P5X's '60 Free Pulls on Download' Marketing Backfires — Players Need 4+ Hours of Grinding, Pulls Are Mostly Standard Banner Trash, Limited Character Locked Behind Paywall

A mobile game plastered its launch ads with 'Easy 60 pulls on Day 1 — just download and claim!' Sounds great, right? Except players quickly discovered they'd need 4-6 hours of non-stop grinding to earn those pulls, and 50 out of 60 were standard banner tickets — only 10 could go toward the limited banner. The limited 5-star character Joker? Basically paywalled. Welcome to P5X (Persona 5: The Phantom X) launch day in 2024 gacha gaming.

It all started when an NGA forum user posted their experience on P5X's launch day. Following the official promise of 'easy 60 pulls,' they dove in — and after over 2 hours of gameplay (not counting the 10 pulls from mailbox), had only scraped together about 30 pulls. 'What is this, 60 pulls in 6 hours? Wow, so easy indeed...' they sarcastically remarked.

After roughly 4 hours of grinding — including the 10+15 pulls gifted at launch — the poster finally hit 60 pulls: 50 into the newbie banner and 10 into the limited banner. Their verdict? 'They promised pulls just for downloading. This is straight-up fraud.'

The comment section erupted. One player nailed the double deception in a single sentence: "'Easy' doesn't mean you get it on Day 1, and '60 pulls' doesn't mean 60 limited banner pulls." A veteran from the game's third closed beta added: 'You get plenty of standard tickets, but barely any premium currency or limited tickets. Getting Joker without spending money is basically impossible.'

Then came the plot twist from comment #16: apparently, the official promo page displayed a '260 pulls' number right below the '60 pulls' figure. Many players interpreted this as '60 free on login, 260 more through grinding.' In reality, the 60 itself required hours of grinding — and 260 was a distant fantasy. This visual number trick had players feeling straight-up scammed.

Other players shared their own horror stories. One described spending their morning sneaking in gameplay at work: 'After watching nearly 2 hours of cutscenes, I'd only scraped together 30-40 pulls — all standard banner garbage. Completely useless.' Another logged in from 10 AM to 1 PM and ended up with just 36 standard tickets and 1,600 crystals (all dumped into the limited banner with nothing to show). The community summed it up with brutal one-liners: 'Easy? You gotta work an 8-hour shift first!' and 'The slave master gives you 60 pulls — problem?'

Commenter #18 tried to play devil's advocate: 'This kind of misleading marketing isn't new — why do people still think the game would just mail you 60 pulls on login? And if it really did, you'd have to ask: is the game so bad that it needs to bribe players with 60 pulls just to keep them around?' Ironically, that second half hits even harder than the criticism — if 60 free pulls are a necessity rather than a bonus, what does that say about the game itself?