The Version 4.4 livestream seems to be the touchpaper for the Chinese gaming community’s Genshin Impact revolt arc.
Have you ever seen pissed off Otakus. Just take a look over at Chinese focused social media. Genshin Impact developer HoYoverse is currently facing something of a backlash from a large swathe of its community, and it seems that the social media outrage kicked off over the rewards announced on a recent Lantern Rights Festival livestream. Dropping around the same time as Genshin Impact’s 3-year anniversary, the Lantern Rights Festival is Genshin Impact’s seasonal New Year event. featuring beautiful new costumes, themed events, and a seemingly spare number of rewards, this has left sections of the community voicing their concerns.
Preview events dropped recently for the imminent release of Genshin’s 4.4 update, introducing a range of free drops, that are detailed over in our own breakdown. This includes up to 10 Intertwined Fates via the May Fortune Find You log-in event. An Of Kites and New Sights event also additional resources to the reward stack. Alongside this, players can also grab in-game gold, exp, and a character skin for participating in other events.
When presented without comment, this might have been seen as less than optimal, but the presentation of three free banner pulls, called Intertwined Fates, as a thank you for three years of support might have set off the storm.
The Fall Out
Since the start of the week, social media across Bilibili, Douyin, Tiktok, and more has seen some impactful responses from HoYo’s homegrown player base. Millions of subscribers have left local social media accounts linked to the game and review bombing on Bilibili continues to occur.
We’ve even seen talk of strikes on the title that haven’t died down over the past few days. How this actually impacts the title’s standing and income is yet to be seen, but the noise is significant enough that Western outlets are beginning to take notice.
https://twitter.com/GenshinUpdate/status/1749334368454385995
Is That It?
Well no. While Genshin Impact is one of the world’s most popular free to play titles, it relies on its player base cashing in real-world currency at a chance to pull playable in-game characters from a gacha system. While this is a perfectly normalized system for free-to-play games, Genshin Impact has faced some pushback over the content of these systems. Increased drop rate promotions, called Banner Events, have featured re runs, sub-optimal characters, and other issues according to community commentary.
This also feeds into other complaints surrounding the game’s overall meta, character viability, and missing quality-of-life improvements. Probably most infuriating to fans is the willingness of HoYoverse to provide vastly superior free rewards to players in its other games. In particular, Honkai Star Rail just gave away a wildly powerful 5-star character via the same in-game mail system. By comparison, this makes three Intertwined Fates feel rather disappointing.
Right now, we don’t have an update from HoYoverse, although we’ve asked for comment. Don’t misunderstand, I love my time in Teyvat but if HoYoverse plans to do something to quell the Genshin Impact revolt, it probably best be soon. You can check out Genshin Impact over on the official website.
