Aniimo gacha: what the game actually asks you to pay for

Aniimo gacha: what Pawprint has and hasn’t said

Aniimo launches on 16 September as a free-to-play creature collector, and the question underneath every pre-registration is the same one: is Aniimo gacha, and what does it cost once you are inside? Five days out, Pawprint Studio has answered half of that question once, in an interview, and has never published a word about the shop. If you are deciding whether to install it on the 16th, that gap is the thing worth understanding.

What there is instead is a set of storefront disclosures, a season pass with an unusual name, two pre-order packs, and a dev letter that half the internet has read backwards.

The half that was answered came from executive producer Jovi Zhang at Summer Game Fest in June: Aniimo will not lock creatures behind pulls, and monetization would lean on cosmetics — outfits and small visual items for players and Aniimo alike. Zhang put it on the record in English, laughing but serious, in an MMORPG.com interview published on 26 June: “[Aniimo] is definitely not a gacha game. We are sure about that.” On what is sold, he was narrower: “our monetization will mainly focus on people or Aniimo outfits—like the costume or their little items to make them feel different or prettier.” That is the closest thing to a position the studio has taken. It was said to press rather than published by Pawprint, and it was said three months before launch — so it is a statement of intent, not a shop listing. We covered it at the time in our beta roundup.

The other half has never been answered. The studio has published nine news posts since March, and none of them describes the shop, the currency model, or a pull mechanic. No official post uses the word gacha. The closest Pawprint has come is the 3 September dev letter describing what it took out — an encounter that stacked “the entry cost and repeated throws on top of pure luck.” When you see a headline that settles the question in either direction, it is reading tea leaves from a store page, and so is everyone else.

What the studio has described is the creature collecting loop, and it is worth reading closely because it is the part people mistake for gacha. Aniimo are caught with Aniipods — thrown items, with traps and timing involved. The Epic listing puts it plainly: “Catch Aniimo using Aniipods, set traps and time your catch perfectly.” That is a skill mechanic in the open world, not a paid draw. Whether Aniipods themselves ever sit behind a paywall is a separate question, and it is one nobody has answered.

The community has been reading the same tea leaves, and the press has been less careful. IGN’s beta preview ran under the headline “All the Fun of Creature-Catching With All the Transactions of Gacha.” PC Gamer called it a Pokemon-like gacha game in its own title. Both were written from hands-on time in the closed beta, which makes them worth something — but a preview impression is not a monetization disclosure, and neither outlet published the shop.

What the dev letter actually removed

On 3 September the dev team published a letter that got compressed into a headline reading “We’re removing gacha.” The letter is real and the change in it is real. The headline still overshoots what it says, and the gap matters if you are deciding whether to install this on 16 September.

The letter opens on Irisalis, the legendary the betas were built around, and the team describes the old version in unusually plain terms: “throwing ball after ball got dull fast, and stacking the entry cost and repeated throws on top of pure luck turned a legendary encounter into a draining chore.” Entry cost, repeated throws, pure luck — that is the shape people meant when they called Aniimo a gacha, described by the studio itself, in the past tense.

What replaces it: “No more repeating the challenge in the hope of a successful catch. Collect legendary tokens through world exploration and story progress, craft your own personal Legendary Aniipod.” You reach Irisalis once, win the fight, and throw the pod you built. The letter adds that this design will be the template for every legendary encounter that follows, so it is a direction, not a one-off.

So why is “removing gacha” still the wrong words for it? Because a gacha is a shop mechanic and this is a design document. It takes a paid random draw out of one part of the game. It does not say what the shop sells, what a legendary costs if you would rather not walk, or whether randomness comes back somewhere else. Pawprint has never used the word, and the storefronts still carry no random-items label.

The accurate version is narrower and travels worse: the loop people were angry about is gone, and the shop is still undocumented.

What the storefronts actually disclose

Aniimo is developed and published by Pawprint Studio, and storefronts are the only place where anyone has to be specific, because ratings boards require it. Every listing agrees, and all of it was checked on 9 September.

The detail worth knowing is what the ESRB does not say. Since 2020 the board has had a separate label for paid random items — the loot box disclosure, written as “In-Game Purchases (Includes Random Items).” Aniimo does not carry it on any listing we checked.

