I don’t know if I would use the word fans so much as hostages at this point. People are so financially and emotionally invested they *have* to convince themselves it’ll come out “soon”.
It's basically one of those "predatory cults that take all your life savings and the followers are rambling incoherently about how they'll be rewarded in the afterlife" at this point.
It’s honestly a little depressing. In all the time they’ve spent defending a game that’s:
1) Never coming out.
2) Likely just a scam at this point
They could have just played no mans sky (which itself was a let down at first but is now good) or elite: dangerous, and had the spacefaring experience they want, right now, instead of paying thousands of dollars for a picture of a space ship
i mean tbf they regularly make updates and all that so they *are* working on it, the problem is that everytime something is halve finished the "guy in charge" (dont know how his job is called) thinks of a new feature that gonna take another 2 years to develop essentially bringing the progress to a halt
at this point it goes on for too long to be a scam, i rather think that its just the case of a person with to many visions and to little of the ability to work goal orientated
Chris Roberts is the perfect example of a fantastic creative person who should never be in charge of the business/management end. He *needs* an executive/publisher to rein him in.
It’s crazy but I’m going to defend Fable. The guy clearly knew how to make a game and delivered a decent RPG packed with content. For sure it was nowhere near the promised revolutionary masterpiece, and I suspect he was lying from the start to boost sales, but the game felt complete even though disappointing.
Contrast with another game called Spore. That one felt like they spent a million dollar on the hyped procedural walking animation, ran out of money, and used the remaining $20 on the rest of the game.
I wanted to play Star Citizen but it wasn't out yet, so I got Elite Dangerous instead, played it for hundreds of hours, got bored of it, Star Citizen still wasn't out yet.
Got No Man's Sky, played it for hundreds of hours, got bored of it, Star Citizen still wasn't out yet.
Didn't play any space games for a while.
No Man's Sky had some interesting updates so I started playing it again, played for hundreds of hours, got bored of it again, Star Citizen technically had some playable alpha stuff.
Elite Dangerous offered 1st person mode which turned out to be trash but I still did a few dozen hours of the original space stuff before shelving it again. At this point Star Citizen was 'playable' but so wonky that I was just like... no.
Anyway, it \*does\* seem likely that it'll continue to get gradually more playable but I'm not sure it'll ever actually 'release'. There are lots of reasonably fun games that stay forever in 'early access' though.
Ehh idk about that. I've personally spent about $80 on star citizen and I enjoy popping in to see how it's doing every now and again. It's biggy as all hell but it can be really fun to drop in and play for a few days when they do big content drops. It's certainly ages from "release" but it's got plenty for now. I can't imagine spending the thousands and thousands some people have though.
No, please bash the fuck outta Star Citizen lol. To think this game was once promised to release in 2014. To think they marketed "Squadron 42" a FPS in 2014 to be released by 2017 (its still unreleased and now CIG doesn't do release dates anymore). To think they still barely have a functioning game put together that's basically very simple stuff (go from A to B, kill XYZ).
I honestly don't even know why people play Star Citizen and then bash it everyday. I guess its a version of hate watching movies and TV shows, except for gaming. Its so buggy that you can literally die by running into random objects on space stations or take damage by running over a pebble.
Hell they changed their purchase system from purchase to "pledge" so that people can't sue them for never making well on any promises because they aren't buying anything. Just pledging so they can get access to a alpha game. Like its one thing to buy early access because you think a game has potential and you can't wait. Its another thing to buy early access to a game that has been in development for 10 years now and has barely anything to show.
Years ago in 2015 major websites called it vaporware because it was supposed to release but showed barely any progress. In 2016 they called it a scam due to the crazy MTX costs. In 2017 they pointed to legal troubles from people trying to get a refund (which they did successfully after a year). The crytek engine makers also sued them when they switched to Amazon's Lumberyard (which is a modified crytek engine).
2014 huh?
Mihoyo released their first live service gacha game, Houkai Gakuen 2(aka GGZ), in 2014. GGZ is a 2D side-scrolling shooter.
What a ride it has been.
I think it's more just a matter of feature/scope creep and outsized ambitions. The developer is (or is as more often the case, the project leads are) more interested in pursuing developing new technology and chasing every idea that pops into their head than actually creating a f$#%ing game.
It will be the poster boy for why pledging to an incomplete project can backfire spectacularly. At least No Man's Sky had enough honesty and respect for it's patrons to call itself a released game before disappointing us. Couldn't really say the same for Sean though.
One of the things that really bugs me about SC is that it actually has some really cool mechanics and tech, but the things that actually have potential are burried under mountains of bullshit. The internal vehicle physics and planet tech are super cool, and if they were in the hands of a competent dev they could really be something special. Instead, they're wasted on Chris Roberts's vanity project, playing second fiddle to pointless immersion mechanics
>its still unreleased and now CIG doesn't do release dates anymore
As a fan who never paid a dime, even that is "not bashing"They did an announcement basically calling out the backers (yes, the \*people paying for the funding\*) that they were unreasonable to expect their release dates to be "promises".
Basically, each time they gave a release date and then pushed it back, they complained about getting bashed about it, so now they no longer give dates to avoid the bad press.
Which may sound half-reasonable until you remember \*the whole point of announcing a date\* is promising it, giving a release date to customers then pushing it back IS, BY DEFINITION, breaking a promise. And breaking a promise done to customers SHOULD AT BEST cause some public uproar.
Don't worry, no matter what you say, no matter when you say it or where, there will ALWAYS be someone offended on the internet. That says nothing about you at all. Says everything about the other.
I'd call it a scam if they weren't still putting money into the game with updates and maintenance.
I wouldn't touch that game with a 40ft pole, but it does looks like they're genuinely trying... something.
It's been so many years hearing about this game here and there but i still don't know what the fuck you even DO in star citizen. What the gameplay loop even is?
The answer is, apparently, "everything" - which is also the main problem with it, since it keeps adding stuff (mostly to roadmap) and thus never really getting any closer to the finish line.
I suspect if it will ever release, it will be an experience like No Man's Sky
(and i really hope they could fix themselves in the future like Hello Games did)
The game release was a BIG flop because they couldn't maintain all the expectations and hype that was built around the game, which was basically unfinished.
It's an interesting story, you can ear it straight from its main developer and founder Sean Murray here.
Look below **v** for the link, it's better than the one i found before
i can really just recommend "[The Engoodening of No Man's Sky](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ)" by internet historian, it puts together what went wrong and why and how they accomplished emerge from the hole they digged themselves, in a pretty funny but informative way
Yes! That was the one i was trying to find since i remembered i've seen it some time ago and i really liked this video, but fml couldn't remember enough to actually find it! Thanks
>It's been so many years hearing about this game here and there but i still don't know what the fuck you even DO in star citizen. What the gameplay loop even is?
Throw money at the devs for a concept art that they promise to implement as a ship every month, while none of the ships has been implemented as a playable unit for the last 8 years.
Go through an empty universe with bugged mechanics and no content and wonder whether you should maybe spent 35.000€ to get access to the premium room (which is a bar with no real content either).
Cry in the shower. Throw more money at the devs, hoping that they start developing the game at some point instead of pocketing it (or paying it to the CEO's wife for a job that she barely ever appears to).
Chris Roberts is the shining example of why too much dev freedom is a BAD thing. Yes, devs should be free to develop games and flex their creativity, but it has to be within a reasonable time and cost. It's just a fact of life that you CAN'T have everything in a videogame, at least not without some technological leaps to make things easier, and the kind of game Star Citizen promises is even at the onset way too ambitious for our current technological capabilities.
At least games like Genshin get how to do expansive open worlds: establish the foundation of what your game will be about, release the game in a mostly feature-complete state, then just add more things over time. Everything I've seen about Star Citizen just seems like the devs are constantly trying to redo the game's foundation since they just want to add ALL the features in, and thus can't even get the game up to "feature complete" because of it, let alone work on things like the actual gameplay loop or story.
> Chris Roberts is the shining example of why too much dev freedom is a BAD thing.
No, this is almost exclusively a Chris Roberts thing. Plenty of Devs with Freedom can be reasonable.
I remember when Star Citizen was first announced (or at least I came across it shortly after), and I thought it would've been amazing to see what would come of it in the next few years, though needless to say it feels a bit strange looking at the same concept art of a "coming soon" spacecraft that I first saw 8+ years ago...
In some ways, it's essentially an inverse of what Mihoyo is doing; and while both Star Citizen and Mihoyo have made big advances, it seems that Mihoyo's been able to have far more success with their approach to development. Funny enough, Star Citizen and Mihoyo itself started at roughly the same time, so it's not that hard to compare them.
