Genshin Impact Review Bombed to Hell and Back
Yesterday was the first birthday of free-to-play game Genshin Impact. Unhappy with the event organized on this occasion and the prizes that could be won, the community prepared a „gift” to MiHoYo - the players conducted a thorough review bombing of the production in Google Play, drastically lowering its rating.
On Friday, we informed that the announcement of Genshin Impact's anniversary event met with a very negative response from the community. Its members showed their dissatisfaction especially in the matter of rewards, which were basically limited to 10 tickets received for daily logins (their real value is about $20). Some players hoped that the developers from MiHoYo would reconsider and give away the coveted five-star characters. However, this did not happen, so yesterday, on the first birthday of Genshin Impact, the frustrated community conducted a review bombing of the mobile version of the game available on Google Play.
Mass of extremely negative, one-star reviews made the overall rating of 4.6 stars (out of five possible), which Genshin Impact could boast in the store, has fallen dramatically - yesterday it was between 1.9 and 2.0, but if you visit the app's subpage now, you will notice that its rating is 2.8 (for comparison, in App Store the game still holds a high rating of 4.7 - although with significantly fewer reviews).
This is probably due to the fact that the rules of Google Play prohibit users from issuing false, inaccurate and misleading reviews. Consequently, many negative opinions have been removed. This is important because the algorithm calculating the overall rating of products gives more weight to new reviews, which - in theory - should reflect the current quality of the app, and not its state from before a few updates, before which it did not have, for example, some of the features.
Review bombing of Genshin Impact goes deeper - the promotional video shared yesterday on the game's YouTube channel (see above) received as many as 46 thousand thumbs down (with 98 thousand thumbs up). In comparison, the previous four videos received only a few thousand (5.8 thousand, 3.2 thousand, 1.8 thousand, and 1 thousand respectively). What's more, the game's channels on Discord have been flooded with the Qiqi emote, which has become a symbol of player dissatisfaction. To make things even more interesting, another, older MiHoYo game - Honkai Impact 3rd- was hit with collateral. Many of the one-star reviews it has received in recent days are due to the dissatisfaction of players caused by the event and the awards in Genshin Impact.
So we can say that the problem we wrote about on Friday is escalating. Will - and how - the developers deal with the community? Submissiveness could make things even more unstable in the future, and the lack of action could further damage the already tarnished image of the Chinese company. It remains to wait for the situation to unfold.