That is not proof there is no gacha. Ratings are self-reported at submission, and a shop can change after launch. But it is the closest thing to a formal statement anyone has made, and it points away from paid randomness rather than toward it.

The Companion Handbook is a season pass with a different name

The clearest monetization detail in public is hiding in the pre-order packs, and it is not called a battle pass. Xbox lists it as “In-Game Path Pass: Collector’s Companion Handbook x1.”

Three things are on the record about how it works. Rewards arrive by level: “Rewards in the Advanced Companion Handbook are unlocked gradually as the Companion Handbook’s level increases.” It is consumable, not permanent: “The Companion Handbook is an in-game item. Once redeemed, it will remain active until the end of the current version.” And its contents are version-bound — the exclusive Prismana Aniimo Egg “may vary by version.”

Read together, that is a seasonal pass in every structural sense. It has a track, it levels as you play, it expires with the patch, and its headline reward rotates. And it is not only a pre-order bundle: the App Store lists both Handbooks as standalone purchases, which answers a question the rest of the coverage still has open.

What the pre-order packs cost

Two packs, and the pricing is settled across regions after a currency artefact confused it for a while.

The Advanced pack is $9.99 and carries the Advanced Companion Handbook. The Collector’s pack is $19.99 and carries the Collector’s Companion Handbook plus a list: an exclusive doll, an exclusive avatar frame, a Companion Handbook-exclusive Prismana Aniimo Egg, a Companion Handbook-exclusive material used to evolve an Aniimo, and a Primegy Battery granted immediately. Xbox buyers also get a Doggo Dude accessory as a platform exclusive.

What the App Store already prices

The mobile listing is further ahead than the desktop stores, and it is the first place real numbers appear. Aniimo’s App Store page (id 6759098797, checked 10 September) carries ten priced items:

Three things fall out of that list. The Handbooks are sold on their own, not only inside a pre-order pack. There is a Monthly Pass at $4.99 that no announcement, press release or desktop storefront has mentioned. And the crystal ladder runs from $0.99 to $99.99 across six tiers — the standard top-up shape for a free-to-play game, which tells you the model without telling you what the crystals buy.

Two caveats travel with this. Apple shows at most ten in-app purchases and there are exactly ten, so the list may be cut off. And this is the iOS build, which arrives on 23 September — the PC and console shop opens a week earlier and does not have to match.

Neither pack is a purchase of the game. Aniimo is free on every platform it ships on; these are cosmetic-and-pass bundles bought on top of a free download. Whether $19.99 is a fair price for a pass that expires at the end of the current version is a judgement you can only make once you know how long a version lasts, and that is not published either.

Glimmer, Aniipods and the free creature catching items

Aniimo has a currency called Glimmer. What it buys has never been stated. What is on the record is that Pawprint gives it away: the pre-registration milestone at 10 million paid out Glimmer ×200, and Xbox Game Pass members are set to receive a monthly reward pack that includes Glimmer alongside catching items.

• 10 million — Glimmer ×200
• 15 million — Aniipod Ultra ×2
• 20 million — “Companion Promise” limited avatar frame
• 30 million — “Sunlit Meadow” limited outfit

Outfits and frames as the top milestone reward is the shape of a cosmetics-led model, though the studio has not said so in those words. The counter passed 30 million at the end of August and stood at 30.5 million on 9 September.

The free-rewards section on the official site is labelled Welfare, and it promises Sparkling Cube, Aniipod Ultra and Tumbler from launch events. Those are catching items, handed out for free. It is the strongest available hint that catching is not the thing being sold.

Where a shop would actually hurt

Most of this post is about what Aniimo sells. The sharper question is where selling would bite, and the store listing answers that better than any preview does.

Aniimo has a competitive mode. The Epic listing describes “Egg Heist” as a PVEVP mode where you “join a 3-player team anytime to engage in real-time searches and battles in the Lost Isles.” That is the part of the game where another player’s wallet could land on your head. A cosmetics shop in a solo creature collector is a shrug; the same shop attached to a mode where three players race other players for eggs is the thing worth watching. Nothing published says Egg Heist is monetized. It is simply the room where a bad decision would do the most damage.

