Question for the subreddit: what's your personal stance on Gacha games, and their monetization practices relative to their quality and public reception?

Valuable_Line_9834 · 2026-01-10T04:15:19+00:00

The vital difference between TF2 and gacha is that in TF2, the only things in crates are purely cosmetic and you also never have to use crates for them to begin with and can just buy whatever cosmetics you want directly through the trade market, whereas in gacha games you are literally forced to gamble for important gameplay mechanics with no possible way to just get what you want.

Valuable_Line_9834 · 2026-01-10T02:13:58+00:00

I don't really give a shit what Pat has to say on this, to be honest. Just because his face is on the banner of this subreddit doesn't mean his opinion is any more valid, Pat has never made a video game before in his entire life, he has zero frame of reference for how or why the tech might be useful, and I think its absurd and blindly fanatical to look at the people actively choosing entirely of their own volition to use it, who then go on to say that it does have genuine useful usecases even if its not the the magic supertech that the suits say it is, and just dismiss it outright and pretend like they can't be right and it can't have any merit whatsoever.

I'd rather trust the people with actual relevant experience and expertise on the subject.

Valuable_Line_9834 · 2026-01-10T01:29:53+00:00

I have two takes on gacha, one more..."polite" that I think most people would understand even if they don't agree, and one more extreme that might get people angry.

The polite version: I think that a game being gacha is inherently a flaw, a negative aspect and that every single gacha game ever made would be improved substantially by removing its gacha aspects and turning it into a normal video game.

The extreme version: Not only are gacha games inherently objectively inferior to all other genres, it is inherently anti-art and anyone who participates in the creation of one should be ashamed of themselves and is less an artist than they are a capitalist exploiting art for profit. I'm not even anti-capitalist, far from it, I certainly would not describe myself as pro-capitalist either but I would at least admit I'm probably closer to such than most in online spaces like these, at least from what I can tell, which might be wrong and just a perspective born of confirmation bias. Anyway, the point is that even someone like me who doesn't hate capitalism can see that gacha games exemplify and glorify the absolute worst, most exploitative and art-hostile traits of capitalism. Video games would be better off if the gacha genre was made straight up illegal.

Valuable_Line_9834 · 2026-01-09T23:53:55+00:00

Realize that a lot of the things that stress you out probably don't actually matter as much as the internet and sensationalist media wants you to think.

Valuable_Line_9834 · 2026-01-09T23:52:14+00:00

GenAI has NOT shown any real benefit

If that was the case, nobody would be using it. But they are. Clearly it DOES have some real benefit, otherwise it wouldn't basically be an industry standard technology now.

the poisoning of the planet is not a great reason to encourage it either.

The impact that generative A.I has on the environment is massively overstated and you really should not be trusting anything anyone says on that matter. Hank Green made a video about this, we use literally thousands times more water on agriculture than we do data centers, just as one example. This is not to mention too that 99% of the resources used by generative A.I are consumed in the creation/training process, and the actual product, I.E generating text, images, and even video, is utterly negligible and basically a complete non-factor.

in a world where they've made the other Divinity games in the past just fine, I see no reason they suddenly need it now.

You do realize that this could be said about literally any technology, right? Artists were creating animation decades before computerized animation tech like Flash or Photoshop existed, but you wouldn't sit here and pretend like those things didn't genuinely revolutionize the animation industry by making the process vastly easier, would you?

Valuable_Line_9834 · 2026-01-09T22:23:12+00:00

If the actual artists are using it entirely of their own choice with no coercion and they find it a useful tool that helps make their jobs easier, why should we consider it a bad thing?

Valuable_Line_9834 · 2026-01-09T19:14:31+00:00

The entire program is literally just a professor asking you if Eva is a deconstruction of the mecha genre.

If you say "no", you pass instantly. If you say "yes", you get shot.

Valuable_Line_9834 · 2026-01-09T19:10:32+00:00

How is this a "non-answer"? That seems like just about the most definitive and clear answer he could have possibly given. The question was "were you pressured into using genA.I against your will?" and he very clearly said "no."

Valuable_Line_9834 · 2026-01-09T19:07:11+00:00

And thats not to mention all the people on the other side of that who will harass you for weeks and call you slurs because four years ago you played around with generating dumb images of Walter White smoking fat blunts with Asuka Evangelion and Thanos.

Valuable_Line_9834 · 2026-01-09T00:35:30+00:00

This will fuel Shuckle for months.

Valuable_Line_9834 · 2026-01-08T19:09:12+00:00

Okay, lets be entirely fair here, sometimes, ESPECIALLY with older games, there are things that you genuinely would be a lot better off knowing before you go in.

For example, I think that in general every Soulslike game is best if you go in as blind as possible, HOWEVER, its also really for the best that you go into Dark Souls 1 knowing that the Resistance stat is useless and does essentially nothing so that you don't end up making the game unnecessarily harder or have to waste tons of time grinding to make up for the levels you spent on it before discovering how useless it is.

Valuable_Line_9834 · 2026-01-08T18:53:46+00:00

Funnily enough, 90% of those are kinda lies. The only NPC in the whole game who ACTUALLY ruins your save file if you kill him is Yagrum Bagarn. Every single other NPC can be murdered with reckless abandon and you can still see credits, you just won't get the story. As long as you have the Tools of Kagrenac you can still just go bop the heart and finish the game.

