Chinese developer miHoYo’s free-to-play RPG Genshin Impact earned critical acclaim upon its launch last year, and it’s proven a huge commercial boon, too. A new report from Sensor Tower estimates its revenue as having already hit $874 million, making it the third highest-earning mobile game in the five months since its release.
Only Honor of Kings and PUBG mobile best its performance, with Genshin Impact’s $175 million per month average revenue enough to see it beat out giants like Niantic’s Pokemon GO.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, China is Genshin Impact’s most lucrative region, comprising $253 million, or 29 percent, of global player spending. Japan sits just behind with $237 million, a region where mobile gaming dominates as the most popular platform.
Sensor Tower notes that Genshin Impact’s success is likely to pave the way for more games to emulate its free-to-play blueprint. Not that free-to-play is anything new, of course, but rather the same commitment to offering huge, content-rich sandbox games monetized with unobtrusive gacha mechanics.
I noted that same notion in my review of Genshin Impact — the hope that Genshin Impact would, indeed, inspire other developers to push monetization through a commitment to quality content, as opposed to the egregious in-game marketing that is an oft bemoaned aspect of the mobile segment today.
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