Genshin Impact's protesting players aren't just "entitled gamers" | Opinion
The games business experiences more than its fair share of controversies, but there's been a clear front runner in the controversy stakes over the past decade or so, and that's free-to-play games.
Though they're now firmly part of the landscape, and quite a few of the most successful games of the past years have used F2P business models, there's still a vocal group of consumers who are rubbed in all the wrong ways by this model.
It doesn't help that many early F2P games were pretty much exactly as exploitative as critics claimed – and even as well-crafted F2P games with thoughtful, generous monetisation schemes have become much better exemplars of the model than the thinly veiled Skinner Boxes of the past, it's been hard to shake those slightly grubby associations in many people's minds.
Consequently, discussions about what's happening in the F2P space often end up being circular and unproductive; it's tricky to talk about the specifics of what's going right and wrong with these business models without getting bogged down in a tired debate over their more general merits.
Take for example the week's biggest controversy in the F2P market – a "revolt" by Chinese players of Genshin Impact, who felt slighted by a poor offering of in-game rewards for the game's Lunar New Year event and have responded by unfollowing its social media accounts en-masse, review bombing the game, and even taking out their displeasure on the social media accounts of companies like Pizza Hut and KFC which have formerly done marketing tie-ups with Genshin.
Much of the response to reporting of these player protests has fallen into two broad camps – mocking the players for being invested in a gacha game in the first place or berating them for "entitled gamer" behaviour. Neither of these responses is constructive or insightful, and what's happening here is actually a pretty interesting case, not least since it's a rare misjudgement by a company that's emerged as a real leader in this market.
To give a
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