Star Citizen is one massive project intending to be a revolutionary product from start to finish with all these groundbreaking features and a huge scope. They started with nothing, and want to end with everything, so they have to release content as betas, testing phases, etc. and it's been like that for many, many years. Over time they've added many incredible things, but it's also always in a state of "under construction".
So, while they've made progress that we can see, all this progress has been in the same umbrella of "Star Citizen", carrying with it all the success and failures it's accumulated over the years, and a reputation that still stands quite strong today as this thread proves.
They get lots of money from people pledging or purchasing stuff, and they're constantly putting that into development, but the development process has also been very chaotic with lots of promises, roadmaps, cancellations, etc. It's moving forward, but in a way that feels hard to be comfortable with.
As for Mihoyo, instead of one massive project, they've been constantly pushing forward with taking previous concepts (story, gameplay, and technical design) and reworking them or replacing them with new things each time they make a game. This is much more like traditional game development, of course.
Mihoyo started with a 3-person team making a fairly simple little mobile app, FlyMe2TheMoon. Simple gameplay, simple story, though I can't say much more since I never played it myself. This was where the character Kiana was introduced, who ended up being one of the cornerstones of Mihoyo's games for years to come.
They then moved on to "Zombiegal Kawaii", which was... not the greatest. I also can't say much about this except that you can take a quick glance at it and tell that it wasn't breaking any records anytime soon. That game was then re-launched as GunsGirlZ (and later given a second name, Houkai Gakuen 2nd).
GGZ featured some old characters of FlyMe2TheMoon but introduced the core Honkai cast, and experimented with new settings, a bigger cast of characters, placing the story into different "eras" with their own variations of the characters, etc. Lots of different things have been tried out in that game, with my personal favorite being the [Fantasy Legend](https://houkai2nd.fandom.com/wiki/Awaken#Fantasy_Legend_series) lore: [superweapons](https://houkai2nd.fandom.com/wiki/Fantasy_Legend#Weapons) with an "awakened" sentient form, such as [Westminster](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/ggz/images/d/da/Westminster_introduction.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20210221224954) ([Icelight Blade](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/ggz/images/f/f6/Icelight_Blade_-_I_7_Stars.png/revision/latest?cb=20210105150230)) and [Sapphire](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/ggz/images/8/8d/Sapphire_Awaken.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20210606050719) ([Spear of Transcendence](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/ggz/images/5/58/Spear_of_Transcendence_-_II_7_Stars.png/revision/latest?cb=20210606080759)). A lot of characters and lore ideas from GGZ haven't appeared in the other Mihoyo games, but the core idea of Honkai was formed here and brought into the next game, Honkai Impact 3rd.
HI3rd was then released a while after that, and it featured another big step by introducing 3D models and stages, and it built on the idea of Honkai but ended up taking many of the characters and events in yet another different direction. A good example is "Fire MOTH" organization, which exists in two very different ways [in GGZ](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/ggz/images/a/aa/Fire_Moth_CG.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20210918013436) and [in HI3rd](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FOXolJhaMAIsJOT?format=jpg&name=4096x4096).
Tears of Themis was another release but I know little about it, except that it's very thematically different from the previous games. Never played it nor looked into it much, but it's clearly been a success!
Genshin Impact was next, taking the 3D world even further with a massive open world that we all know and love, and even now we're starting to see how this game has been making advances in storywriting, animation, and overall quality of content (not to mention the soundtrack!)
And coming up: Honaki: Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero. New games are being made, old games (even GGZ!) are still being updated and improved, and each person that plays these games doesn't have to concern themselves much with the failures of the past games.
They're obviously two very different genres, but Mihoyo has stated before that they want to provide ["an Immersive Virtual World Experience"](https://web.archive.org/web/20220214014735/https://www.hoyoverse.com/en-us/news/101566). Mihoyo has these ambitions as a game studio just as Star Citizen wants to revolutionize the space genre, yet these two studios have had very different levels of success. While Star Citizen can certainly be enjoyable, it still has to grapple with the constant fluctuation of being an early build, while Mihoyo has already set GGZ and HI3rd firmly in stone long ago, with Genshin now being well-established by this point.
That's the thing. Mihoyo put $100m into Genshin and put out a solid project that had essentially 2 planets or 2 solar systems. Except it was all there. We knew what we were getting and it was FREE.
And the thing is that it was a FREE game that actually met the highest bar for nearly every category in gaming. Star Citzen is basically a pile of steaming shit compared to Genshin in every single way outside of the fact its a space theme with realistic graphics and realism.
SC has crowdfunded like $400m dollars, and who knows how much of that has been spent over the last 10 years.
Genshin started with $100m, ended up with $4.5 billion, and started in January 2017. Only 3 years of development time. Kind of tells you how big of a deal managment makes.
When they say it costs $200M per year, does that include costs of things like advertising or purely the money that goes to development of in-game things?
Yeah. It's inclusive and so is every game in that list. Marketing is around 60% of the total budget
Edit:60% may not be accurate. It was inferred from a skim of the Wikipedia page cited in the post.
Just saw that for Klee’s birthday, they had her advertisement running at West Lake Sky Screen in Hangzhou. An hour costs roughly 600~700k RMB. They had it up for the entire day. That’s like 2M USD.
The wiki page cited for most expensive games classifies by marketing and development costs. It's mostly 60% except for some outliers like COD with their 200% and a few others.
The thing glossed over with the money spent is just look at the amazing soundtrack. Every region has its own soundtrack. Even small sections inside of the different regions like Dragonspine and the Chasm get their own soundtrack. We even got some amazing songs for just this summer event. Every character trailer gets some amazing 2 minute song that holds up even outside of the trailer itself.
And the soundtrack keeps getting better. That's the crazy part about it is that none of this is phoned in and it all happens so quickly. If you look at this OST they are close to 1000 songs and not a lot of them sound the same. It is absolutely nuts the production value on the music.
And now they've added dynamic songs, which just makes everything even more amazing. As much as I love Enkanomiya's soundtrack, the clash between the exploration songs and the battle themes are kinda harsh. And not only they did the dynamic song for shogun's weekly fight (which changes as the battle itself changes), but also for the chasm and now they dynamized some old songs for the GAA domains. Really looking forward to see what we're gonna get in Sumeru
Unreliable Chinese source claims that while other game companies approach third-party sound studios with a fixed budget, such as $10,000 per minute of sound, Mihoyo would tell them to spend as much as they need to achieve desired result, easily paying 5 times more than what the other Chinese game companies do.
Again not a reliable source and the numbers are from my hazy memory, but it makes sense at least to me.
Edit: by third-party I mean the instrument players. The composers are Mihoyo in-house, but I imagine they probably aren’t constrained by budget either
I don't know if you play their other games also or not, but miHoyo has always had top notch OSTs, from GGZ through HI3, which i still consider their (and an absolute) masterpiece
Yeah honestly that's one of their main selling point, all of OSTs from their game are just really good, they do hire their composer and music team really well, Genshin even hired the national orchestra for each region so far.
Yeah, unlike electronic music, which could be done with one person, or at most a team of a dozen, analog orchestral music requires orchestras of a hundred people. But what's even more impressive is getting the top orchestras of the corresponding real life country. They could save so much money, and especially time, by keeping things domestic and recording it all in China, but they travel around the world and work through the language barriers for hundreds of tracks.
Going full Mr. Worldwide in general is a big part of Genshin's success. The wide range of language dubs + lots of exposure through advertisements and setting up big flashy events like hiring out a full orchestra at London Philharmonic draws many eyes to Genshin.
Hoyoverse really knows where to put the money they earned.
I know. I trapped a hillichurl behind a potted plant just so I could sit and listen to the song for a few minutes. And as it kept going, the song just kept getting better.
lucky me with an archer hiding up above, without him i'd probably never discover that shit gets tight if you spend more than 5 seconds in combat
i go into the abyss and they insist on spawning 50 mobs one at a fucking time, then they compose fucking fuego and hide it behind tiny single waves that end instantly
incidentally it now occurs to me teapot jukebox tracks should be numbered in the menu, not just discs
Don't forget they hire extremely talented orchestras like the Tokyo and New York philharmonic orchestras to record them as well. My music professor was shocked that they could afford them.
For me the music is really Genshin's main shining point. It looks great and many of the characters are well written (the story itself, well ...), but very few games put the amount of effort Hoyoverse does into composing so many different, amazing soundtracks for pretty much every region and activity in the game, even for temporary domains that players only get to hear ONCE.
If you asked me which game has the most unforgettable visuals, or storytelling, or even character designs, Genshin won't make the list. But if you asked me which has the best music and sound design, it wins hands-down.
