Persona 5 Mobile Retracts '60 Free Pulls on Day 1' Promotional Promise — Replaces It With Just 10 Pulls, Players Roast: 'Rather Admit Their Marketing Is a Clown Show Than Give 45 More Pulls'

Have you ever seen a gacha game discover their promo promised too many free pulls — and their solution was to delete the promo? P5X (Persona 5: The Phantom X) just did exactly that.

Here's what happened: On launch day, P5X's official promotional materials explicitly stated players could earn 60 gacha pulls on Day 1. However, once players actually downloaded the game, they discovered the grind required to earn those pulls was nowhere near as easy as advertised. Faced with a wave of complaints, the dev team's 'fix' wasn't to send out the missing pulls — they retracted the promotional material entirely and tossed players a single 10-pull as compensation.

The comment section went nuclear. One top-voted reply broke down two approaches to PR crisis management: 'A normal dev just gives out the 60 pulls, everyone's happy, launch hype stays strong. A *perfect* dev goes: what 60 pulls? Oh, the promo said that? Let us just quietly edit that out.' The player added: 'Seriously, with rates this bad, what would 60 extra pulls even do? I actually hope they double down — if they cave later after all this backlash, they'll just look even more pathetic.'

Another commenter nailed the absurdity: 'They'd rather retract the promo and admit their marketing is a clown show than just give players 45 more pulls?' This perfectly captures the bizarro-world logic at play — when forced to choose between saving face and honoring their word, the devs found a secret third option: just unsay it.

In reality, the gacha problems go way beyond a broken 60-pull promise. One player reported that after 4 hours of story content, they burned through every free pull and got zero 5-stars. Another who went deep gave a full rundown of the miHoYo-style monetization package: 180 stamina cap, 80-pull pity with 50/50, character constellation dupes, weapon banners with epitomized path... their verdict? 'Gacha devs, please stop copying miHoYo's gacha model if you don't have the gameplay to back it up. Stop force-feeding players that recycled slop.'

Players also called out suspiciously glowing reviews on Weibo: 'Perfect World (the publisher) is notorious for astroturfing. During their Swords of Legends X beta disaster, even the Tieba mods couldn't hold back from roasting them — then overnight, suspicious accounts started white-knighting hard. Classic shill army move.' The implication being that P5X's launch hype may be heavily astroturfed too.

One player quipped: 'The pigs are already lured into the pen and slaughtered — might as well keep the sign up a bit longer to drag in a few more.' Another bluntly reviewed: 'Spent two and a half hours this afternoon evaluating it. Verdict: it's pure garbage.'

The thread's final comment — reply #19 — put the perfect cap on this circus: 'Their solution for the misleading promotional language? Retract the promo. What a PR genius.' When a game company would rather torch their own credibility than hand out a few virtual cards, you know exactly where their bottom line is.