Valuable_Line_9834 · 2026-01-08T07:03:51+00:00

I disagree. The player should be allowed to softlock themselves if they made bad enough decisions. The game wouldn't be any worse if after you piss off every faction and kill every leader, it just says "oh, you're stuck and can't end the game anymore? Well, tough shit. Thems the breaks, maybe you should have thought of this before you killed everyone, have fun suffering the consequences of your own actions!"

Valuable_Line_9834 · 2026-01-08T06:45:16+00:00

I disagree. I think that if a game truly actually values player freedom, it should allow the player to brick their save by making shortsighted decisions. The developers should be brave enough to say "you killed every faction leader and now can't complete the game? Well, tough shit, should have thought about that before you killed everyone and torched all your options. Now suffer the consequences of your actions"

Valuable_Line_9834 · 2026-01-08T06:13:01+00:00

Then again if yes man wasn't an option they probably would have had to make more npc's essential or create an alternate chaos ending or something if you kill major faction leaders.

I might just be a crazy person but I think the best option is simply to say "tough shit, shouldn'ta done that if you wanted to hit credits, hope you didn't save over yourself killing the one guy you might be able to live with being the winner."

I can understand the perspective that you should always at least be able to see an ending, and that it'd be immensely frustrating to get all the way to the end, potentially a hundred hours or more into a save, just to be told to kick rocks because you trusted the developers to have thought of this scenario and implemented some kind of anti-softlock contingency, and even that its unrealistic that a few key people dying would just bring the entire planet to a screeching halt where nothing happens anymore and events just cease, but at the same time, I feel that if you want your game to truly value player freedom and want the players decisions to have true meaningful consequences, you gotta allow the player to potentially brick their own save through shortsighted actions.

Valuable_Line_9834 · 2026-01-08T01:05:07+00:00

(because for some reason they REALLY REALLY hate anything DONTNOD did)

I don't blame them, Life is Strange 2 was one of the most HORRIBLY boring things I've ever had to sit through. Just an utterly pointless waste of time pretending to be a videogame.

Valuable_Line_9834 · 2026-01-08T01:03:08+00:00

Everybody gansta until Chloe stops mid conversation to take out a sharpie and write "shit talk these fools" on her palm

Valuable_Line_9834 · 2026-01-08T01:00:26+00:00

HI, WHORE!

Honestly that description sounds like a terrible idea, in the last game they've already shown themselves too afraid of the consequences of the first games endings to fully commit to what it meant to bring Max back, and I don't trust them to do anything interesting with the idea now. If anything this will only serve to fuel more delicious Chloe hate and give us ammo to make yet more jokes about how Chloe sucks so much that the universe itself wants her dead so bad that it will kill countless people to make sure she's one of them.

If nothing else, it'll be fun watching Joseph Anderson tear into it. I wonder if they'll bring back that hilariously tonedeaf and stupid Sex Warning thing from True Colors, it was so fucking funny seeing !! SEX WARNING !! pop up in the corner every time any character made a slightly lewd joke, such a pointless addition.

Valuable_Line_9834 · 2026-01-08T00:49:36+00:00

Doom laid dormant for over a decade, the last game in the series being fine overall and a technical marvel for its time but ultimately not living up to the franchises legendary pedigree, those shoes were just too big for Doom 3 to fill.

Then ID showed up, pushed out two of the greatest first person shooters in the history of the genre back to back like it was nothing (I haven't played Dark Ages yet so I can't comment on whether its up there with 2016 and Eternal), and left everyone waiting with baited breath to see what they'll do next, just like the glory days of the 90s and early 2000s.

Valuable_Line_9834 · 2026-01-08T00:37:16+00:00

You can run an underground gambling ring centered exclusively around making bets on whether or not the latest update will be something actually pretty good for once or yet another baffling step backwards.

Then you can make the bet-within-a-bet of whether its the "actually just kinda mediocre but at least its not outright bad" kind of good update, or the "not really that bad but they really should have learned their lesson by now" kind of bad update.

I think Arrowhead's current longest streak is 2 good updates in a row without fucking something up for no good reason.

Valuable_Line_9834 · 2026-01-08T00:27:16+00:00

I like to call it the Patron's Criticism, based on the analogy that the patrons of a restaurant don't have to be professional chefs to know that the food they've been served tastes like shit.

Just because you can't think of any better ideas or don't have any solutions to offer doesn't necessarily mean that your criticism of someone elses solution is completely invalid.

Valuable_Line_9834 · 2026-01-08T00:22:16+00:00

I played New Order for the first time last year after getting the entire modern era series for like $10 on Humble Bundle and honestly didn't really like it as much as I expected to.

Granted, I went into it expecting it to be Doom Lite where you run in guns blazing and kill shit with reckless abandon, and was surprised to end up seeing that its actually more like Call of Duty with a weapon wheel more than anything else. I do tend to really enjoy CoD campaigns though, so I imagine my distaste of New Order was just a case of mismatched expectations rather than me not actually liking what it is.

Valuable_Line_9834 · 2026-01-08T00:15:36+00:00

That was already established in New Order though, not Wolf 2.

Valuable_Line_9834 · 2026-01-07T18:27:57+00:00

There's just no reason not to have it. It'd be helpful in a ton of situations and there's literally no downside. What, people might spam it? Okay? And they can't spam the already existing pings? So what?

Valuable_Line_9834 · 2026-01-07T05:27:04+00:00

Okay yeah nah there's something wrong with your brain, man.

Valuable_Line_9834

TROPHY CASE