A player who wants a particular creature waits for the right conditions and goes looking, which is the opposite of a pull screen. Add that “most Aniimo can evolve” and the interesting resource becomes evolution material and time, both of which the game hands out.

Then there is the cosmetics surface, and it is large. Every Pathfinder gets a personal RV parked at a campsite where they “meet and interact with other players,” and a Homeland where they “plant crops, build decorations, and freely arrange your space.” A home, a vehicle and a public campsite is a lot of room for outfits, frames and furniture. If the studio’s stated cosmetics lean is real, this is where it lives.

Full mechanics, region by region, sit on our Aniimo tracker. Here they matter only for what they say about the shop.

On Xbox, the free game needs a subscription

One catch that has nothing to do with the shop. On Xbox, Aniimo requires an active Game Pass Core or Ultimate subscription to play online, despite being free-to-play. Console players who assumed free meant free should budget for that.

Game Pass also sits oddly here, and a lot of coverage has it backwards. Aniimo is not in the Game Pass catalogue — it does not need to be, because it costs nothing. What Game Pass members get is an in-game benefit: a monthly reward pack of catching items and currency. Headlines reading “Aniimo launches with Game Pass” invert the relationship. The game launches free for everyone; Game Pass adds a monthly drop on top.

What the Aniimo shop sells after launch

Pawprint’s web shop at aniimo.com went up with the launch, and it is the first storefront the studio runs itself. Checked on 17 September from Germany, it sells three things: a Monthly Pass, two Companion Handbooks and Lumin Crystals. It prices in euros, and the euro figures are not the App Store dollars converted one to one.

Two details sit on the crystal tiers. Every tier is marked 8% off in the web shop, so the €0.99 tier is charged at €0.91 and the €99.99 tier at €91.99. And every tier carries a first-purchase bonus that doubles the amount, plus a standing ten percent on top: 60 crystals come with 6 extra, 6,480 with 648. The Glimmer you are given for free is not on sale here at all.

What the Monthly Pass actually does

The in-game pass screen, captured on launch day, lists two effects before it lists a single reward. The pass doubles the Primegy cap, and it cuts egg hatching time by two hours. Primegy is the energy that refills over time and gates how much capped content you can run in a day. The rewards come after that: 330 Lumin Crystals on activation, then 3,000 Glimmer and 6,000 companion EXP spread over 30 days.

What launch-day press says the crystals buy

The web shop sells crystals but does not show what they are spent on; that happens inside the game. Launch-day reporting disagrees on exactly that point:

• MMOs.com, 16 September: crystals buy outfits and packs “containing Glimmer, cubes for capturing Aniimo, and leveling materials.”
• PC Gamer, 16 September: shop bundles cover Aniipods, stat alterations and guaranteed ways to get rare versions of Aniimo.
• MeinMMO, 17 September: the better Aniipods are for sale, and the outlet calls the game pay-to-win in PvP but fair for solo players.
• Allthings.how, 16 September: crystals unlock shop outfits and stay outside the systems that decide how strong your roster is.

Three of the four say catching or levelling items can be bought. We have not gone through the in-game shop item by item yet, so this page reports that as their finding, not ours.

What we still don’t know

The App Store list closed two of these before launch, and the web shop closed two more on launch day. One is still open, and it is the part that matters most.

• Whether any catching item is sold. Still open on our side. Three launch-day reports say yes, one says no, and neither the iOS list nor the web shop shows it, because crystals are spent inside the game. For a creature catcher this is still the question that decides everything.
• What Lumin Crystals actually buy. Outfits for certain. Whether also packs with catching and levelling items is the same open point as above.
• Whether Glimmer can be bought too. Answered on launch day: not directly. The web shop does not sell it, and the Monthly Pass pays out 3,000 of it over 30 days.
• What the desktop shop looks like. Answered on launch day: the web shop table above.

The accurate summary after launch is this: Aniimo is free, it sells a seasonal pass, a monthly pass that doubles an energy cap, and a six-tier currency ladder, it hands out a second currency for nothing, and it does not carry the ESRB’s paid-random-items label. Whether those crystals reach catching items is the one point we have not checked ourselves, and it is the one that decides how this game reads.

Aniimo monetization FAQ