Love them or hate them, gacha games are huge right now, and there’s no sign that’s going to change on a large scale any time soon. By their nature, they exclude players without a lot of disposable income and can form the same addictive attachments as other forms of gambling. But the potential to make a boatload of money means the incentives for developers to keep making them are huge. Despite that, a few developers have been bucking the trend toward aggressive monetization lately and hoping to find success without fleecing their fans.
Back in 2022, in the wake of Genshin Impact’s massive success, developer Hotta Studio released Tower of Fantasy. One of many games to take inspiration from Genshin Impact’s character designs and open world, Tower of Fantasy set itself apart by featuring more elements of massively multiplayer online RPGs, letting players interact with one another a bit more than in a typical gacha game. Now, it’s taking the surprising step of seeing how well its gacha MMORPG could work if it just dumped the gacha part entirely.
