Neverness to Everness
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The ever-churning wheel of gacha just keeps spinning. Neverness To Everness is my most recent obsession, although I’ve also got my eyes on Arknights: Endfield and even dabbled a little in Marvel Mystic Mayhem this week. The landscape of gacha games is an always changing battlefield, but even when new games come along, the older games don’t tend to go anywhere.
I’m a casual gacha fan. I’ve dabbled in them all and committed to very few of them. But it’s a part of the gaming ecosystem that fascinates me, mostly because of the sheer amount of cash flowing. Wuthering Waves made over $300 million in its first year on microtransactions alone.
After hundreds of hours in Wuthering Waves and plenty of money spent on virtual characters and weapons, what exactly will it take for another game to capture my interest (and my wallet?) How much gacha is too much gacha? This is a difficult question and quite a fun one to dive into, so let’s take a look at the current state of gacha games in 2025.
I Don’t Even “Play” Gacha Games Anymore, Really
My daily experience with WuWa is pretty simple: I log in, I do my daily quests, I log off. All in all it takes like, under an hour. The gameplay amounts to little more than that, unless there’s a new character or quests.
Even then, these tasks demand very little of my time, as I’m not actively hunting for a new character — Lupa does look pretty sweet, though. I’m not playing Wuthering Waves, I’m just staying invested in case something interesting happens.
I haven’t touched Honkai: Star Rail or Zenless Zone Zero since the first month of their respective launches. Honkai captured my attention for a lot longer than ZZZ and, realistically, I could still be diving in occasionally like I do with WuWa, but life is too short to play multiple gacha games.
Before too long, you are just completing daily chores for next to no personal gain, and tapping into a dwindling well of dopamine that just doesn’t quite hit like it used to.
I’ve got some friends that do play multiple gachas. One pal completes their daily tasks in multiple games and just picks one gacha game a day to do extra tasks in.
It’s impossible to keep up with all the content in ZZZ, Genshin, Honkai, and the others, but by choosing just one of them a day, the content grind stays relatively fresh — at least, that’s what they tell me.
Even Though The Market Is Saturated, New Games Keep Pushing The Boundaries
It’s always good to have a little healthy competition. I wrote this week about how fair NTE’s gacha system is (it has no 50/50 RNG on getting the character you want), and about how more gacha games will likely have to this path to keep their players happy.
Whether or not you agree with the overall monetisation practices of these games, it’s obvious there’s a huge demand for them. New games typically begin life with a simultaneous release on console, mobile, and PC, and release globally. They lockdown the whole market, and there just always seems to be a demand for them.
There’s no concrete method of telling how many players any gacha game has — as far as I’m aware, even Hoyoverse has never released precise player numbers — but for big titles like Genshin Impact, it’s estimated to be well over 50 million active monthly players.
Much of this comes from a simple «Ooh, that’s a new shiny thing,» but it’s also because gacha as a genre has come a long way in the past five years. Not only do the new games look fantastic (Neverness To Everness is absolutely gorgeous), they also come loaded with more sophisticated mechanics and gameplay.
I argue that they have to. Player loyalty is a difficult thing to come by in such a saturated market. New gacha games have to go above and beyond their predecessors if they want to corner any bit of the market. More niche ideas, more interesting mechanics, it’s all an ever-changing whirlwind in the battle for the top gacha game of the moment.
Do you dabble in multiple gachas at the same time, or do you stick loyally to your favourite?
