You do not gotta hand it to MiHoYo
I'm someone from the Global South (a flattening, vaguely fluffy term I'm unfond of using); and I'm a game developer with a history of working on mobile and freemium games.
And yet, I find myself pinching my nose and rolling my eyes at a recent minor trend in video games discourse that supposedly valorizes people like me. Specifically, I'm exhausted at people in the video games intelligentsia make posts that take the premise that gacha games are Artistically Valid, Important, and Not Being Talked About enough.
(Petty aside: a major performer of this genre of writing was a certain Kotaku writer, whose name I'll omit in the interest of decorum, who... quit journalism to take a marketing job at MiHoYo.)
I think at this point in the course of human events it's impossible to claim that gacha games aren't 'talked about enough' without being tremendously disingenuous. Flip through the surviving rump of English-language games journalism and you will find a huge volume of posting about whichever gacha has most recently broken out in the west.
Right now, Polygon has done a pretty substantial amount of Infinity Nikki coverage, most of it pretty breathless. In the current cultural climate in the West, where the aristocracy have collectively decided that addicting the peasantry to gambling is a good idea, any reluctance or 'cringe' around promoting a gacha game is dead and buried.
But I think there should be reluctance and cringe around promoting these games; I think there should be a degree of cultural resistance to them, in the same way that I think there should be a critical posture towards AAA video games that glorify the US military.
The reality is that gacha monetization is tremendously predatory. It combines an unbounded way of spending money on the game with an explicitly designed mechanism of addiction.
So when I see people strenuously making the argument that it's wrong to critique these games for their predatory business model -- or to apply any kind of critique at all -- on grounds that "well, this is what people in the Global South can play, they can't afford $60 games or $400 consoles," I just roll my eyes.
You might as well be telling me that payday lenders are "banking the unbanked."
Yes, global inequities means that a lot of people around the world are unable to enjoy video games through the 'traditional' medium of console and disc ownership. It does not follow that any business model that fills this gap is therefore beyond reproach.1
The gacha model is, fundamentally, about extracting value out of a mass market that is too unequal to support a world where the average player is spending something close to your ARPU2. It explicitly exploits the drastic income and wealth inequalities that exist in these markets.
Or, in other worlds: gacha doesn't work in emerging markets because people in these markets have no money. It works because the money is there, but very unevenly distributed. The bulk of Free Fire's audience is low-income people in SE Asia and Latin America; but the game makes its money off the minority of people in its audience who can afford to spend a lot of money on it -- significantly more than the $70 someone would spend on a conventional AAA game.3
It's not coincidental that US games culture and games journalism has become so much more friendly to gacha at a time when US society is becoming more and more grotesquely unequal and stratified.
Which is to say: I don't think these games shouldn't be talked about; but I do think that the breathless way they're discussed is actively harmful. And I think that the constant erasure of why people have been resistant and dismissive of F2P games is incredibly frustrating.
The reality of the industry is that the negative perception of F2P games is not a purely irrational and dismissive expression of elitist gamer gatekeeping; it's a reaction to many of the studios working on this model being up to a ton of shady shit.
It is possible to make money on a freemium game without skinning your users. But it's not possible to make mega-scale money.
I think it's right to think that video games belong to everyone. I think however that we should consider what genuine inclusion looks like. One of the contradictions inherent to predatory F2P4 is that while they are often the only games that low-income players can access, they are also actively hostile to those users.
Free users are pitted against paying users with mechanical advantages; every pause in play is interrupted with ads, hostile sales tactics, and reminders of premium purchases you can't afford.
We should not consider these companies as fulfilling a need so much as exploiting an inequity. These games are worth talking about. But I don't think you're really talking about them if you're setting aside their business model. Especially because once you set the business model aside, what is there to talk about?
Some of the things that have historically filled this gap are great, of course. LAN café culture is a genuinely great thing, for one. It is worth considering how mobile gaming decimated the LAN scene in many places, replacing dozens of small local businesses with a handful of large international studios beholden to Google.↩
Average Revenue per User, a commonly-used metric for all kinds of games that have monetization more complex than 'buy once to own the game'.↩
Free Fire in particular pioneered a particularly rancid form of influencer marketing where it sells on the promise of esports success or becoming a streamer; hustle/bag culture as games marketing.↩
Truth be told, there are few actively-developed games with a fremium model that are not engaged in predatory practices. But I am obliged to specifically acknowledge that they exist by making statements specifically about the predatory subset.↩