mainline Soulsborne game.
With respect to the ahead of the curve specifically, it's more that they're ahead of the curve within their own market, not the market as a whole. But I also don't think every dev needs to be doing something new. Especially not the biggest devs. Newness is something indie devs should be doing, and the bigger companies should be copying the cool gameplay and mechanics and aesthetics the indie companies come up with, and then making them at scale. I would LOVE if someone huge made a massive budget "Expedition 33like" with a full open world like old RPGs had but with modern graphics. That's what the big studios are for. They're like giant aircraft carriers, those are a lot harder to turn than a small speedboat, so they're not going to be taking risky swings on new stuff, but they CAN scale up the ambition of existing stuff other smaller studios found out people liked.
One of the real reasons is that their games are primarily free to play and look and feel just good enough to get people interested. They do nothing revolutionary, but they are accessible.
No one said they're inventing new genres. They're pushing the boundaries of what a "gacha game" can be. Prior to HI3, gacha games were all small 2D turn-based games because that's what's "proven" to work for a mobile audience. Then HI3 released and showed the industry that higher budget mobile 3D actions games are viable and everyone followed suit, you started seeing more 3D games with voice acting in the main story and whatnot.
Then the genre stagnated sticking to the same RPG formula, until Genshin came out proving that a game on a AAA budget and scale is viable in this niche pushing gacha games into the mainstream. Everyone is copying the open-world and monetization part of genshin thinking this is what made it popular (because they're creatively bankrupt trend-chasers) when the reality is that what made it popular was the fact that it was just a... dare I say, good game with non-intrusive gacha launching at the perfect time.
And they keep expanding what they can slap a gacha on- things you never thought could work as a gacha game: Cozy games? Souls-like? TFT? A rumored shooter in the works of some kind? Probably all gacha on AA-AAA budgets rivaling "traditional" games in scope.
Once Petit Planet releases and makes billions, you'll start seeing more "cozy gachas" releasing and so on. Hoyo is the risk takers in the industry. Everyone else is just watching them to copy what works *coughcoughkurocoughcough*.
first they make dmc/god of war with gacha, then botw clone with gacha, then soon animal crossing and tft with gacha
hoyo is the first to flag many genre with the gacha version, hence they they become industry leader in gacha. other company either just playing catcup or dont expand too much (HG with AK iirc pioneer of tower defense with gacha, SU with Nikke is gallery shooter with gacha.. but tbh that GI money is what made hoyo possible to expand so fast)
although nodusfall will be interesting since they will move to more common monetisation with cosmetic than character gachas
You say Kuro but Wuwa is as unique as Genshin was in terms of what they added and has diverged enough from Genshin as Genshin did from BotW. Again, are we trying to say Genshin did something really unique with its launch when it was just gambling added on top of an already acclaimed game?
And this isn't even a gacha unique thing. Look at Fortnite and PUBG lmao.
Think what you want about the games themselves but you have to be kidding me if you truly believe Zelda with gambling was a unique game and its popularity wasn't a result of a broke ass audience getting a free nintendo game on their phone during the most dead period of our lives.
trying to say Genshin did something really unique with its launch when it was just gambling added on top of an already acclaimed game?
Where did i say that?
Think what you want about the games themselves but you have to be kidding me if you truly believe Zelda with gambling was a unique game and its popularity wasn't a result of a broke ass audience getting a free nintendo game on their phone during the most dead period of our lives.
again, where did i say that?
Damn, you're really coming into this discussion with a massive chip on your shoulder.
You say Kuro but Wuwa is as unique as Genshin was in terms of what they added and has diverged enough from Genshin as Genshin did from BotW
That's not the claim i'm making. My claim is kuro consistently tries to emulate hoyoverse's successes. I'm not saying they copy 1 to 1. I'm saying, if you line up their game release timelines, kuro consistently comes out with a similar product a few years after hoyoverse proves success. It's so apparent that in CN kuro is memed on as "eating Mihoyo's exhaust fumes".
