Follow The Money

 

After I finished playing Wuthering Waves this afternoon I found myself thinking about a couple of things I remembered Naithin and Nimgimli saying about the game. 

In a comment on the post about how good the story is, Nimgimli, astutely observing that it never seems like I spend any money on Wuthering Waves and yet still seem to get an enormous amount of entertainment out of it, wondered "where is the "gacha" incentive in all this?"

Naithin, meanwhile, mentioned on his blog that he's "done with the main story but recently increased my ‘Union Level’ (aka, account level) high enough that I can max out my characters and weapons to 90."

I am not quite done with the story in Riniscita. I'm nearer the end than the beginning, but my "Union Level" is just 35. As for the gacha part of the game, far from spending money on a chance of getting new Resonators or better weapons, I have barely even touched the free pulls they hand out.

By almost any standard, I am bad at Wuthering Waves. I make minimal efforts to upgrade my team and I have only the most basic understanding of what any of their attacks or abilities do. As for the combos you're supposed to build from interactions between the abilities of different Resonators, I don't even have the basics.

I did figure out how to heal my team, finally. You have to have a healer! Who knew?! I didn't even have one in the team until I got to the Black Shores. No wonder I kept dying.

One thing I do know how to do is knock opponents into the air and keep them there like juggling balls. That's basically a stun-lock so it helps me take less damage, even if it is a drag on DPS.

I've also worked out out that if I swap team members in and out of combat all the time it's better than sticking with just one but anything more subtle than that is beyond me. I don't really have a clue. And yet, even though my level is less than half of Naithin's and my skill probably less than half that again, it seems the game is happy to let me see the same content without either learning to play or spending money.

I'm all too aware that could stop at any moment, particularly when I run up against the inevitable "bosses". My minimal research tells me there are four in the Riniscita storyline and so far I've only had to deal with the first: Lorelei. That went very well. 

There are a lot of guides to the fight online but I didn't read any of them until after I beat her on my first attempt. I wanted to see if I'd missed anything and it seems I did.

Apparently, all the bosses in the new update have "a lot more going on than anything from the 1.0 content." You could have fooled me. I just button-mashed as usual and it went better than many of the bosses I recall having considerably more trouble with, much earlier in the game. 

It wasn't a complete cakewalk. One of my team died early on but it wasn't the healer and it didn't seem to make all that much difference, mostly because it was Sanhua, who I only added to the squad because a guide I read suggested she would synergize well with Rover, the default player-character. 

She didn't, particularly, mostly because I didn't really know what to do with her. Also, I think she was supposed to go well with the Spectro version of Rover, which I was playing at the time, but now I've swapped to o the Havoc version so I ought to rethink the whole thing. 

I've never gotten on with her. She's always the first to die, even though she's supposed to be a tank. I'll be happy to see the back of her. I'll keep her for now but I'm going to drop her for someone else the moment I run into a boss I can't beat.

The fight itself wasn't much fun but then none of the boss fights ever have been in any gacha game I've played. They're clearly designed for people who enjoy a lot more complicated dancing and dodging about than I do. I like to stand in one place and thump things or, failing that, keep my distance and shoot stuff. All that fancy footwork gives me cramp.

The fact that I'm somehow still able to progress comfortably through the storyline despite being both temperamentally unsuited to the mechanics and fundamentally unwilling to do anything much to change that suggests, as Nimgimli says, " the content [in other gacha games] gets harder and you need better characters or better gear to tone down the difficulty, and both of those you often get via the gacha mechanics, but that doesn't seem to be the case here."

As the difference in level between myself and Naithin as we move (At very different paces, it has to be said.) through the same content attests, it's not a case of leveling up to make things easier on yourself, either. If it was, that would be a way for the game to make money, since raising just about any stat or attribute requires a ton of materials, all of which you can farm but might well prefer to buy for cash. Nearly all of them are for sale in the store. 

I guess a lot of people must be doing just that because it seems Wuthering Waves is highly profitable. If you google "how commercially successful is Wuthering Waves?", you'll get a slew of articles about the huge amount of money the game is making. There's a website that keeps track of such things (Or tries to - there's some guesstimating.) and according to their figures, WW made $28m in January.

That was a huge bump up on the back of the update because December brought in just $7.75m, down from November's $18.25m. Those are just the mobile numbers, though. Who knows how much the desktop client adds?

And really, even at just under $8m a month, its a lot of money, isn't it? I do have to wonder, like Nimgimli, where it's all coming from. Apart from those mats I mentioned, they barely seem to sell anything in the store. 

It's only in 2025 that you've been able to buy cosmetic outfits and so far there are only two of them, although I suspect here may be more soon. While I was playing, I spotted yet another survey in the in-game mail. The developers send out a lot of surveys and they pay in-game currency for filling them out. I always fill them in but they don't need to bribe me. I love completing surveys.

This one began with some general questions on the Riniscita update then moved to specifics about those two outfits. There were a lot of quite questions and I'd have liked to have answered them all but I had to stick with Unable To Comment for the lot. I haven't even looked at the get-ups in the shop, let alone bought them to see how they look an actual character. 

I would, though, if I could wear them on characters of my choosing. Annoyingly, that's not generally how gacha games work. The characters are all individuals, separate from "your" character, who you might very well not even include in your team, and you can't usually dress them up in each others' clothes.

You could in Noah's Heart. That was the main reason I spent so long with the game. It's the only gacha game I've played where you could have your character wear clothes normally worn by other members of your team. Even better, they came as Outfits but also as separates you could mix and match. And you could craft some of them in game, without having to buy them in the store. And Noah's Heart had housing! How did it fail?

Once again, I used the feedback section at the end to suggest they consider adding clothes, pets and housing. At this point, I wouldn't even mind if it was only in the store. I really like Wuthering Waves and I'd be willing to pay cash for some added cosmetic value - if only they'd sell me something I wanted.

Given the nature of the survey, maybe they're thinking about it. I hope so. I would certainly prefer a shop full of frocks to one full of things I can already get as drops in the game and don't much want when I do. 

And I certainly hope they don't get any bright ideas about turning the screw on difficulty. I'm enjoying this easy-mode playstyle and I'd like to keep it going as long as possible. I'd far rather they made money by playing on our vanity rather than our frustration.

For now, though, I'm keeping my fingers crossed they 're making enough money out of whoever it is who's paying however much it is for whatever they're buying already.