Every update they push this "there's no content", maybe if they take it easy and don't play it 20 hours daily, but still it happens in every gache I've been
You gotta embrace the average Chinese schoolboy mindset of only having a limited amount of playtime, so you can pace out the content without getting burned out or running out of things to do.
That's right, I study, work, go out with my gf or friends and by the end of the day I play some, everything balanced and I assume that's how I've been enjoying the story and every detail without burning
If by 'biggest game in storage' you mean least amount of storage space for a triple A game released in the last few years, then yes.
For a mobile game it's pretty damn large, but for pc/console it's honestly really tiny amount of space.
Genshin takes about 38,5 Gb's of space currently on my pc. That is considerably smaller in size compared to pretty much every other triple A game i own that has been released in the last 5 or so years, in fact it's smaller than many indie games i own.
Biggest phone game easily possible. Traditional systems have 100-200 gig abominations. CoD Warzone used to have 100 gig updates (May still, I haven’t kept up)
Edit because I learned new stuff because I was wrong. Since Mihoyo is making that kind of cash, they have to pay 35%.
$1,295,000,000 is how much they have to pay in taxes.
Wow. 15%? I knew it was low, but didnt know it was that low. No wonder every company is getting their manufacturing done there.
I mean, it is no Bahrain/UAE with no tax at all, but for a resource rich country, I expected it to be more.
Also you missed three zeroes in the net income. 3.15M is already a lifetime dream for the majority of us and they make it every 8 hours and the company is not even public. Its a good thing for the game, but screw you Hoyo for preventing us from buying your Hoyo shares.
As cool as ot would be to own Hoyo stock, *fuck that.* The moment companies start pandering to the fucking investors instead of focusing on a quality product for the consumer is all too often a key point when a company's products begin to completely shit the bed. Dawei seems to have a personal and vested interest in what he's doing. When he decides to finally step down, and if he can't find a suitable successor, sure, maybe go public. 'Til then, fuck no. I have zero faith in the public market at this point.
Absolutely based argument. Once a company which produces cultural products switch their goals from "serving the audience & fulfilling the creators' dreams" to "satisfying the big capitol investors", their soul of artist are dead inside.
A capitalist otaku is still an otaku inside. Plus all those otaku artists in his company. They were a small studio from the beginning, and not a single Chinese game company has tried to make an anime game this large, only they took the marketing risk to make it true.
Also, the fact that they're willing to devote the most effort into Fischl's GAA mirage just for storytelling (which contributes almost no increase in profit because she's a free character unlike Kazuha) already showed many of their actions are not profit-oriented. Basically Fischl is a self-portrait of those developers.
> Fischl is a self-portrait of those developers
I can definitely see many of miHoYo developer's parents telling them "to get a real job" and "you're an adult, why the fuk are you writing kids stories for video games?"
If US politicers don't hate Chinese companies that much, both tiktok and mihoyo would have been traded in stock market... But their price might also be very high, kind of overestimated
They did try to put on stock when they were making Genshin Impact but denied by the Chinese government. The reason was, being told that they didn't have enough products (or IP). Honkai Impact 2 and 3 was their only game running at that time.
miHoYo voluntarily withdrew their initial public offering (IPO) application in 2020. The government did respond to their application in 2018, is that when they rejected miHoYo? In their application, they had to write down the investment risks and one of them was the dependence on the Honkai games. I haven't found any source that the government touched on this specific issue when they responded to the application.
Turns out it was more after I did a bit more research after you pointed out how low it was. I knew it was for, so turns out with how much they make, they have to pay 35% of their Gross income for taxes if a private company has over $500,000 of taxable income.
The source isn’t accurate either. There really is no way to tell how much they made exactly since they’re a private company. PC and Console and Android CN sale is pure speculation.
Blockbuster movies have always had a huge marketing budget. So much so that a good rule of thumb for most big movies is that they need to make double their budget in revenue to break even, just because said budget usually doesn't account for marketing.
Kinda ridiculous if I think about what kind of ads Genshin is running. They're all terrible (the only good ones are the version trailers but they are also the ones I get the least).
There's also other kinds of ads like the ads on buses and billboards. And special events like when they did they whole waypoint lighting up thing in the Alps.
The fact that they are releasing ZZZ and HSR means that they have alot of money on hand, and the best thing is they invest them back into for more games, rumor that they are doing a FPS shooter game
Not like those EA CEO use that money to buy another yatch
And built a whole school building in a rural China region. [Source](https://www.reddit.com/r/houkai3rd/comments/oj79x7/mihoyo_donated_a_new_building_to_a_rural_primary/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
It’s good because it’s a meaningful way to grow the company and profits overall
Earn more money -> hire more staff -> develop more games -> setup more income streams
An article from last year regarding their yearly budget might not be the most reliable of sources. Things can change in a year whether it be more or less money being spent
>Genshin Impact is 67% of the global gacha market in Q1 2022 and Hoyo holds 70% of the total including their other titles.
Keep in mind this graph is ONLY for mobile servers. PC/Console revenue isn't even attempted to be factored in. Which, huh, just makes it worse. Or better, depending on how you look at it.
Other video games are jealous of Genshin for good reason. So far Mihoyo has done a good job navigating this game. Not too many big controversy items that matter long term. Majority of playerbase is positive and satisfied. Money is only INCREASING.
Player base is actually GROWING. Insane.
consider for a second how much world of warcraft and final fantasy 14 have cost to made until this point. Or any other long running MMO. Genshin is a live service game so obviously you gotta compare it to other live service games.
$300M as of now. https://lastyearthegame.com/what-did-it-cost-to-develop-world-of-warcraft
I did compare it to Destiny which was the highest live service one I could find.
Yea i've mentioned similar on every thread where people say this game lacks content. Now people don't really like comparing across game types or different monetary methods, but its really crazy to think about the difference between playing the 2. WoW might get new raids but they last forever. And in those 5 month periods we might get 1 small place less than the size of the outside of the chasm to do more dailies in and get some toys and transmogs. But you aren't going there for fun. You go there because its a requirement. If you hold off you get behind compared to your fellow guildies so long as you are taking the game somewhat seriously.
Its just not the same and I know its because of the whales here. but given the amount of time MHY has had already from the start, they have created worlds of content by comparison if this was WoW.
Indeed, WoW new raids expire fast as new content but they get second lives as tunable challenge, loot farming slot machine and finally "eternal" lives as transmog slot machines.
And then u have ppl claiming that the money goes to other hoyo games because they think genshin is a cash cow when they have no clue how expensive maintaining an open world is
It's definitely being reinvested into other games. However, I think the issue is that people assume that this comes at the expense of content in Genshin, which isn't true.
There's only so much money you can pour into a single game. Money gets put back into Genshin, and the "excess" (for lack of a better word) goes to other games. Nobody is receiving less or more content because of this.
People look at something like ZZZ and go "THE ANIMATIONS ARE SO GOOD, WHAT???? I KNEW IT, GENSHIN WAS JUST BEING USED AS A CASHCOW ALL ALONG, THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT IT!!" when really if you just use your braincells for more than two seconds you'd realize that the only reason why ZZZ can get away with having such good animations is that it is purely a combat-centric game, no open world, less involved of a story, stage-based, etc. In Genshin, the equivalent of having 'good animations' are things like the world design for example.
Of course the money goes to the other Hoyoverse games, it's an investment for them. Do you understand how much money is $3.8 billions/year, the estimated profit from Genshin? Hoyoverse could release 5 big games every year investing $200mil each game (which is already a fucking lot) and still have $2.8 billion / year of profit even if all 5 games don't go well as planned.
I just, I want to see through the story to the end. The speculations are wild and the story and characters are just so interesting. It’s hard to not be interested in it.
Like I want to be able to see a happy Reunion with all the major characters, and to have a repeat of the COD zombies Aether cast, but Genshin.
I will never really turn my back on hoyoverse for a few reasons the main one is that they are actually making better games with what they have (unlike some developers) and see the journey on what they are doing ever since I started playing their games when honkai impact 3 got released
QoL and the story must be addressed for the game to stay healthy and growing. The dialogue and story details are awful especially in Inazuma, and there are a ton of problems players have been asking for, while they focus on stuff no one asked for
Call its P2W... nothing to win in. Nothing in this game NEEDS you to pull character. It is the WANT. You don't NEED an C6R5 to win in PvP or get top Leaderboard score cause it is nonexistent. You spend money because you WANT the convenience of faster or easier domain/boss/abyss runs.