If it was a 1 or 2 year gap you could chalk it up to competitors competing but hoyo beats them to the punch, however, the real gap is so large it's clear that they speedrun development of a new game when they see the success hoyo is having that's why, If you were present at WuWa launch, you know how horribly broken it was, to the point that they had to rely on Tencent to bail them out.
Your second paragraph ended with "popular because dare I say its a good game with non intrusive gacha" which is what I countered with the "think what you want-" paragraph
"Coming in with a chip on your shoulder"
Is that what you tell everyone who disagrees with you
Is that what you tell everyone who disagrees with you
you just keep reaching to conclusions based on your biases. It's almost impressive.
Your second paragraph ended with "popular because dare I say its a good game with non intrusive gacha"
Yes, because that's an objective statement. I'm relaying public opinion at the time. Were you there at Genshin's launch? Pretty much everyone who played it got addicted and word of mouth spread like wildfire making Gacha Games, the low effort cash grab mobile slop trash, part of the mainstream culture. A soulless clone would not achieve that. Even people who've never heard of a gacha game in their lives were playing it. It was good enough to turn console/pc only purists and haters of everything mobile into "hmmmmm maybe i'll try this genshin game people keep saying is not like other mobile games". I have watched MMORPG-only streamers and CCs i followed try Genshin, unsponsored btw, just through sheer social pressure and fall in love with this single player mobile game.
Of course there were people like you screeching about Genshin violating the sanctity of your precious BoTW, but that's obviously criticism in bad faith that nobody listened to. And that's why Genshin is one of he most popular games in the world and is still printing money 6 years later. The end.
You lost my good faith as soon as you brought me as a person into my criticism. Then you doubled down. So I'll play it likewise.
Saying genshin release was all cakes and roses is revisionist history, and yes I was there at the time, and was one of the rare few who played BotW after Genshin.
But regardless, that last bit told me enough. There's a phrase for that called "Argumentum ad Populum" and entire theses exist on why sales and popularity are misleading metrics by themselves. But of course, I wouldn't expect someone who hasn't sold or managed a commercialised product in their life to understand.
You're not even addressing what I said. Just vaguely waving at concepts of an argument but there's nothing there.
Anyway, people like you are a waste of time to argue with. I wouldn't expect much more from someone names SexWithYiXuan69 frequenting a gacha subreddit and being tribalistic about other games.
Yes? That's how genres work? It's not a major revelation. You don't say Persona 5 is just a Final Fantasy with a stylish UI slapped on top because they're both JRPGs and have summons and elemental spells to exploit weaknesses and where you start as a nobody then defeat God at the end. It's a turn-based RPG in its own right.
Games draw inspiration from eachother all the time, that's how genres evolve. You can take literally any game you played in the past and I guarantee you that game borrowed some elements from an older game. You'd be hard-pressed to find something truly unique these days because almost everything has been done before.
Likewise with Genshin. The creators don't hide the fact that they drew heavy inspiration from BoTW. But that really only applies to Mondstad, doesn't it? Being the first area, a generic green-field RPG area in a cel-shaded art style accentuating the similarities to Hyrule. Once you reach Liyue, it starts departing from it's BoTW roots. I bet if, say, Inazuma was the first region instead of Mondstad, nobody would be calling it a BoTW clone.
I never denied that. But I would say that hoyo's comparative success is somewhat undeserved. I will give credit where it's due to the coders, artists, voice actors, and sometimes the writers; all that work is still work, but overall, these games are not that special, and it's hard to see why these out of all games are worth billions of dollars.
That's subjective, isn't it? Animal Crossing New Horizons sold over 50M copies worldwide and I genuinely still can't understand what's so engaging about cozy games at all.
