When to say goodbye to a game?

Some games will last forever, if you let them. You expect that in an MMO, but with mobile gacha games — when do you just decide it’s time to move on?

I made the difficult decision last night to stop playing Flight Rising. It’s a browser game where you raise and breed dragons. After looking into a similar game that used crypto, I looked around for non-exploitative alternatives, found this game and fell in love with it. The community is awesome, there’s little need to pay money for their currency when they give so much of it away for free; I’ve never come close to running out. But the game made, for me, a fatal mistake; they added a game mode where you have to check in throughout the day.

It’s called Arlo’s Ancient Artifacts, and requires you to play that mini-game about ten times a day. That was too much time, and most days I didn’t play enough to clear the thing. As it stands now, I am way behind. As my lair grew, caring for the dragons became tedious. The necessary Coliseum battles became a grind. In short, the game started taking up too much of my time.

My perfect gacha game is one that I can complete for the day in ten minutes or so. Flight Rising was a game I played for awhile before work, and then for a half hour or more after work — and if I wanted to participate in the forum games (that are fun), much more time.

Probably the worst example of this is Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms, a game that Steam says I’m about 3,200 hours into. And when loading it up to take screen shots for this post, I started playing it again (and in fact is playing right now). Idle Champions is an idle clicker game, and these are particularly insidious as you can just always have them running in the background, and just check in every so often to level up the critters and rearrange the formation.

Upshot was I would have this running on my iPad 24/7; sometimes I’d do it on my PC if I wanted to play with formations. When I would travel, I’d load it up on my laptop. This game was just always running. (Coming clean: it is running in the background on my computer right now). This is an addictive game.

I stayed so long, again, because of the stellar community. The CMs were active and friendly on Reddit, and there was a lot of discussions about the champions and how best to use them. This often tied in to the streamers would who be running games in this area, and a lot of personalities from the streaming community would show up, either as champions or quest givers.

I spent a lot of money on this game, but I feel I got decent value for it. Spending money makes it harder to leave a game, so following Idle Champions, I resolved not to spend money on gacha games ever again. I have broken that promise once or twice since then, but am pretty resolved not to toss my money away like that again.

I spent two years and hundreds of dollars on FF Brave Exvius. I had a lot of fun with it, too. The community was amazing — the very best. The devs produced a lot of content, and the producer was very involved with the community. It had a great story, the boss fights were challenging, and it dived deep into not only the history of Final Fantasy, but associated games like the Dragon Quest and Legend of Mana series.

I didn’t mind the money spent or the game itself. It came down to, again, time. It took a couple hours each day to fully spend the NRG and to do the dailies, and at some point it stopped earning that time. This is a game I’ve tried to come back to, but as it continually introduces new levels of heroes and leans into the gacha mechanic, it would literally cost too much money to start again.

Since FFBE, I’ve been very choosy about which mobile games I put on the phone, and I find I hardly play them even when I do. Gumslinger was the only one of the many Wild West-themed games I’d installed for a post that still stays on my phone. It has all the standard gacha mechanics — pay to win is definitely in play. The main game mechanic is a sort of “battle royale” where you compete against a hundred other players to see which one, in a series of ladder duels, can come out victorious.

The duels are fun and a little weird. You don’t actually compete in real time with other players; you are the only live player in each game. But your opponents seem, at least, to be drawn from the characters from other players.

I played this game heavily for a time, but then, because there was no community, I stopped playing, and nobody even knew I’d ever played at all — until now.

My partner was playing a Yu-Gi-Oh-like RPG based around this game, and he seemed to be having a lot of fun. All the PCs and NPCs in the game based their entire lives around playing the mobile Shadowverse game. I thought it might be fun to try the game that they were all playing in the series. The gacha comes in pretty early, as you’d expect with a collectible card game. You’re urged to buy packs and packs of cards, hoping for one that will turn your deck into a powerhouse.

I wanted to like this game — and there is an RPG plot to take you through it, though it is not the same plot as in the RPG game (or, apparently, the anime based on it).

Building decks for CCGs takes a lot of knowledge and time. I didn’t want to learn that knowledge or spend that time, so I didn’t stay long.

I’d just finished Dragon Quest XI, and I love tactics games, so this would look like an easy match. And it was! I tore through Dragon Quest Tact and finished the plot until there was nothing left to do, and then I quit it.

This is the perfect mobile game for me 🙂 There were the standard gacha mechanics. I’m not sure if I spent any money on this game, but if I did, it wasn’t much.

My son was playing this game along with me for awhile, but then he stopped. Knowing that this game had a finish, though, drove me on. If I’d thought it would just be a forever grind, I likely wouldn’t have played as much as I did.

There’s other games of this sort I could talk about (Pokemon Go, for instance).

Whether I keep playing a mobile game really depends on how much time it takes from my day. If I can play a little at a time, ten or fifteen minutes, then I’ll do it. If I can get all the fun without paying any money, even better — but I will pay money if I am having fun. If I start to feel a game is getting predatory, I will quit it immediately. My time is precious, but so is my money.

I have plenty of games to play that are content with just letting me buy it once. A game with a strong community, though, can get me to stick around a little longer, but at a certain point, it will either take too much time or be too expensive to continue, and then I’m gone.