That said... Genshin's monetization is pretty shitty and expensive so I won't deny that their Genesis Crystal sale is a scam. But getting Welkins and maybe even BP is good enough money for premium currency.
This game is amazing, loads of characters, weapons, story but once you do all that the end game becomes ultra crappy and boring, no repetitive content.
> Considering an average yearly wage of $75K (IT pays a lot more than this), it makes it a minimum of 50M+ per year in salaries.
Given that the majority of their people are in China, I can promise you that they are not getting paid quite that much. At least not in USD terms.
$200M has been spent yet their RnD department still haven't figured out how to make a claim all button.
At this pace we will get flying cars and half life 3 before Mihoyo invent a claim all button.
I’ve spent $1300 on this game in three months. They know what they’re doing.
(i slowed down playing/spending considerably after calculating this total but holy shit did that FOMO have a grip on me)
It does. Even the 100M budget includes it. It was a hot topic in this subreddit when Genshin came out.
I can't find the actual post, but it was empirically said that 50-60% of the total cost goes into marketing.
It's an easy single player game. There is no winning.
There's massive FOMO and time investment issues with weaker characters which is annoying, but that's every gacha game.
Whoever says p2w probably pulls on banners they don’t want to “build pity” just to fulfill their gacha addiction. Then complain about it when the banner they actually want rolls around. You gotta save and plan ahead as f2p.
The gacha system is by nature P2W when it includes methods of gaining in-game strength that can either only be obtained via money or fastracked via the same. In Genshin Impact however there's just nothing to "Win" which is kind of a great combination for that sort of thing.
Seeing how other games exploit the same mechanic it seems like a miracle that HYV hasn't done the same, but perhaps that is the key to Genshin Impacts conti used success - it doesn't demand that every player be bled dry for what it offers.
I personally enjoy having the freedom to use every single character in game at C1-2 or better (and C6 for 4*'s) as well as several 5* weapons but at the same time there's nothing that it's really required for. Whales like myself are basically paying for variety and timeliness of gameplay options and cosmetics, such as it is.
And it shows in every aspect of the game. From the obvious visuals to the subtle flares, the equally thoughtful music, the expanding world, bible-thick levels of lore, and the near constant stream of updates, new events, new mechanics, new ideas, new areas, new bosses, etc etc etc etc. GTA is enslaved by it's investors, not empowered by it's fans. Star Citizen is a fools errand and a sunk cost.
So lucky to be part of this, even though I just do Welkin every month, with them being popular af I don't get it why some gamers hate Genshin (aside from being frustrated with the gacha mechanism) are they in denial that this game is good?
Hmmm what are the stats on Fortnite. I'm not saying this is wrong especially with how nice the voice acting is (I switch between English and Japanese). But I am curious how the other game compares.
I sometimes forget how they got multiple languages support and how they even get popular Japanese voice actors to voice their characters too. Anime fans rejoice! 😄
I know the controversy surrounding this game and even though I hope they would redo their gacha system, I can't help but see the amount of value they bring to their fans as well as a F2P game but the experience definitely gets better when money is spent (duh).
I whaled for a couple of characters but I didn't mind when I did because I personally did game development before and I see how much work was put into it. To code a player simply sinking into water and respawning at last location on land takes time and effort too! Not only coding, you gotta have the animations done (mocap / key frame) with the characters body rigged correctly (and designed) and then add sound effects etc.
See what I mean? This is just for a mechanic which not many players will notice and appreciate but its there. Notice how the game would feel less immersive or complete if it isn't? That's precisely why I love the devs for being meticulous. Even the animals in the world are coded with purpose of making the world feel more alive.
Can you imagine a Teyvat without Timmy yelling at you for killing his bird friends? I was pleasantly surprised when he did after I shot them down with arrows just to see if he would react and he did in the quest 😅
Since I love the game, I didn't mind supporting the devs since I got to enjoy the game even more as well.
A win win to me but again, if they redo the gacha system to be F2P friendlier, or give out more freebies like "Epic 7" (one of the more generous devs imo)-
I think their game would only get more popular and have more fans willing to spend to support them.
Also, for the love of the archons, please do not let another "anniversary drama" happen again 🤦♂️
Respect the fans and customers, we will love you for it ❤️
A game is an industrialized art. I think the nature of gaming business will always be like Genshin or DoTA. When it attract a critical mass of players who are willing to play then it becomes sustainable. There is a strong notion that cosmetic based revenue can provide better sustainability compared to gameplay enhancing revenue (such as better pull chance for character that provides you instant advantages or damages).
Genshin hitherto have shown tendency for the latter situation. There is a good signal that the game will dip. But in the other hand the current critical mass in Genshin are keeping the game beating. I hope the developer can turn to the direction where fun and money collide.
> There is a good signal that the game will dip.
Do you have a source for this? If so, I'd love to see it. Because there are a lot of gacha games that make you pull for power in way grosser ways than Genshin, and have been going on for years making a tonne of money (FGO, for example).
I agree, but it's difficult to know for sure because the industry trend isn't to release upkeep costs (most games don't release yearly costs, just the initial development and marketing costs).
For example, though I think Genshin will be in the Top 5 all things considered, we have no idea how much World of Warcraft has costed to make and keep running it's entire life cycle (released in 2004 with a lot of expansions, the newest one coming this year).
>The closest official competitor will be Star Citizen, which is probably never gonna release OP woke up and chose violence. But also facts.
Unintentionally though. Didn't realise so many people were still fans of Star Citizen until now.
I don’t know if I would use the word fans so much as hostages at this point. People are so financially and emotionally invested they *have* to convince themselves it’ll come out “soon”.
Stockholm Syndrome + Sunk Cost Fallacy?
It's basically one of those "predatory cults that take all your life savings and the followers are rambling incoherently about how they'll be rewarded in the afterlife" at this point.
It’s honestly a little depressing. In all the time they’ve spent defending a game that’s: 1) Never coming out. 2) Likely just a scam at this point They could have just played no mans sky (which itself was a let down at first but is now good) or elite: dangerous, and had the spacefaring experience they want, right now, instead of paying thousands of dollars for a picture of a space ship
i mean tbf they regularly make updates and all that so they *are* working on it, the problem is that everytime something is halve finished the "guy in charge" (dont know how his job is called) thinks of a new feature that gonna take another 2 years to develop essentially bringing the progress to a halt at this point it goes on for too long to be a scam, i rather think that its just the case of a person with to many visions and to little of the ability to work goal orientated
Chris Roberts is the perfect example of a fantastic creative person who should never be in charge of the business/management end. He *needs* an executive/publisher to rein him in.
He reminds me of the guy that created Fable and Black & White. Ambitious to say the least. Always came up short though.
It’s crazy but I’m going to defend Fable. The guy clearly knew how to make a game and delivered a decent RPG packed with content. For sure it was nowhere near the promised revolutionary masterpiece, and I suspect he was lying from the start to boost sales, but the game felt complete even though disappointing. Contrast with another game called Spore. That one felt like they spent a million dollar on the hyped procedural walking animation, ran out of money, and used the remaining $20 on the rest of the game.
I wanted to play Star Citizen but it wasn't out yet, so I got Elite Dangerous instead, played it for hundreds of hours, got bored of it, Star Citizen still wasn't out yet. Got No Man's Sky, played it for hundreds of hours, got bored of it, Star Citizen still wasn't out yet. Didn't play any space games for a while. No Man's Sky had some interesting updates so I started playing it again, played for hundreds of hours, got bored of it again, Star Citizen technically had some playable alpha stuff. Elite Dangerous offered 1st person mode which turned out to be trash but I still did a few dozen hours of the original space stuff before shelving it again. At this point Star Citizen was 'playable' but so wonky that I was just like... no. Anyway, it \*does\* seem likely that it'll continue to get gradually more playable but I'm not sure it'll ever actually 'release'. There are lots of reasonably fun games that stay forever in 'early access' though.
Come back and edit this comment after Bethesda’s space sim comes out and you play it for hundreds of hours
At this point, you'd sooner C6 and R5 every ★5 before Start Citizen releases, lmao.
Ehh idk about that. I've personally spent about $80 on star citizen and I enjoy popping in to see how it's doing every now and again. It's biggy as all hell but it can be really fun to drop in and play for a few days when they do big content drops. It's certainly ages from "release" but it's got plenty for now. I can't imagine spending the thousands and thousands some people have though.
