On September 28, 2021, Genshin Impact, a free-to-play gacha game, made by miHoYo, had their first ever anniversary. However, the game’s community, along with others, are infuriated by the lack of rewards and communication between the player base and the company.

Genshin Impact is an open-world Action/Adventure RPG game made by miHoYo, was launched on September 28, 2020. According to Sensor Tower, the game, during its 1 year of being available to the public, broke new sales records, with the developers (miHoYo) securing a whopping $2 billion in just mobile platforms. This allowed them to be the No. 3 revenue generating mobile game globally. This was because of the gacha* system in the game, which allows players to spend money to get in-game items and characters by “wishing”, and the fantastic designs and backstories that all characters have. According to an anonymous Genshin Impact player, “I play [the game] because I like the storyline and because the graphics are pretty, not for the gacha/reward system.”

Due to the fact that Genshin Impact made so much money because of the gacha system implemented in the game, the players thought they would get good rewards during the game’s anniversary. In the gacha world, anniversary events are a big deal, because it is a time when the game thanks the players for playing their game and sticking with it for a year. Gacha games usually show gratitude by giving players significant rewards.

When miHoYo announced the anniversary event/rewards on September 20th, the players were furious to find out that all of the events were community based (cosplays and fanart made by community), with the rewards not given to everyone who participated. Some of the player base, who were furious at miHoYo for giving nearly no rewards, took drastic measures. They gave the game bad reviews on Google Play, and dropped the game’s rating from a 4.5 to a whopping 1.9 in just a short period of time. Some players also spammed an emoji, which depicted a character from the game crying, on the official Discord server. According to Forbes, “Discussion has been…heated, so much so that official forums on places like reddit or Discord have mostly banned complaints about anniversary rewards.” On the day of the anniversary, Genshin Impact released another event, this time in-game. They put on a 7-day log-in event, where players could get up to 10 wishes.

The players then targeted other games to review bomb and to leave comments about how the Genshin Impact rewards weren’t up to their standards and how they were disappointing. Some games that were impacted by this were: Honkai Impact, Arknights, Tears of Themis, Clash of Clans, Cookie Run Kingdom, Fate/Grand Order, Epic Seven, Punishing Grey Raven, Dragalia Lost, and League of Legends: Wild Rift, with Honkai Impact and Tears of Themis being impacted the hardest, because they were made by the same company that made Genshin Impact.

Furthermore, the players, who were first mad at the rewards, began to talk about how miHoYo isn’t listening to the community, and not fixing bugs in the game. This blew up, resulting in more players openly criticizing the game developers for being greedy and not caring about the game.

Currently, discussions and arguments have quieted down, with the game ratings going back up to 3.6. However, the community is like a pile of dry wood, ready to be set off at any moment by a single mistake from miHoYo.

*Gacha (or Gachapon) is a monetization technique used in many successful Japanese free to play games. Originally a term used for Japanese Toy machines, this is used to describe games that pull a selection of data, people, heroes, etc. from a large pool at random.