Genshin offers things that a lot of people like, be it character designs, art direction, music, story, exploration, combat or even just the gacha. Any of these could be a reason it appeals to someone in particular but it's undeniable that its popularity was due to *something* it offers that no other game does or at the very least to the same degree.
I get what you mean, but I feel like you need to focus on their full statement. Sure, anyone could have made a BotW clone, a Pokemon clone etc., but the fact is Hoyo somehow manages to be either the first or the most prominent to do so, and also to do it with a certain base level of quality. No, they haven't created the genres their games are based off of, but they are undoubtedly pioneers in the market they actually cater to (gacha) if you look at the general landscape there.
By itself other company means gaming in general. Other gacha companies? Sure.
I think a lot of people fail to realise that Hoyo is on a different playing field now. A field where what they do isn't really considered waow unique pog.
In management we call it the Peter Principle where people (here, game devs) in a hierarchy tend to rise to a level of respective incompetence. That is basically what Genshin did for Hoyo. The position and timing was so perfect for that game they just took off from there but started to be counted amongst the players who were genuinely setting new trends.
Tbh, I thought the fact they referred to gacha companies was understood from context.
Not sure what you mean by the rest, what is "incompetent" about the projects Hoyo creates? They are obviously savvy in creating and monetizing successful products, Covid alone definitely helped boosting initial player numbers but it doesn't explain why the game still tops the charts 6 years later. And while HSR and especially ZZZ don't quite reach the same numbers, they are arguably just as successful in terms of longterm player/interest retention.
I would like to reply to your last sentence, but I genuinely don't quite understand it. Are you saying their status as trend setters is technically false, because players are too stupid to understand the wider gaming landscape?
Respective incompetence is the literal definition restated. In effect it means people end up in places where they're sorta just a part of the pack.
As for the last statement it's not stupidity and more so lack of awareness. Genshin brought a lot of people into games, but that's more or less where their experience ends. Creating or rather recreating an existing game has been how the gaming sphere has operated for a very long time, so it's rather funny to see people take hoyo doing it as them being market setters.
And on that note, the comment I replied to didn't mention gacha market. Thus my reply was calibrated. It's also why I mentioned the chinese and gacha market myself in my original reply.
No one is creating anything new for the last two decades. Just at the best selling, most popular or goty of each years.
Elden Ring: Dark Souls but open world
E33: Turn based but with Sekiro mechanics
Baldur's Gate 3: CRPG but extra horny (lol)
COD, FIFA, any E-sports, hero shooter or fps: just the same thing over and over.
Then we also have lots of sequels to popular franchises or remakes.
Even the indie industry isn't doing much better in this front (although much better than the rest) as the biggest indie release we got this decade was also a sequel to another beloved game (Silksong).
The guy above never specified what 'being 2 steps ahead' means, so your interpretation is fine but also limited.
Fyi, if youve ever read mihoyos employee induction booklet or listened to one of da weis talks, they state in no uncertain terms that mihoyo doesnt consider themselves to be a game dev company, let alone specifically an anime game company. They first and foremost consider themselves to be a tech company; the tech moat is how they keep ahead of the competition.
They started developing and optimizing an open world game in 2017 on their customized version of unity.
Theyre one of the earliest game companies to focus on ai; being angel investors in minimax and with recent news of them putting 100 billion rmb up forward to in house ai tools. Apparently they already have their own data center(s) set up.
Most recently its been confirmed that nodusfall will be releasing on mobile and recent job descriptions state that theyre aiming to do away with/heavily modify ue5s lumen for lighter and more efficient global illumination solutions.
From a recent ai conference talk they plan to implement ai agents to create more authentic npc interactions for games new and old. For instance, the npc characters in petit planet and most notably their goal of creating an npc driven game in varsapura.
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u/firezero10 6h ago
Yeah, I think that's why Hoyo is diversifying with Nexus Anima going "Pokemon" style and Nodusfall going Souls/Monster Hunter style. The usual formula for open world gacha games just doesn't cut it anymore.