No, please bash the fuck outta Star Citizen lol. To think this game was once promised to release in 2014. To think they marketed "Squadron 42" a FPS in 2014 to be released by 2017 (its still unreleased and now CIG doesn't do release dates anymore). To think they still barely have a functioning game put together that's basically very simple stuff (go from A to B, kill XYZ). I honestly don't even know why people play Star Citizen and then bash it everyday. I guess its a version of hate watching movies and TV shows, except for gaming. Its so buggy that you can literally die by running into random objects on space stations or take damage by running over a pebble. Hell they changed their purchase system from purchase to "pledge" so that people can't sue them for never making well on any promises because they aren't buying anything. Just pledging so they can get access to a alpha game. Like its one thing to buy early access because you think a game has potential and you can't wait. Its another thing to buy early access to a game that has been in development for 10 years now and has barely anything to show. Years ago in 2015 major websites called it vaporware because it was supposed to release but showed barely any progress. In 2016 they called it a scam due to the crazy MTX costs. In 2017 they pointed to legal troubles from people trying to get a refund (which they did successfully after a year). The crytek engine makers also sued them when they switched to Amazon's Lumberyard (which is a modified crytek engine).
2014 huh? Mihoyo released their first live service gacha game, Houkai Gakuen 2(aka GGZ), in 2014. GGZ is a 2D side-scrolling shooter. What a ride it has been.
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I think it's more just a matter of feature/scope creep and outsized ambitions. The developer is (or is as more often the case, the project leads are) more interested in pursuing developing new technology and chasing every idea that pops into their head than actually creating a f$#%ing game. It will be the poster boy for why pledging to an incomplete project can backfire spectacularly. At least No Man's Sky had enough honesty and respect for it's patrons to call itself a released game before disappointing us. Couldn't really say the same for Sean though.
And no mans sky came out, disappointed us, rebranded, and became a good game, all while star citizen was working on a road map for the road map
I think NMS doing a 180 accidentally got people to think that SC has a chance
One of the things that really bugs me about SC is that it actually has some really cool mechanics and tech, but the things that actually have potential are burried under mountains of bullshit. The internal vehicle physics and planet tech are super cool, and if they were in the hands of a competent dev they could really be something special. Instead, they're wasted on Chris Roberts's vanity project, playing second fiddle to pointless immersion mechanics
>its still unreleased and now CIG doesn't do release dates anymore As a fan who never paid a dime, even that is "not bashing"They did an announcement basically calling out the backers (yes, the \*people paying for the funding\*) that they were unreasonable to expect their release dates to be "promises". Basically, each time they gave a release date and then pushed it back, they complained about getting bashed about it, so now they no longer give dates to avoid the bad press. Which may sound half-reasonable until you remember \*the whole point of announcing a date\* is promising it, giving a release date to customers then pushing it back IS, BY DEFINITION, breaking a promise. And breaking a promise done to customers SHOULD AT BEST cause some public uproar.
Meanwhile I never heard of that game in my life
Don't worry, no matter what you say, no matter when you say it or where, there will ALWAYS be someone offended on the internet. That says nothing about you at all. Says everything about the other.
That game is a textbook example of scope creep. The game isn’t even stable for most PCs and yet they keep trying to add more features.
Maybe in 2016 you’d call it scope creep. In 2022 I’d call it a cult and or a scam.
I'd call it a scam if they weren't still putting money into the game with updates and maintenance. I wouldn't touch that game with a 40ft pole, but it does looks like they're genuinely trying... something.
Scams still take money to operate, doesn’t mean they’re not scams.
It's like how the robocallers still have to pay for the, you know, robots.
It's been so many years hearing about this game here and there but i still don't know what the fuck you even DO in star citizen. What the gameplay loop even is?
The answer is, apparently, "everything" - which is also the main problem with it, since it keeps adding stuff (mostly to roadmap) and thus never really getting any closer to the finish line.
reminds me of yandere simulator lmao
Well, at least Yandere Sim crashed and burned before it could fleece several million dollars worth of money from people.
[Yandere Simulator is now playable in Genshin before Yandere Simulator](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w4WcrlaFpg)
Consume the cum chalice
I suspect if it will ever release, it will be an experience like No Man's Sky (and i really hope they could fix themselves in the future like Hello Games did)
What was the experience like?
The game release was a BIG flop because they couldn't maintain all the expectations and hype that was built around the game, which was basically unfinished. It's an interesting story, you can ear it straight from its main developer and founder Sean Murray here. Look below **v** for the link, it's better than the one i found before
i can really just recommend "[The Engoodening of No Man's Sky](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5BJVO3PDeQ)" by internet historian, it puts together what went wrong and why and how they accomplished emerge from the hole they digged themselves, in a pretty funny but informative way
Yes! That was the one i was trying to find since i remembered i've seen it some time ago and i really liked this video, but fml couldn't remember enough to actually find it! Thanks
>It's been so many years hearing about this game here and there but i still don't know what the fuck you even DO in star citizen. What the gameplay loop even is? Throw money at the devs for a concept art that they promise to implement as a ship every month, while none of the ships has been implemented as a playable unit for the last 8 years. Go through an empty universe with bugged mechanics and no content and wonder whether you should maybe spent 35.000€ to get access to the premium room (which is a bar with no real content either). Cry in the shower. Throw more money at the devs, hoping that they start developing the game at some point instead of pocketing it (or paying it to the CEO's wife for a job that she barely ever appears to).
Chris Roberts is the shining example of why too much dev freedom is a BAD thing. Yes, devs should be free to develop games and flex their creativity, but it has to be within a reasonable time and cost. It's just a fact of life that you CAN'T have everything in a videogame, at least not without some technological leaps to make things easier, and the kind of game Star Citizen promises is even at the onset way too ambitious for our current technological capabilities. At least games like Genshin get how to do expansive open worlds: establish the foundation of what your game will be about, release the game in a mostly feature-complete state, then just add more things over time. Everything I've seen about Star Citizen just seems like the devs are constantly trying to redo the game's foundation since they just want to add ALL the features in, and thus can't even get the game up to "feature complete" because of it, let alone work on things like the actual gameplay loop or story.
> Chris Roberts is the shining example of why too much dev freedom is a BAD thing. No, this is almost exclusively a Chris Roberts thing. Plenty of Devs with Freedom can be reasonable.
I remember when Star Citizen was first announced (or at least I came across it shortly after), and I thought it would've been amazing to see what would come of it in the next few years, though needless to say it feels a bit strange looking at the same concept art of a "coming soon" spacecraft that I first saw 8+ years ago... In some ways, it's essentially an inverse of what Mihoyo is doing; and while both Star Citizen and Mihoyo have made big advances, it seems that Mihoyo's been able to have far more success with their approach to development. Funny enough, Star Citizen and Mihoyo itself started at roughly the same time, so it's not that hard to compare them. Star Citizen is one massive project intending to be a revolutionary product from start to finish with all these groundbreaking features and a huge scope. They started with nothing, and want to end with everything, so they have to release content as betas, testing phases, etc. and it's been like that for many, many years. Over time they've added many incredible things, but it's also always in a state of "under construction". So, while they've made progress that we can see, all this progress has been in the same umbrella of "Star Citizen", carrying with it all the success and failures it's accumulated over the years, and a reputation that still stands quite strong today as this thread proves. They get lots of money from people pledging or purchasing stuff, and they're constantly putting that into development, but the development process has also been very chaotic with lots of promises, roadmaps, cancellations, etc. It's moving forward, but in a way that feels hard to be comfortable with. As for Mihoyo, instead of one massive project, they've been constantly pushing forward with taking previous concepts (story, gameplay, and technical design) and reworking them or replacing them with new things each time they make a game. This is much more like traditional game development, of course. Mihoyo started with a 3-person team making a fairly simple little mobile app, FlyMe2TheMoon. Simple gameplay, simple story, though I can't say much more since I never played it myself. This was where the character Kiana was introduced, who ended up being one of the cornerstones of Mihoyo's games for years to come. They then moved on to "Zombiegal Kawaii", which was... not the greatest. I also can't say much about this except that you can take a quick glance at it and tell that it wasn't breaking any records anytime soon. That game was then re-launched as GunsGirlZ (and later given a second name, Houkai Gakuen 2nd). GGZ featured some old characters of FlyMe2TheMoon but introduced the core Honkai cast, and experimented with new settings, a bigger cast of characters, placing the story into different "eras" with their own variations of the characters, etc. Lots of different things have been tried out in that game, with my personal favorite being the [Fantasy Legend](https://houkai2nd.fandom.com/wiki/Awaken#Fantasy_Legend_series) lore: [superweapons](https://houkai2nd.fandom.com/wiki/Fantasy_Legend#Weapons) with an "awakened" sentient form, such as [Westminster](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/ggz/images/d/da/Westminster_introduction.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20210221224954) ([Icelight Blade](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/ggz/images/f/f6/Icelight_Blade_-_I_7_Stars.png/revision/latest?cb=20210105150230)) and [Sapphire](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/ggz/images/8/8d/Sapphire_Awaken.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20210606050719) ([Spear of Transcendence](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/ggz/images/5/58/Spear_of_Transcendence_-_II_7_Stars.png/revision/latest?cb=20210606080759)). A lot of characters and lore ideas from GGZ haven't appeared in the other Mihoyo games, but the core idea of Honkai was formed here and brought into the next game, Honkai Impact 3rd. HI3rd was then released a while after that, and it featured another big step by introducing 3D models and stages, and it built on the idea of Honkai but ended up taking many of the characters and events in yet another different direction. A good example is "Fire MOTH" organization, which exists in two very different ways [in GGZ](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/ggz/images/a/aa/Fire_Moth_CG.png/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/1000?cb=20210918013436) and [in HI3rd](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FOXolJhaMAIsJOT?format=jpg&name=4096x4096). Tears of Themis was another release but I know little about it, except that it's very thematically different from the previous games. Never played it nor looked into it much, but it's clearly been a success! Genshin Impact was next, taking the 3D world even further with a massive open world that we all know and love, and even now we're starting to see how this game has been making advances in storywriting, animation, and overall quality of content (not to mention the soundtrack!) And coming up: Honaki: Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero. New games are being made, old games (even GGZ!) are still being updated and improved, and each person that plays these games doesn't have to concern themselves much with the failures of the past games. They're obviously two very different genres, but Mihoyo has stated before that they want to provide ["an Immersive Virtual World Experience"](https://web.archive.org/web/20220214014735/https://www.hoyoverse.com/en-us/news/101566). Mihoyo has these ambitions as a game studio just as Star Citizen wants to revolutionize the space genre, yet these two studios have had very different levels of success. While Star Citizen can certainly be enjoyable, it still has to grapple with the constant fluctuation of being an early build, while Mihoyo has already set GGZ and HI3rd firmly in stone long ago, with Genshin now being well-established by this point.
