Revenue Cratered in Just 3 Months? A Full Breakdown of How Fog Sequence Shot Itself in the Foot

A gacha game barely three months old, with revenue so low you'd wonder if it can even cover payroll — that's the current state of Fog Sequence (雾境序列). A user posted on the gaming gossip board asking for help: the art quality is actually decent among new releases, the steampunk setting is rare, so how did things go so wrong? Veteran players in the comments delivered a post-mortem, and the answer was unanimous: the operations and design teams stepped on every single landmine they could find.

[Balance Apocalypse: One Character Planted the Seeds of Disaster from Day One]

According to multiple players, Fog Sequence's very first character banner included an absurdly overpowered unit — the 'Dragon Girl' (a shield-tanking dragon character) who could solo the weekly boss by herself. While other players were still running traditional tank-healer-DPS comps for two-minute clears, Dragon Girl users were stacking crit buffs and obliterating the boss in 4 seconds. As one commenter put it: 'The character balance is trashed, and the skill numbers were clearly filled in by a script.' This kind of numbers going haywire in the very first version meant every subsequent character looked like a caveman by comparison, killing any motivation to pull.

[Resource Hell: Worse Than Arknights at Launch]

If the broken balance was the fatal wound, the suffocating resource bottleneck was the slow-acting poison. The game uses a 4-deploy + 2-reserve team setup, similar to Arknights' progression system, but with even tighter resources — promoting a single character to the second tier takes two to three weeks. Commenters warned: 'You'd better pray the 4 characters you invest in aren't the wrong ones, or you'll be stuck for ages.' Even more maddening: there's no sweep function. Clearing dailies means watching replays, requiring roughly 3 logins per day to burn through stamina and resource production. Each battle takes 1.5 to 2 minutes. As the 18th reply summarized: 'It's not fun enough to make you want to play, but the dailies are exhausting — so you just gradually quit.'

[First Event Disaster: Shop So Stingy It Took a Riot to Get a Fix]

The first event was a full-blown catastrophe. Dual banners with characters that needed duplicates to unlock their full abilities (constellation system), and the event shop rewards were described as 'makes you want to vomit with how stingy it is.' After players erupted in outrage, the dev team went silent for over a day before finally responding with compensation (EXP cards and gold). As one commenter raged: 'Their heads are completely unclear and their knees are stiff... It's a shame — a rare gacha with actually good writing, dragged down by the rest of the team.'

[PvP Leaderboards + Cumulative Spending Walls: A Small Studio Copying Every Predatory Trick]

Fog Sequence wasn't content with PvE — it added monthly PvP speed-run leaderboards (called 'Total Assault'), requiring 3 daily attempts for a full month, with the top reward tier reserved for just 1% of players and massive reward gaps between tiers. The shop also featured a character locked behind 1,500 yuan cumulative spending with no other way to obtain her. As the 19th reply nailed it: 'No Arknights luck, but copied Arknights' progression. No miHoYo's fortune, but copied miHoYo's constellation system. And it's completely broke.' A tiny indie studio grafted every big-studio monetization hook imaginable — and ended up with none of the big-studio appeal.

[The Verdict: It Just Isn't Fun]

Despite the art and writing earning praise, and the steampunk setting being seen as a genuine highlight, nearly every commenter's conclusion converged on the same word — 'not fun.' One player hit the nail on the head: 'I pulled a character, but can I even afford to build her? No sustained sense of progress, no satisfaction from clearing hard content — just the dread of logging in and seeing those 3/3 Total Assault tickets.' Another offered a deeper industry take: 'A small studio going for the general audience in today's market is a death sentence. There are too many games to choose from now — if it doesn't grab you at first glance, people just leave.' Fog Sequence spent 3 months teaching every small developer a lesson: if your quality isn't rock-solid and your operations don't know what they're doing, players really won't give you a second chance.