[minimaxir]

The funny thing about Mihoyo's games is that they are one of the most profitable developers, but they could definitely pull more levers to incentivise people to spend even more money. Most gacha games have some sort of pay-to-win PvP and/or leaderboards built in their games, but in Mihoyo's games, having a top-tier team just means you have to oppertunity to get slightly more premium currency.

[lilyball]

At some point, adding mechanics like that turns people off from the game. Those things are good for games that have limited shelf life and want to get people to dump money into it while the game is popular, but things like leaderboards actually get people to quit playing once they realize that they can't get ever get on it because too many other people are willing to pay more. miHoYo games are intended to get people playing for a long time rather than trying to milk a group of players for a month or two and then moving on.

[maxglute]

Waifu monetization model, more profitable to milk a lot of horny folks a little for a long time. I still can't get over Mihoyo built a tokamak reactor IRL.

[hooverd]

Please do not milk the horny folk. ;) Well, they invested in one, and they also invested in a SpaceX competitor, Orienspace, too. It was a little jarring seeing their logo alongside all the ~serious companies.

[FMecha]

Not just monetization, these types of games also pivot towards building parasocial relationships with in-game characters to you. This leads to people building zero tolerance for what can be perceived as other characters interacting to them - an issue that affected Girls Frontline 2.

International Genshin players, however, do seem to embrace "shipping" (pairing two in-universe characters in relationships) instead, but these also have their own internal controversies - look up "shipping wars".

[carbotaniuman]

Sadly they're just an investor in that company - misinformation travels quickly. The era of anime dystopian megacorps is not upon us yet thankfully.

[shados]

Honkai Impact 3rd does have pay2win ladder. It's pretty hardcore too, even as a whale it can be quite rough to get to the top. There's a LOT of top tier whales in that game and you need some pixel perfect timings to utilize it at the top level.

[jabroni_salad]

Where they really get you is the FOMO factor when a banner is about to expire and you have lost your 50/50. I wonder how much of their revenue comes from the final 24 hrs of that countdown.

[johnnyanmac]

Probably some, but I think it works more like the crowdfunding model. The first few days of the banner has the biggest spenders go hard, and then it cools down and ramps up slightly by the end. The former is going to include a lot of spenders going for 6 copies, so they are much less elastic in how to optimally spend on the banner.

[joseda-hg]

I'm confident they could be more aggresive with their monetization, less so on if it would be more beneficial long term

[jabbany]

PVP and leaderboards attract a different audience than normal gacha players which is why it tends to be rare-ish in gacha games. (Almost none of the popular ones focus on it).

Most of the time, the social aspect of gacha is to show off your "collection" rather than to show off your "skills", so adding PvP and leaderboards doesn't do much for most players. Instead, gacha games tend to have "social" features that do let you show off your "collection" in some way, like profile cards with character showcases, "supports" mechanisms that let friends and strangers borrow your characters, or sometimes just blatantly a score for your gallery completion %.

Also FWIW, Genshin actually has PvP, it's just that it's only present in the card battle mini-game. And my impression (could be inaccurate though) of that is most players are not particularly "into" that mode.