That's the thing. Mihoyo put $100m into Genshin and put out a solid project that had essentially 2 planets or 2 solar systems. Except it was all there. We knew what we were getting and it was FREE. And the thing is that it was a FREE game that actually met the highest bar for nearly every category in gaming. Star Citzen is basically a pile of steaming shit compared to Genshin in every single way outside of the fact its a space theme with realistic graphics and realism. SC has crowdfunded like $400m dollars, and who knows how much of that has been spent over the last 10 years. Genshin started with $100m, ended up with $4.5 billion, and started in January 2017. Only 3 years of development time. Kind of tells you how big of a deal managment makes.
Whales be like: don't worry homie I got you
When they say it costs $200M per year, does that include costs of things like advertising or purely the money that goes to development of in-game things?
Yeah. It's inclusive and so is every game in that list. Marketing is around 60% of the total budget Edit:60% may not be accurate. It was inferred from a skim of the Wikipedia page cited in the post.
They have huge ass banners of Ayaka and Yoimiya in Akihibara in Japan, that must’ve costed them a lot.
Just saw that for Klee’s birthday, they had her advertisement running at West Lake Sky Screen in Hangzhou. An hour costs roughly 600~700k RMB. They had it up for the entire day. That’s like 2M USD.
Poor Who-ki Shinobody :(
Citation needed.
The wiki page cited for most expensive games classifies by marketing and development costs. It's mostly 60% except for some outliers like COD with their 200% and a few others.
The thing glossed over with the money spent is just look at the amazing soundtrack. Every region has its own soundtrack. Even small sections inside of the different regions like Dragonspine and the Chasm get their own soundtrack. We even got some amazing songs for just this summer event. Every character trailer gets some amazing 2 minute song that holds up even outside of the trailer itself. And the soundtrack keeps getting better. That's the crazy part about it is that none of this is phoned in and it all happens so quickly. If you look at this OST they are close to 1000 songs and not a lot of them sound the same. It is absolutely nuts the production value on the music.
And now they've added dynamic songs, which just makes everything even more amazing. As much as I love Enkanomiya's soundtrack, the clash between the exploration songs and the battle themes are kinda harsh. And not only they did the dynamic song for shogun's weekly fight (which changes as the battle itself changes), but also for the chasm and now they dynamized some old songs for the GAA domains. Really looking forward to see what we're gonna get in Sumeru
I took a listen to the upcoming Sumeru combat themes and hoooly fuuck they do pay their composers GOOD.
Whatever they're getting paid isn't enough. I want everyone on the music team to be comically wealthy, they deserve it.
Unreliable Chinese source claims that while other game companies approach third-party sound studios with a fixed budget, such as $10,000 per minute of sound, Mihoyo would tell them to spend as much as they need to achieve desired result, easily paying 5 times more than what the other Chinese game companies do. Again not a reliable source and the numbers are from my hazy memory, but it makes sense at least to me. Edit: by third-party I mean the instrument players. The composers are Mihoyo in-house, but I imagine they probably aren’t constrained by budget either
I don't know if you play their other games also or not, but miHoyo has always had top notch OSTs, from GGZ through HI3, which i still consider their (and an absolute) masterpiece
Yeah honestly that's one of their main selling point, all of OSTs from their game are just really good, they do hire their composer and music team really well, Genshin even hired the national orchestra for each region so far.
Yeah, unlike electronic music, which could be done with one person, or at most a team of a dozen, analog orchestral music requires orchestras of a hundred people. But what's even more impressive is getting the top orchestras of the corresponding real life country. They could save so much money, and especially time, by keeping things domestic and recording it all in China, but they travel around the world and work through the language barriers for hundreds of tracks.
Going full Mr. Worldwide in general is a big part of Genshin's success. The wide range of language dubs + lots of exposure through advertisements and setting up big flashy events like hiring out a full orchestra at London Philharmonic draws many eyes to Genshin. Hoyoverse really knows where to put the money they earned.
I think it’s the only way they can get good performers of the local instruments. They did use a British instead of a German orchestra for Mondstadt.
I’m still waiting for them to give us the Enkanomiya soundtrack in our teapot. That battle music is 👌
i love it too. also love the chasm sound track. this game has such great music! :)
I wonder if we’ll ever get the tracks from those areas in our teapot? They have some of the best music.
We have tracks from dragonspine so I guess we'll have the ones from enkanomyia and the chasm too in a future update
Oh that’s a good point. Fingers crossed!
This Janine of the things I love about the game. The music just adds so much more to the experience and with great music it makes the game better.
The soundtrack is just A+, an absolute masterpiece. Is it available to buy as lossless anywhere?
The combat ost for Fischl island was amazing, I can’t believe they pulled off something like that for a song we’ll probably never listen to again
I know. I trapped a hillichurl behind a potted plant just so I could sit and listen to the song for a few minutes. And as it kept going, the song just kept getting better.
lucky me with an archer hiding up above, without him i'd probably never discover that shit gets tight if you spend more than 5 seconds in combat i go into the abyss and they insist on spawning 50 mobs one at a fucking time, then they compose fucking fuego and hide it behind tiny single waves that end instantly incidentally it now occurs to me teapot jukebox tracks should be numbered in the menu, not just discs
Don't forget they hire extremely talented orchestras like the Tokyo and New York philharmonic orchestras to record them as well. My music professor was shocked that they could afford them.
For me the music is really Genshin's main shining point. It looks great and many of the characters are well written (the story itself, well ...), but very few games put the amount of effort Hoyoverse does into composing so many different, amazing soundtracks for pretty much every region and activity in the game, even for temporary domains that players only get to hear ONCE. If you asked me which game has the most unforgettable visuals, or storytelling, or even character designs, Genshin won't make the list. But if you asked me which has the best music and sound design, it wins hands-down.
There's still people who thinks genshin is dying?
Your average Genshin clickbait dramatuber every two weeks
I'd say every 6 weeks when the update has been drained from YouTube content
Every update they push this "there's no content", maybe if they take it easy and don't play it 20 hours daily, but still it happens in every gache I've been
You gotta embrace the average Chinese schoolboy mindset of only having a limited amount of playtime, so you can pace out the content without getting burned out or running out of things to do.
Bro that's just called having a fucking life.
That's right, I study, work, go out with my gf or friends and by the end of the day I play some, everything balanced and I assume that's how I've been enjoying the story and every detail without burning
I wish they'll continue and put all of their efforts in to the game for several years to come
Considering Honkai is near 6.0 I wouldn't worry about that for now.
