Kuro Games has successfully completed the synchronization of PGR servers

This is it, players! The current PGR version, “Through the Tide Home,” marks the conclusion of the global server synchronization. From here on out, the Chinese, the Japanese, and the global servers will receive the same content at the same time. I want to express my thoughts about this process and the effect it will have going forward.

Plenty of games in the gacha space have a delay between servers. Among the ones I play, there is Blue Archive with approximately 6 months of a delay, Girls Frontline 2 that started with a whole year of a delay, and Honkai Impact 3rd, which is lagging only a single version behind the Chinese server. This delay happens for a simple reason: launching a live service game globally is expensive. Many Asian companies opt for the local market first (which is already a huge market), and if the game does well or they need a larger player base, they try their luck globally. Obviously that creates a delay between servers, which has always been a double-edged sword.

There is a significant benefit when you're lagging behind. You get to see what characters will come out in the future, how good they will be, and what team compositions will have the best performance, and you can prepare in advance. It also means you can skip characters that won't be relevant and save money. The drawback is you have to wait. It's already difficult when a company announces an upcoming character you want at the beginning of the current update, so having to wait several months is a major pain. I'll gladly sacrifice the ability to know who's coming and how good they will be to get the latest characters as soon as they're released. That being said, I'm also not a player who cares much about the difficult content, so it doesn't really matter to me how good a character performs.

That's a player's perspective. I'm not a game developer, but I'm sure the delay bothers them as well. Firstly, there's the monetary issue. I've already mentioned that knowing what will come allows us to save money. Well, that's money that the company won't earn. In addition to that, the developers need to do extra work by maintaining two or more separate update schedules with the corresponding marketing. I assume that also results in additional expenses.

Kuro Games, to my knowledge, is the first company that has attempted and successfully carried out a full synchronization between all servers. In case you didn't know, PGR had three different update schedules with about half a year of delay between them. Therefore I would say this synchronization had to be done more so for the developers than the players, and I'm genuinely surprised how well it was done.

After the synchronization was announced, plenty of players, especially the high spenders, were concerned. They were worried about missing out on resources and not being able to get every character they wanted. I can't speak for the high spenders, but for low spenders this process was actually better than a regular release cycle. We got a crazy amount of free resources and were able to quickly upgrade five A-rank characters to SSS+ without spending a cent. I had so much extra serum that I was forced to build every character I owned, even the ones I didn't use, just so that the serum wouldn't go to waste.

The only downsides of this process have been a reduced character longevity and rushing through the story. Since I don't care much about character performance, their longevity doesn't bother me. After all, I still use Bambinata even though I have Qu. Rushing through the story has been a problem, however. I am a rather busy person, and in addition to that, I also play several live service games. I want to fully enjoy the story for each of them, so it becomes very overwhelming whenever a game combines the story of two or three updates into one. Luckily, I've managed to keep up quite well throughout this synchronization process. The only story I skipped is Land of Bliss, which is a side story for Vera, but I will get to it eventually. At least I kept up with all the main ones.

I think it's safe to say that the synchronization process has been a massive success, but how do we take things from here? I have no clue what character is coming next, and I've just spent a considerable amount of pulls on Bianca. For the first time since I've started playing PGR, I need to plan my resources carefully. Of course I've been doing that in other games, but it's kind of a new experience in PGR. I'm excited.

PGR might have been the first one, but I'm seeing other games trying to achieve the same thing. Girls Frontline 2 developers have announced their plans to catch up the global server with the Chinese one. Unlike Kuro Games, they didn't set a time frame, but we are currently having one of such accelerated versions. Nexon has expressed a similar idea in the past regarding Blue Archive, but so far there has been only one update that sped things up a little.

Overall, it's a nice trend. I think having all servers in sync benefits everyone, and Kuro Games has proved that it can be done very efficiently. If you're not playing PGR, this is the best time since launch to get into it.