Genshin Impact's First Birthday Overshadowed by Controversy
In four days, Genshin Impact will celebrate its first birthday. In theory, both the devs at miHoYo and the community should be celebrating. In practice, the latter resent the former - mainly for the poor rewards, but also for making it impossible to write comments.
Genshin Impact turned out to be a great success for miHoYo - Chinese developers proved that they can release a F2P AAA game and make millions on it. For twelve months, the title received a lot of new content, becoming even bigger and better. Its first birthday, which falls on September 28, should be the crowning achievement of the period. In theory, everything's fine - there are events and rewards. In practice, the players are not satisfied; they expected cool, worthwhile challenges, and received a number of competitions - for cosplay, photo, or graphics - in which, although intented to advertise the game, feature no attractive items to win, and nobody cares about the offered little bit of currency.
The community complains above all about the lack of opportunities to acquire additional five-star characters. What's interesting, no one even asks for characters that can be drawn from the limited time banners - most players would settle for heroes from the basic roster. Many people already have Jean, Mona, Diluca, Keqing, and Qiqi in their collection, but Genshin Impact constantly attracts new users, for whom each of these characters would be worth their weight in gold to start with. Veterans wouldn't be at a loss either, as they would gain another constellation level for the character, which often comes with significant upgrades.
miHoYo could give out these types of rewards for free - considering the studio's revenues the developers can simply afford such a gesture. They would satisfy the community, while not losing anything themselves. Despite that, they decided not to make this move - thus causing frustration among players, which only increased when it turned out that chances to win some of these poor prizes are terribly small.
Another ugly move on the part of developers was the removal of the announcement about the anniversary event and associated prizes from HoYoLAB.com. Some time later the same information appeared on the official website but here, in contrast to the aforementioned service, there is no comment system. Apparently, the devs have no intention to discuss anything with the frustrated community - instead, they decided to silent the louder members of the community.
The leatter were not idle and moved to Reddit... where some of the entries were removed by moderation. Everyone added their two cents - from "whales" spending exorbitant amounts on microtransactions to "normie" players. All these posts have one thing in common - disappointment with the developers' stinginess, the slightly better rewards in China (although the community the local doesn't seem to be satisfied either), the comment censorship, the attempt to sweep the entire thing under the rug. The latter in particular seems to have succeeded for the developers; as user _Lomax_ noted:
The developers at miHoYo may yet get out this without losing face, but there's no indication that they're doing anything towards that goal. Patch 2.2 is to be released in October, which - very likely - will turn out to be another success, so the community will probably forgive the creators, and Genshin Impact will be developed further. Especially since this isn't the first failed event in the game's history; after all, everyone eventually forgot about the previous one. It's doubtful that fans will quickly forget this kind of disappointment. One can only hope that the devs will draw the right conclusions for the future and Genshin Impact's second birthday will go as it should.
