Following Destiny: Rising‘s release, reviews are now in and things are looking up for this NetEase project and its players. This is good news for Destiny 2 fans, as even though Bungie won’t directly profit from the success of the mobile game, it does allow for a bit of experimenting on what might or might not work in the main game. However, there is a downside to this otherwise exciting development for Destiny fans: nothing gold can stay, especially with new gacha games.
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Destiny: Rising’s Opening Weeks Have Seen Great Success
Within the first week of its launch, Destiny: Rising has seen over one million downloads and almost double that in player spending, according to some estimates, which is a good look for a game some Destiny players were dreading. Not only are its numbers up, it’s also getting excellent reviews pretty much across the board, lining up with its mobile reviews across the Apple and Google Play stores with 4.9 and 4.7 stars, respectively.
For those who haven’t read any reviews or checked it out yet, Destiny: Rising is a pretty phenomenal entry into the Destiny franchise despite being a mobile game. It runs smoothly and conveys almost as much Destiny flair as the PC and console games themselves do. Not only that, but the quests are enjoyable and engaging outside of some rough writing and voice acting, lending themselves to a satisfying gameplay experience. Unfortunately, NetEase doesn’t have the best history of supporting its games, and this has some players worried.
NetEase Has a Rough Track Record With Previous Games
NetEase is a company that, historically, has picked up and published a few IPs over the years, supporting smaller studios through development and then publishing their games, but then dropping that support as soon as the new-game money boom has died down. They’ve published Marvel Super War, Marvel Duel, Harry Potter: Magic Awakened, and spinoffs of other high-profile IPs that were mildly successful at their launch, but fell off quickly enough to be considered relative failures in the long-term.
One particularly egregious example of this is the mobile port of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. It was ported to iPhone and Android in 2020 and received updates for a while, but quickly stopped being supported by the studio after its release. Despite the fact that the game didn’t even boot up, it could still be purchased for $10 until sometime in 2023, when it was taken down. Ritual of the Night isn’t the only game NetEase has released and then pumped for cash while it was still new, and with Destiny: Rising being a gacha game, it’s hard to imagine they won’t try the same thing here.
Keep Playing Destiny: Rising, Just Remember It’s a Gacha
Despite being a gacha game and made primarily for mobile, Destiny: Rising is great for free. It provides a really enjoyable Destiny experience for those who don’t own a PC or don’t want to invest too much time into the main game. And while its gacha and monetization system isn’t too predatory now, that’s likely to change.
Many gacha games do a sort of rug pull a few months to a year after launch. Slowly, the pull rates will become more sparse, more characters will be released, the materials needed to engage in the activities will increase, and the game will generally become more demanding. This encourages players to spend a couple of bucks at a time, preying on their previous investment to convince them that the money is worth it. While for some, it definitely is, this tactic puts a lot of pressure on free-to-play players to open their wallets.
In most cases, this bubble bursts eventually. NetEase will make the money they’re looking for and keep demanding more from players. Infinity Nikki made the same mistake, and players retaliated by boycotting the game until they got official apologies from the developers. Unfortunately, NetEase historically isn’t the type to apologize. This doesn’t mean players should uninstall Destiny: Rising, or that it’s a bad game, but rather that players should be aware of what they might be able to expect in the future. Gacha games are a pretty imperfect genre, but this is pretty par for the course for most of them. Keep an eye out for pulls getting sparser and top-ups getting more expensive, because that might be the time that free-to-play gets more difficult.
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