I mean I hate to say I told you so to the commenters in my last topic about this but I don't hate it. Facts are facts. Genshin has not been doing well. Star Rail has been doing worse. And MiHoYo still hasn't learned from its obvious mistakes.
But now thanks to good ol' China MiHoYo is in more trouble. I brought this up years ago the last time China laid the whammy on the games industry. Back then the topic was about MiHoYo becoming Cognosphere and setting up a headquarters in Singapore. Because of China's Gaming Hunt Decree it was a good idea for local developers to get closer to their global markets where the regulations are still loose.
And the effects were noticeable. For a while more of Genshin's profits were coming from global markets.
But that's over again and it's not surprising to see why.
Of course this news from China is being reported on in the usual mass media way. "China's in a panic!" "They're doing damage control because the stocks are down!" "It'll never get passed!" But more level-headed people have noted that despite public backlash or an impact to stocks China doesn't bow to money like most leaderships do. (Just look at the huge economic hit they took with their Zero-Covid policy and they still got it done successfully which left their massive population mostly unscathed compared to all of us.) And their purpose for the new regulations is to curb gaming addiction which many people even on our side of the world agree with. So it looks likely that these regulations will pass and that severely limits MiHoYo's local earnings potential. More and more they'll want to improve relations with the global market. Or you know, fizzle out. It's up to them.
So what specifically will change? Well for one we may not have to play every day anymore.
It's still not clear how much the regulators understand about mobile games. When they say rewards does that include energy systems like Genshin's Resin? After all it technically doesn't "reward" us for logging in on time to use it. It just builds up while we're not playing and there's a cap that requires at least 2 logins per day to not waste. If the purpose of this is to prevent gamers from being forced to play a game then energy systems need to be addressed too. After all we don't really have daily login rewards in-game. It's just because of stuff like the Expeditions and using up Resin that we have to play at certain intervals. If it does get included though we may just get an increase in our Resin caps to at least 180 which will reduce our logins to once a day. (we get 180 resin in a 24hr period) Even better would be removing the limit on Condensed Resin so we could log in, quickly make some and then log off. Then we could play whenever we actually want. It'll be up to MiHoYo to convince us to want to play more.
Also does this regulation extend to game related apps and websites? After all while we don't in-game we do have a daily login reward system on Hoyolab. We're forced to login every day to get 60 primogems per month. If this regulation extends to that none of us will be forced to come here every day. That will mean MiHoYo would need to find a better way of getting us here like you know improving relations with the players so we'll actually want to be here.
This is most damning for MiHoYo. After all whales prop up this company. Guys like Tectone had already spent 10s of 1000s of dollars on this game years ago. I doubt it'd be any different with local Chinese whales. If the upper limit of their spending is fixed that will force MiHoYo to find ways of getting more dolphins to spend up to the cap and also motivate f2p players to start spending. And how would they do that? Well for starters not ******* off the playerbase would help immensely.
And this last part is interesting. It's not quite anything that would harm MiHoYo or Genshin but it could be a plus for us players. Genshin is a 12+ game in China. That means it caters to all audiences including kids. Think Rated E in the ESRB system. We can see that Genshin's stories are nowhere near as bleak as Honkai's. But if they are no longer allowed to use gacha mechanics on kids it would benefit MiHoYo to change Genshin from a 12+ game to at least a 15+ game like Honkai. That way the more mature themes could appeal to older audiences and older audiences aren't limited by this regulation.
Bottom line: Either these regulations force a global change in Genshin that will force MiHoYo to cater more towards what we players actually want or they'll shift further towards Cognosphere which means they'll want to cater more towards what we international players actually want. Win-win for us.
It's really in MiHoYo's hands now. They've had the solutions to all of their problems for years, they just never did anything with it and kept digging. Now they've hit the bedrock that is Chinese regulators. You know it's also funny, on this side of the world we'd been told that the CN players were always angry with MiHoYo's decisions but that wasn't true. For the longest time CN players defended most of MiHoYo's decisions even the lackluster rewards of previous milestones. My friends have shown me topics responding to almost every controversy we've ever cooked up about the game like Nahida's skin color or supposed nerfs to characters and the topics all tended to follow a theme of "Is that what these people care about? What is wrong with them?" But this time they are actually up in arms too. And it really is MiHoYo's fault. They had to go and say "as thanks for player support" they were gifting us those 3 Intertwined Fates. That's been the headlines for so many angry CN community topics lol. To compare even as recently as the 3rd anniversary the CN players were defending MiHoYo because Genshin was just the best mobile game to date. Genshin Killers had come and gone several times so despite the rewards being so small they were good enough for the kind of game Genshin was. And MiHoYo managed to **** them off too lol
To conclude I think we're at the stage where either MiHoYo shapes up or it ships out. I think I've talked enough about this myself and while the stuff I'd been predicting keeps coming true MiHoYo has not done anything different. So unless that miraculously changes I won't be addressing this issue any more.
Let's all just keep playing this game (or don't) for as long as it can last. Hopefully if MiHoYo crumbles it'll serve as a cautionary tale for some other game developer to do right by us.
Tips and Tricks from a Super Casual Genshin f2p
Commentaries on Genshin Impact and MiHoYo
PS: Also I'm really happy this final straw seems to have also woken some people up about what's really wrong at MiHoYo. For the longest time it was just "the devs" but this is the first time I've seen people separate out "the devs" with "the management" and specified that it isn't the devs fault for any of this but instead poor management at MiHoYo. Yeah guys please sympathize with the hardworking devs of Genshin. The game we all love playing comes from them. The problems we have with it are purely from the execs running the show. If MiHoYo does crumble I really hope the dev team goes on to be hired by worthy management.
