Aether Gazer Anniversary Flop: $27 'Gacha Season Pass' Forces One Pull Per Day for 90 Days — Miss It and It Vanishes, Negative Reviews Purged from Forums

198 RMB ($27), 90 days, one pull per day, expires if you skip — Aether Gazer just redefined what an anniversary 'welfare gift' looks like, and players are NOT having it.

Aether Gazer (nicknamed 'Big Eye' by the community) just launched its anniversary celebration, and the headline feature is a 198 RMB 'gacha season pass.' The deal: one pull per day for 90 days, totaling 90 pulls. But here is the kicker — if you do not log in and use your daily pull before midnight, it vanishes. No stockpiling, no exceptions. So what you are really buying is not gacha currency — it is a 90-day mandatory check-in alarm that costs real money.

The original poster called it out: as far as they know, Aether Gazer is the first gacha game to pull something like this. Veteran players in the comments backed this up — games like FGO and Princess Connect (PCR) have daily single-pull mechanics too, but those are built-in free features, never packaged as a standalone paid product. One commenter summed it up: 'I have seen 7-day passes. 90 days? That is a first.'

What makes it worse is that Aether Gazer uses a pity system similar to miHoYo games. One player nailed the real danger: 'A forced daily pull on a pity-based banner is a trap — one wrong pull and you have wasted your hard pity.' If you are saving your guaranteed pity for a specific character, being forced to pull daily on whatever banner is running is a fast track to burning your pity on something you do not want. This is not welfare — it is a trap.

The community response on Baidu Tieba (China's equivalent of Reddit) has been brutal. The top-voted comment read: 'The anniversary might as well have "final cash grab" written on it in bold letters. They cannot even delete the negative posts fast enough.' Another player added: 'The card is somewhat acceptable, but the skins? That is just straight-up begging for money.' The devs' aggressive censorship — mass-deleting critical posts on Tieba — has only poured fuel on the fire, a classic Streisand Effect in action.

To make matters worse, leaks are circulating that new game mode enemies have seen a 5× power spike. Players are not mincing words: 'The devs' favorite move when they have no new ideas is to raise the character progression ceiling' and 'now your money goes into fighting inflated mobs, not getting stronger.' When a paid 'welfare' package drops alongside massive power creep, the 'cash grab before shutdown' narrative practically writes itself.

Some comments cut straight to the core hypocrisy: 'Why are people calling paid content "welfare"?' and 'How much did the publisher (Yongshi) pay for people to recommend this game again?' One ex-player who left early offered a survivor's perspective: 'Once a predatory gacha, always a predatory gacha. Glad I bailed early — spent a few thousand at launch, now I am just here eating popcorn watching the drama.' (Note: 'Myanmar-tier' (缅北) is Chinese gacha community slang for extremely predatory, scam-like game monetization, derived from online scam compounds.)

Industry veterans pointed to a precedent: another gacha title once offered a similar 'permanent monthly card' that turned out to be nothing but a desperate last-ditch cash grab before decline. The parallels with Aether Gazer's current move are hard to ignore.

For 198 RMB, you do not get welfare — you get a 90-day ball and chain. An anniversary should be about celebrating with your playerbase, not engineering one final squeeze. When the dominant community discussion around your anniversary is not about exciting new content but about 'shutdown speculation' and 'forum censorship,' something has gone seriously wrong with your game's direction.