Gacha Games are Losing Players and We Think It Will Get Worse – Here’s Why

Gacha games are making more money than ever on paper, but something is clearly broken under the surface. Player counts are actually dropping, content creators are reporting their worst viewership numbers in years, and new launches are losing momentum within days if not weeks. The numbers look fine from the outside, but they're hiding a much uglier truth about where the gacha genre is actually heading. Here's why gacha games are losing players fast and why we think it will only get worse.

Gacha Games' Numbers are Hard to Ignore

Let's start with Wuthering Waves. It peaked at 2.2 million monthly players on Google Play in June 2025. However, by March 2026, that dropped to 1.1 million. This is a 50% drop in under nine months. That's literally players walking out the door.

Arknights: Endfield tells a similar story. Its revenue dropped from $26 million in February 2026 to $22 million in March. That's a 15% decline in just its second month. Global revenue fell 26.7% month-over-month, with Vietnam specifically crashing 37.5%.

Zenless Zone Zero hit historic lows in both search interest and revenue after its Angels of Delusion content push, despite being one of the biggest names in the genre. Even Genshin Impact, the most stable gacha game for viewership historically, saw real drops during filler patches.

Then there's Neverness to Everness, which launched globally on April 29, 2026, after months of hype as a potential Genshin Impact competitor. It debuted at 40th place on Chinese Gacha Games revenue charts before climbing to 28th by the end of launch day. Those numbers were actually bad enough to trigger a 6% drop in the stock prices of the developer Perfect World Games on day one. Well, investors won't be happy. The question you, the players, should be asking is whether investor expectations are what's forcing developers to add these daunting daily tasks?

Players praised the game's optimization but immediately called it out for feeling like a second job, which is exactly the problem the entire genre is struggling with right now.

Why Players Keep Burning Out in These Gacha Games

Here is the core problem: a gameplay loop that feels more like a chore than a choice. Every major gacha game uses the same template. An amnesiac protagonist wakes up in a city full of supernatural weirdness. Then, you need to collect characters through gacha pulls, grind daily tasks for premium currency, and log in repeatedly for limited-time events.

Playing one game means committing 30–45 minutes of daily tasks just to stay on top of things. Playing two means 2–3 hours a day. Three games? You're basically working a part-time job for fictional characters.

Sunk Cost Fallacy

What's that? It is a cognitive bias where individuals continue a behavior, project, or investment, even when it is detrimental, solely because of resources already sunk into it (time, money, effort). This is why players are sticking to the genre.

Neverness to Everness is the latest example of this. It's not that the game is bad. It actually looked very good and ran well, but players immediately flagged the daily obligation loop as exhausting. Same as Arknights: Endfield. It launched with smooth performance and decent gameplay, but players didn’t like it much because it didn’t bring anything new beyond what Genshin Impact already did in 2020.

And it's not just the gameplay loop that feels copy-pasted. The characters themselves are starting to blur. There's this certain type of gacha character design that has become so overused it's almost a genre cliche at this point. The silver-haired charming guy, the cheerful girl with a giant weapon, we've seen them all before, just with different names and a slightly different color palette.

When your first impression of a brand-new game is that it already feels like homework, and the characters feel like people you've already met in three other games, something has gone seriously wrong with how the genre is designed.

Developers are Making Things Worse

What makes this worse is that developers seem to know about these problems and choose not to fix them. Arknights: Endfield ran five player surveys before its 1.1 update. Players gave detailed feedback. Almost none of it was implemented. One of the events in that same update had players literally cleaning filth off objects as its core gameplay loop.

Compare that to Wuthering Waves, which launched rough but used its 1.1 update to implement great quality-of-life improvements. That approach stabilized its player base. Endfield's approach tanked trust. Neverness to Everness is too new to judge on follow-through yet, but the launch day reaction already shows the same warning signs the community has seen before.

Our Take: What Needs to Change

Right now, it feels like the gacha industry is heading toward a wall, and most developers aren’t even paying attention. The cost of launching a competitive game keeps rising, but players are less willing than ever to commit to something new, which is a bad combination.

It means only the biggest studios can survive, which kills innovation and makes everything feel even more the same than it already does. The Wuthering Waves vs Arknights: Endfield comparison says it all. Wuthering Waves launched with problems, listened to players, and fixed things. Endfield ran five surveys, ignored almost everything, and watched its revenue drop. One builds trust. The other burns it.

And not to forget that there is also a growing problem with rules that the industry keeps ignoring. Governments in places like Europe, South Korea, China, and North America are starting to look at gacha systems as a kind of gambling.

Some countries, like Belgium and the Netherlands, have already banned certain types of gacha. China makes game companies show the odds of getting items and limits how much players can spend. If game studios don’t fix this on their own, stricter rules will be forced on them later.

The fix is actually pretty simple, but it means game companies would make less money at first, which is why we think most won’t do it on their own. They need to make daily logins less important. Let players keep event rewards instead of losing them forever. Stop systems that punish players for taking a break. Ultimately, they should treat players’ time with respect instead of trying to squeeze more out of it.

The gacha industry isn't dying in terms of revenue. It's dying in terms of trust and player enthusiasm. That's a much harder thing to rebuild than a player count.