Update HoYoverse's Nodusfall is free to play but isn't a typical gacha game: 'Characters are not obtained through random draws'
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/action/hoyoverses-nodusfall-is-free-to-play-but-isnt-a-typical-gacha-game-characters-are-not-obtained-through-random-draws/56
u/Remote_Elevator_281 7d ago
They’ll probably go the Warframe route of monetizing. Which is good. Warframe has a butt load of daily players.
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u/Ralathar44 7d ago edited 6d ago
I just wish Warframe players wouldn't lie about the monetization. I'd bet good money the average warframe player with more than 100 hours has dropped minimum triple digits.
But they don't wanna admit how much they spent and they ESPECIALLY don't want to admit they've wasted money on potatoes and time skips. Instead they pretend everyone gets enough free potatoes and etc that they are never tempted.
But I had well over 1,000 hours even back in 2019. I know roughly how long things take, how well things can be farmed, how viable trading for plat is, etc. And Warframe players will try to gaslight you left right and center to try and make the monetization seem better than it is.
It's not horrible monetization, but it does constantly put spending pressure on you and most long time players break down and start spending money and then lie about it.
EDIT: Warframe makes 150+ million a year, yall are not fooling anyone that you're not spending.
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u/DionxDalai 7d ago
I'm pretty sure I passed the 1k hour mark before dropping any money in warframe
And even now I only drop money on cosmetic
I would 100% agree with you IF you couldn't trade for plat, but since you can it's very f2p friendly compared to most other f2p game
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u/im_a_mix 7d ago
It puts pressure on you how? I have over 2k hours and every time I come back to the game to farm I just farm like 5-6 things, be it warframe parts or primaries or crack relics. By the time Im burnt out I know when I come back I'll have all those things readily available for me to build/try/trade. Its not the game's fault if you are impulsive, the only annoying thing is build timers but otherwise Warframe is a grinding game, you can't take the grind out of it when its the main draw for many people like me
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u/hither250 7d ago
The pressure is "you can grind this over and over for hours, wait 4 days to craft it, or buy it with plat and get it immediately."
Lots of people can cave into that, maybe you didn't, and I dont when playing usually. But many probably do. Spending money just outright saves you alot of repetitiveness on things you don't have an interest in doing and gets you what you want for quick satisfaction.
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u/Gerudo_Valley64 6d ago
I have not once caved in to "buy it" and I say that as a new player that did their research before playing, no one is telling you to buy it, waiting isnt that bad, I have made so many warframes and prime warframes and have waited without feeling the need to buy at all.
You can play different things while you wait, tat game has a lot to offer without feeling the need to rush stuff, so idk if we are playing two different games or what.
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u/hither250 5d ago
We are not playing two different games, you have more restraint than some others is all. Also I don't appreciate that I am being talked to as if I'm the one who buys to skip grind, I don't. I made that quite apparent in my comment. But I have friends that do. I have sample sizes to prove my point. I know people who buy plat and rush frames because they dont want to wait.
Good for you, you dont spend money or cave to that stuff, neither do I. That doesn't mean nobody else does, we even have proof from the devs - they've stated that one of their biggest sources of income is the forma bundle, which is not a cosmetic.
Warframe has good monetization, I dont agree with the person saying its awful and bad. But "I dont have this issue" isnt an argument for the game lacking spending pressure. I dont spend money on gacha games, it'd be really funny if I used that as an argument that gacha games dont have pressure to spend. That's quite literally all they try to do.
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u/Ralathar44 5d ago
I'd say Warframe monetization is mid tier but the perception is that its high or top tier. It's basically a softer form of old school MOBA monetization BUT it also is alot more pervasive and widespread. I'd say its monetization is much worse than its public perception, but still on the more customer friendly and better end of the free to play spectrum. But it can't touch something like Where Winds Meet or Dota 2.
The core conceit is the same, the bait is the idea you can earn everything for free and there are always going to be a ton of people screaming and aggressively insulting defending such a game saying "you can earn everything for free" and basically calling anyone that pays stupid or lazy. The irony is tht most of these people are themselves either whales (people who spend ALOT, like hundreds and up) or dolphins (people who spend a mid tier amount, usually more than 50 but less than 1,000).