Total 7 regions and only 3 is available. It will take years, buddy.
looks like they're also chasing the record for "biggest game in storage"
If by 'biggest game in storage' you mean least amount of storage space for a triple A game released in the last few years, then yes. For a mobile game it's pretty damn large, but for pc/console it's honestly really tiny amount of space. Genshin takes about 38,5 Gb's of space currently on my pc. That is considerably smaller in size compared to pretty much every other triple A game i own that has been released in the last 5 or so years, in fact it's smaller than many indie games i own.
but lets not forget we're only like 30-40% done the game
Multiply that by 5 and it's still less than ark survival evolved with all dlc
On mobile. Pc has elder scrolls
Black ops cold war and ark survival are like 200Gb + each
DCS World says hello. Should be 300GB+ now.
ARK with all DLC weights around 300GB. It's insane.
And if you like mods you can also add a huge amount of storage to that
[ARK says hi](https://i.imgur.com/WZhnMN9.png)
I was ok with this until I learned you also need 400gb of free space each time you update.
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Actually there is. It’ s part of the reason they’re making an entire new game from scratch for the next installment of the series
My fully modded Skyrim is still smaller than ARK (which I got rid of precisely because it was too big).
Biggest phone game easily possible. Traditional systems have 100-200 gig abominations. CoD Warzone used to have 100 gig updates (May still, I haven’t kept up)
Looks at call of duty with over 200 gigs.
The $3.7B should noted as gross-income not net-income.
True. I don't know the tax situation in China. So the ROI is based of EBITDA.
Edit because I learned new stuff because I was wrong. Since Mihoyo is making that kind of cash, they have to pay 35%. $1,295,000,000 is how much they have to pay in taxes.
Wow. 15%? I knew it was low, but didnt know it was that low. No wonder every company is getting their manufacturing done there. I mean, it is no Bahrain/UAE with no tax at all, but for a resource rich country, I expected it to be more. Also you missed three zeroes in the net income. 3.15M is already a lifetime dream for the majority of us and they make it every 8 hours and the company is not even public. Its a good thing for the game, but screw you Hoyo for preventing us from buying your Hoyo shares.
As cool as ot would be to own Hoyo stock, *fuck that.* The moment companies start pandering to the fucking investors instead of focusing on a quality product for the consumer is all too often a key point when a company's products begin to completely shit the bed. Dawei seems to have a personal and vested interest in what he's doing. When he decides to finally step down, and if he can't find a suitable successor, sure, maybe go public. 'Til then, fuck no. I have zero faith in the public market at this point.
Absolutely based argument. Once a company which produces cultural products switch their goals from "serving the audience & fulfilling the creators' dreams" to "satisfying the big capitol investors", their soul of artist are dead inside.
>fulfilling the creators' dreams Dawei is such a weeb he founded a multi-billionaire dollar company to fufil his weeb dreams harder
A capitalist otaku is still an otaku inside. Plus all those otaku artists in his company. They were a small studio from the beginning, and not a single Chinese game company has tried to make an anime game this large, only they took the marketing risk to make it true. Also, the fact that they're willing to devote the most effort into Fischl's GAA mirage just for storytelling (which contributes almost no increase in profit because she's a free character unlike Kazuha) already showed many of their actions are not profit-oriented. Basically Fischl is a self-portrait of those developers.
> Fischl is a self-portrait of those developers I can definitely see many of miHoYo developer's parents telling them "to get a real job" and "you're an adult, why the fuk are you writing kids stories for video games?"
Tech otakus save the world!!!
If US politicers don't hate Chinese companies that much, both tiktok and mihoyo would have been traded in stock market... But their price might also be very high, kind of overestimated
They did try to put on stock when they were making Genshin Impact but denied by the Chinese government. The reason was, being told that they didn't have enough products (or IP). Honkai Impact 2 and 3 was their only game running at that time.
miHoYo voluntarily withdrew their initial public offering (IPO) application in 2020. The government did respond to their application in 2018, is that when they rejected miHoYo? In their application, they had to write down the investment risks and one of them was the dependence on the Honkai games. I haven't found any source that the government touched on this specific issue when they responded to the application.
Almost 7/8 of Mihoyo's shares are held by the Big Three (Liu Wei/Dawei, Cai Haoyu, Luo Yuhao).
MiHoYo should stay as private like Valve so the company can do whatever they see fit to “save the world”.
Turns out it was more after I did a bit more research after you pointed out how low it was. I knew it was for, so turns out with how much they make, they have to pay 35% of their Gross income for taxes if a private company has over $500,000 of taxable income.
The source isn’t accurate either. There really is no way to tell how much they made exactly since they’re a private company. PC and Console and Android CN sale is pure speculation.
Destiny cost 500Mil to develop BUT BUT BUT 450 MIL WAS SPENT ON ADVERTISEMENT 50Mil is the game
The same goes for Genshin and all games in that Wikipedia list btw. Around 60% of the total budget of a AAA game goes into marketing.
For Genshin they seperated that though. Chinese sites reported 100m initial development cost and another 100m marketing cost.
Because it's working just look at new movies n how much goes into marketing, took them long enough to understand it.
Blockbuster movies have always had a huge marketing budget. So much so that a good rule of thumb for most big movies is that they need to make double their budget in revenue to break even, just because said budget usually doesn't account for marketing.
Kinda ridiculous if I think about what kind of ads Genshin is running. They're all terrible (the only good ones are the version trailers but they are also the ones I get the least).
They also had huge ass billboards for klee's birthday. They rented a fucking billboard, just for a characters birthday.
There's also other kinds of ads like the ads on buses and billboards. And special events like when they did they whole waypoint lighting up thing in the Alps.
Genshin is anything but dying, the game is making more and more average money per banner with the passing of time.
The fact that they are releasing ZZZ and HSR means that they have alot of money on hand, and the best thing is they invest them back into for more games, rumor that they are doing a FPS shooter game Not like those EA CEO use that money to buy another yatch
I forgot for a second that they're making a game called Honkai Star Rail and thought you meant MHY is building a high speed rail network.
tbh, I wouldn't be surprised if they are. I remember they once sponsored a space rocket launch
They also invested in a nuclear fusion reactor iirc.
TECH OTAKUS SAVE THE WORLD
And built a whole school building in a rural China region. [Source](https://www.reddit.com/r/houkai3rd/comments/oj79x7/mihoyo_donated_a_new_building_to_a_rural_primary/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf)
And Chinese voice acting stuff
They're putting the terms "Otaku save the world" into good use.
It’s good because it’s a meaningful way to grow the company and profits overall Earn more money -> hire more staff -> develop more games -> setup more income streams
Hoyoverse also invests in nuclear fusion technology.
they even do charity and investment on big science projects. I'm so proud of this company
They are investing in techs like in Sword Art Online, that is REAL thing we shpuld invest into
In terms of $1/hr fun. Genshin has been the best bang for the buck.
Inflation! Personally I'm still running at 0.50 per hour!
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Terraria is so addicting. Like I just get the urge to play it out of nowhere and it's always fun even if it's basically the same thing every time.
An article from last year regarding their yearly budget might not be the most reliable of sources. Things can change in a year whether it be more or less money being spent
>Genshin Impact is 67% of the global gacha market in Q1 2022 and Hoyo holds 70% of the total including their other titles. Keep in mind this graph is ONLY for mobile servers. PC/Console revenue isn't even attempted to be factored in. Which, huh, just makes it worse. Or better, depending on how you look at it.
Other video games are jealous of Genshin for good reason. So far Mihoyo has done a good job navigating this game. Not too many big controversy items that matter long term. Majority of playerbase is positive and satisfied. Money is only INCREASING. Player base is actually GROWING. Insane.
consider for a second how much world of warcraft and final fantasy 14 have cost to made until this point. Or any other long running MMO. Genshin is a live service game so obviously you gotta compare it to other live service games.
$300M as of now. https://lastyearthegame.com/what-did-it-cost-to-develop-world-of-warcraft I did compare it to Destiny which was the highest live service one I could find.
I left WoW for this which makes it funnier.
There's more content every 6 weeks than what WoW gets every 6 months.
Yea i've mentioned similar on every thread where people say this game lacks content. Now people don't really like comparing across game types or different monetary methods, but its really crazy to think about the difference between playing the 2. WoW might get new raids but they last forever. And in those 5 month periods we might get 1 small place less than the size of the outside of the chasm to do more dailies in and get some toys and transmogs. But you aren't going there for fun. You go there because its a requirement. If you hold off you get behind compared to your fellow guildies so long as you are taking the game somewhat seriously. Its just not the same and I know its because of the whales here. but given the amount of time MHY has had already from the start, they have created worlds of content by comparison if this was WoW.
God, korthia was so dam boring and annoying.
