The relationship between gacha game developers and their players is often a strenuous one. That couldn’t be more evident with how Chinese Infinity Nikki players have been reacting to its most recent update, including taking to the forums of the new Steam launch en masse to warn people away from playing.
Version 1.5 launched this week and it’s a pretty big one. There’s a new dye system, extra colour evolutions for a handful of outfits, and the introduction of the Star Sea ensemble, an iconic fit in the Nikki series. Aside from the multitude of bugs it seems to have introduced—if you can even get into the game to experience them right now—there’s been a real subtle monetisation push on Infold’s side.
Both of the new Infinity Nikki banners, for example, contain two 5-star outfits that sport a record 11 pieces to collect. That’s a maximum of 220 pulls, or 26,400 diamonds just to complete one outfit. For context, all other 5-star outfits have either been nine or 10 pieces each, taking the cost down to 180 pulls and 200 pulls respectively.
It’s an extremely small change, but one that’s already ringing alarm bells for future outfits. As it stands, Infinity Nikki’s banner cadence is already pretty unfriendly to low spenders or free-to-play folk—I fall into the low spender category and have had to skip around half of the banners released since December—and outfits with extra items only make it more difficult for budget-friendly players.
Couple that with the fact that Infold has extended the duration of Mira Crown—the biggest and easiest source of free currency—from two weeks to three weeks, and it’s causing more than a few players to feel the financial squeeze.
Chinese players in particular seem deeply unhappy with the changes, and haven’t been shy about vocalising their thoughts and even reaching out across the pond to potential stylists in the west in an attempt to deter them.
The forums for the new Steam release has been the main vessel for this, with an absurd number of both Chinese language and English translated posts venting frustrations. One forum post called Infinity Nikki “a fraudulent product that betrays its core promise,” citing “pity system sabotage” and “progres-resetting crashes” as issues.
Another titled “Don’t play! Don’t play! Don’t play!” claimed Infold was “a game company that only stares at the player’s wallet” and called some of the Version 1.5 changes “sneaky”. Another post simply calls for a maximum of 180 pulls to obtain a full outfit.
I could go on forever, as there’s around a dozen pages right now, the majority filled with these posts. As someone who’s been playing both gacha games and the Nikki series for a hot sec, seeing Chinese players reach out to English-speaking communities to vent frustrations and band together is an incredibly rare occurrence. Most of this noise usually tends to happen over on Chinese social media like Billibilli.
Whether it’s because Steam’s a pretty easy vessel to connect the two communities, or if it’s because the situation is truly so dire that folk are crossing oceans and language barriers to protest, I don’t know. Maybe a bit of both. It’s still in the early hours of the new update so no word from Infold yet. It’s done a good amount of backpedaling on unfavorable additions in the past, though, so I expect to see at least some sort of acknowledgement in the coming days.
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