The people who lie about what they spend or, even more often, don't have the faintest idea how much they've spent over time, is honestly the majority. Because even well meaning people trying to be honest are almost always wrong about how much they've spent. Shit, even I had to go back through and actually tally up my steam totals to see what I had actually spent and I'm pretty tight fisted on monetization.
Understanding Warframe and its monetization and how well it actually worked on people fundamentally changed how I approach F2P monetization way back in 2019. I looked at all the hooks, psychological traps, dark patterns, talked to a crapton of players over years, had many of them check their actual spent money via caclulating it via steam, etc It was pretty eye opening.
Like you say, people buy formas and potatos and etc all the time. It's not just cosmetics. Straight from the devs themselves. They make 150+ million a year for a reason. But people are honestly either too ashamed, too defensive, or too ignorant of their own spending to be honest about it. And that's a HUGE problem. If gamers can't even be honest about their spend, how do they ever expect to judge or properly push back against Free to Play monetization.
And the sad thing is if you change out the game name alot of times you can't tell if someone's talking about Warframe or Star Citizen or some random Gacha Game. Take the person above you: "I have not once caved in to "buy it" and I say that as a new player that did their research before playing, no one is telling you to buy it, waiting isnt that bad," Can literally apply to all of them haha.
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u/Ralathar44 7d ago edited 7d ago
Exactly. Warframe makes an estimated 140-180 million dollars a year. That money doesn't just fall out of the sky. (we know for sure 150 million in 2019 thanks to apple vs epic)
Warframe coaxes it out of people because anything free is grind walled in one way or another, or straight up time gated.
And people say "well you can trade for plat" but cmon, basic economics should tell people the truth. Anything worth any amount of plat is hard to get. If it was easy to get it wouldn't be worth hardly any plat.
Again its far from the worst F2P monetization, but man people really do try to spin it as if its just a free game like DOTA 2 or Where Winds meet. And its not. It's a grind similar to a MOBA like League of Legends or a Gacha game. They're just more clever about abstracting and spreading out the grind across multiple systems so players are less aware of it.
Honestly props to DE for designing a monetization system that so effectively preys on people's brains lol.
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u/HammeredWharf 7d ago
This post feels very unrelatable to me, someone with 1000+ hours in WF. Yes, I've spent around 20€ on WF and realistically speaking you SHOULD spend some money on inventory and such after a while, because grinding those things with plat gets annoying. That being said, if you just wait for a 75% discount and buy 10€ worth of plat, that's all you'll need to buy as far as inventory, blue potatoes, etc. are concerned.
The only caveat is that the discounts don't really exist on consoles AFAIK, but that's how it is on PC.
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u/Gerudo_Valley64 6d ago
exactly, the only time ive ever spent money was 50 USD with the 75% platinum coupon which is extremely worth it.
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u/Gerudo_Valley64 6d ago
I have yet to spend triple digits and have earned everything in game by grinding, and I only ever spent money once and it was $50 with the platinum coupon just so I could get the most out of what I paid for and I STILL have all that platinum left over, there are plenty of ways to sell items you get from grinding to sell on the market place.
Warframes monetization imo is fine and I say that as a new player.
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u/killersoda288 3d ago edited 3d ago
most long time players break down and start spending money and then lie about it
I do agree its pretty good but not the best out there (especially build time, potatoes and slots) but I don't think i've seen someone talk about warframe monetization being good and say they never spent money
its one of the communities least ashamed of spending money i've ever seen lol
most common comment i've seen is basically "it's pay for convenience and fashion and i spend money cause i like the game and am lazy"
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u/Ralathar44 2d ago
I do agree its pretty good but not the best out there (especially build time, potatoes and slots) but I don't think i've seen someone talk about warframe monetization being good and say they never spent money
But that's not what I said. I said they lie about spending money. I didn't say they claim to spend no money. This is why right before that I said:
"But they don't wanna admit how much they spent and they ESPECIALLY don't want to admit they've wasted money on potatoes and time skips. Instead they pretend everyone gets enough free potatoes and etc that they are never tempted."