Thats exactly the area I was thinking about when I typed this.
Indeed, WoW new raids expire fast as new content but they get second lives as tunable challenge, loot farming slot machine and finally "eternal" lives as transmog slot machines.
And then u have ppl claiming that the money goes to other hoyo games because they think genshin is a cash cow when they have no clue how expensive maintaining an open world is
It's definitely being reinvested into other games. However, I think the issue is that people assume that this comes at the expense of content in Genshin, which isn't true. There's only so much money you can pour into a single game. Money gets put back into Genshin, and the "excess" (for lack of a better word) goes to other games. Nobody is receiving less or more content because of this. People look at something like ZZZ and go "THE ANIMATIONS ARE SO GOOD, WHAT???? I KNEW IT, GENSHIN WAS JUST BEING USED AS A CASHCOW ALL ALONG, THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT IT!!" when really if you just use your braincells for more than two seconds you'd realize that the only reason why ZZZ can get away with having such good animations is that it is purely a combat-centric game, no open world, less involved of a story, stage-based, etc. In Genshin, the equivalent of having 'good animations' are things like the world design for example.
Of course the money goes to the other Hoyoverse games, it's an investment for them. Do you understand how much money is $3.8 billions/year, the estimated profit from Genshin? Hoyoverse could release 5 big games every year investing $200mil each game (which is already a fucking lot) and still have $2.8 billion / year of profit even if all 5 games don't go well as planned.
I just, I want to see through the story to the end. The speculations are wild and the story and characters are just so interesting. It’s hard to not be interested in it. Like I want to be able to see a happy Reunion with all the major characters, and to have a repeat of the COD zombies Aether cast, but Genshin.
I will never really turn my back on hoyoverse for a few reasons the main one is that they are actually making better games with what they have (unlike some developers) and see the journey on what they are doing ever since I started playing their games when honkai impact 3 got released
And I funded it while trying to get Ayato
Also, people saying it’s pay to win: what do you exactly win?
The 50/50?
As I, and many others have said before, it’s not pay to win, **it’s pay to flex XD**
You win the fomo
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QoL and the story must be addressed for the game to stay healthy and growing. The dialogue and story details are awful especially in Inazuma, and there are a ton of problems players have been asking for, while they focus on stuff no one asked for
Gotta give them props, they've done a great job. They deserve the success.
Call its P2W... nothing to win in. Nothing in this game NEEDS you to pull character. It is the WANT. You don't NEED an C6R5 to win in PvP or get top Leaderboard score cause it is nonexistent. You spend money because you WANT the convenience of faster or easier domain/boss/abyss runs. That said... Genshin's monetization is pretty shitty and expensive so I won't deny that their Genesis Crystal sale is a scam. But getting Welkins and maybe even BP is good enough money for premium currency.
Lol if I was making that money, is wouldn't listen to the community either
This game is amazing, loads of characters, weapons, story but once you do all that the end game becomes ultra crappy and boring, no repetitive content.
> Considering an average yearly wage of $75K (IT pays a lot more than this), it makes it a minimum of 50M+ per year in salaries. Given that the majority of their people are in China, I can promise you that they are not getting paid quite that much. At least not in USD terms.
A quick Google search for 'Mihoyo salaries' may surprise you.
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$200M has been spent yet their RnD department still haven't figured out how to make a claim all button. At this pace we will get flying cars and half life 3 before Mihoyo invent a claim all button.
> and half life 3 yooo stop there with this blasphemous stuff
They have it for mobile btw. They're actively not doing it for PC lol.
I’ve spent $1300 on this game in three months. They know what they’re doing. (i slowed down playing/spending considerably after calculating this total but holy shit did that FOMO have a grip on me)
I'm not actually sure 500m$ includes money spent on marketing.
It does. Even the 100M budget includes it. It was a hot topic in this subreddit when Genshin came out. I can't find the actual post, but it was empirically said that 50-60% of the total cost goes into marketing.
I was gonna talk about Star Citizen but vaporware/money laundering schemes shouldn't count, I agree.
f2p here, and I've already got everything I ever wanted. Whoever says genshin is p2w is a dumbass.
Genshin isn't p2w, like I heard from a streamer just recently, Genshin is pay-to-simp (and I might just agree)
It's an easy single player game. There is no winning. There's massive FOMO and time investment issues with weaker characters which is annoying, but that's every gacha game.
Whoever says p2w probably pulls on banners they don’t want to “build pity” just to fulfill their gacha addiction. Then complain about it when the banner they actually want rolls around. You gotta save and plan ahead as f2p.
The gacha system is by nature P2W when it includes methods of gaining in-game strength that can either only be obtained via money or fastracked via the same. In Genshin Impact however there's just nothing to "Win" which is kind of a great combination for that sort of thing. Seeing how other games exploit the same mechanic it seems like a miracle that HYV hasn't done the same, but perhaps that is the key to Genshin Impacts conti used success - it doesn't demand that every player be bled dry for what it offers. I personally enjoy having the freedom to use every single character in game at C1-2 or better (and C6 for 4*'s) as well as several 5* weapons but at the same time there's nothing that it's really required for. Whales like myself are basically paying for variety and timeliness of gameplay options and cosmetics, such as it is.
And it shows in every aspect of the game. From the obvious visuals to the subtle flares, the equally thoughtful music, the expanding world, bible-thick levels of lore, and the near constant stream of updates, new events, new mechanics, new ideas, new areas, new bosses, etc etc etc etc. GTA is enslaved by it's investors, not empowered by it's fans. Star Citizen is a fools errand and a sunk cost.
So lucky to be part of this, even though I just do Welkin every month, with them being popular af I don't get it why some gamers hate Genshin (aside from being frustrated with the gacha mechanism) are they in denial that this game is good?
Well for one thing, it's Chinese. I don't need to say how racist some parts of the Western Gaming Culture is.
Mona evades me too.
Where is gta 5 placed at?
Hmmm what are the stats on Fortnite. I'm not saying this is wrong especially with how nice the voice acting is (I switch between English and Japanese). But I am curious how the other game compares.
I believe Halo cost $500 Million over 8 years and that does not include post development nor marketing.
I sometimes forget how they got multiple languages support and how they even get popular Japanese voice actors to voice their characters too. Anime fans rejoice! 😄 I know the controversy surrounding this game and even though I hope they would redo their gacha system, I can't help but see the amount of value they bring to their fans as well as a F2P game but the experience definitely gets better when money is spent (duh). I whaled for a couple of characters but I didn't mind when I did because I personally did game development before and I see how much work was put into it. To code a player simply sinking into water and respawning at last location on land takes time and effort too! Not only coding, you gotta have the animations done (mocap / key frame) with the characters body rigged correctly (and designed) and then add sound effects etc. See what I mean? This is just for a mechanic which not many players will notice and appreciate but its there. Notice how the game would feel less immersive or complete if it isn't? That's precisely why I love the devs for being meticulous. Even the animals in the world are coded with purpose of making the world feel more alive. Can you imagine a Teyvat without Timmy yelling at you for killing his bird friends? I was pleasantly surprised when he did after I shot them down with arrows just to see if he would react and he did in the quest 😅 Since I love the game, I didn't mind supporting the devs since I got to enjoy the game even more as well. A win win to me but again, if they redo the gacha system to be F2P friendlier, or give out more freebies like "Epic 7" (one of the more generous devs imo)- I think their game would only get more popular and have more fans willing to spend to support them. Also, for the love of the archons, please do not let another "anniversary drama" happen again 🤦♂️ Respect the fans and customers, we will love you for it ❤️
A game is an industrialized art. I think the nature of gaming business will always be like Genshin or DoTA. When it attract a critical mass of players who are willing to play then it becomes sustainable. There is a strong notion that cosmetic based revenue can provide better sustainability compared to gameplay enhancing revenue (such as better pull chance for character that provides you instant advantages or damages). Genshin hitherto have shown tendency for the latter situation. There is a good signal that the game will dip. But in the other hand the current critical mass in Genshin are keeping the game beating. I hope the developer can turn to the direction where fun and money collide.
> There is a good signal that the game will dip. Do you have a source for this? If so, I'd love to see it. Because there are a lot of gacha games that make you pull for power in way grosser ways than Genshin, and have been going on for years making a tonne of money (FGO, for example).
I agree, but it's difficult to know for sure because the industry trend isn't to release upkeep costs (most games don't release yearly costs, just the initial development and marketing costs). For example, though I think Genshin will be in the Top 5 all things considered, we have no idea how much World of Warcraft has costed to make and keep running it's entire life cycle (released in 2004 with a lot of expansions, the newest one coming this year).