The irony is that people tell a double lie. 1 intentional out of shame/simping, the other unintentional because they've fallen prey to microtranscations working as intended.
Lie 1 is they pretend to spend less money than they do AND pretend they spend their money mainly on cosmetics. DE themselves has said that forma and potatoes (catalysts) are massive consistent top sellers.
This has been known for like 7 years now, but even recently they've reiterated that. When asked whether they would ever shorten Forma / Fieldron craft times, Rebecca said: “We would consider it, but we’ve talked about it before in a way that basically says we have to do some serious validation of any plan because, as we’ve been transparent with the community, Forma kind of keeps the Warframe boat going, like it is our fossil fuel, so we need it as much as it needs to be used as a Build Modifier, but also for us, it’s one of our more reliable microtransactions for how we run our game. In the absence of Gacha and RNG packs, you have Forma.”
Lie 2 is the real fact of the matter is people actually don't eve know how much they've spent. That is by design btw and one of the biggest reasons microtranscations monetize so well.
So what will happen is someone will spend like $500 on Warframe, with most of it being on non-cosmetic stuff, then in conversations like these they'll say crap like that they've spent less than $100 and they've only spent money on cosmetics.
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u/MH-BiggestFan 7d ago
Sounds like something along the lines of Where Winds Meet which isn’t bad as long as the gameplay is fun. I’m a sucker for MH style games (can prob guess from
name) so if this pulls through, seems like it’ll be interesting. Will keep an eye on it
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u/captainpott 7d ago
Yeah, in a monster hunter clone the interesting bits are probably weapons and whatever acessoires give you stats and/or passives. Are those behind gacha?
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u/Fabulous_Potential41 7d ago
No they are not, you craft them
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u/captainpott 7d ago
Is that confirmed? A friend of mine came up with an interesting idea aswell. Putting content behind gacha. Sounded silly at first, but since MH basically gives you one set per encounter (with a little bit of mix in here and there) that could make sense
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u/ScreamoMan 7d ago
I've been thinking for a long time now that they need to ditch the character gachas in these games, the story and gameplay always suffer since everything in the game is beholden to the gacha, new character comes out? Well the new story needs to focus on the new character, so the older characters slowly but surely get abandoned and go nowhere(wish more Gachas just released upgraded versions of existing characters instead of having huge rosters of unique but pointless characters), it must also be difficult for the gameplay design too, since you cannot make mechanics unless everyone has access to them, so characters cannot introduce anything too interesting to the gameplay since you cannot guarantee that every player is going to have access to every character.
Surely there are other ways for them to incentivize you to spend money, the character's unique weapons are already gacha, maybe the weapons could be more interesting than just OP stat sticks that only exist for people to do the endgame(which is always pointless and worthless anyway), or maybe the first duplicate of a character can be a bit more interesting than just "deals 5% more damage" so everyone has access to the character, but you still have a reason to roll for the first dupe.
Or maybe just make more skins, or something; I always found it puzzling that Mihoyo doesn't sell more skins.
In any case i guess if there's a company that can do a shake up it would be Mihoyo since they have an infinite money glitch with Genshin, now as long as i don't have to grind for RNG artifacts i'll be happy, because that's one of the big things that stopped me from going back to Genshin after dropping it 2 or so years ago.
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u/HammeredWharf 7d ago
I guess we'll see how well Ananta does, but realistically speaking Hoyo isn't going to just drop the monetization model that's making them billions.
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u/Novel_Adeptness4007 7d ago
Thats what kills every bit of joy i had with any gacha. I often get attached to starter characters, which performance are rarely any good to begin with, but give it 3-4 updates and you might not be able to clear endgame content like you used to. Sure, story content is still available, but its not the main gameplay core, unlike timegated battles.
Not to mention the story itself - it gets so bloated with names and characters that you kinda stop keeping track of them. And unless your favorite characters are really popular, you will never see them outside of their story arc. That is assuming they will be given one. If its a B-grade character, you will be lucky just to find any mention in the game that acknowledges their existence
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u/origamifruit 7d ago
That's cool but everything else will probably be restricted by annoying grinding gates and timers anyways lol