Disclaimer: This article is an opinionated blog post written based on personal requirements and represents only a subjective perspective. The terms used in the text, such as "parasitic marketing" and "black-red marketing," are critical expressions and not legal determinations. The gaming industry is a complex ecosystem of creativity and commerce. Appreciating or criticizing a product is the consumer's freedom. Let's focus on the merits and maintain rational discussion.
This is an in-depth commentary from the perspectives of industry depth, design logic, and the culture industry. It attempts to move beyond emotional disputes and instead explore how Genshin Impact and its followers have reshaped the global gaming industry, and the price paid for this reshaping.
The Originality Black Hole Behind the Industrial Miracle: On the Hidden Erosion of the "Genshin Model" on the Industry
Preface: When "Success" Becomes the Only Criterion for Aesthetics
When discussing current domestic games, we cannot bypass Genshin Impact. As a behemoth with annual revenues measured in billions of US dollars and Daily Active Users (DAU) consistently at the top tier, its success in commercial logic and industrial processes is self-evident.
However, as an industry observer deeply involved in and focused on the coupling of narrative and mechanics, I hold a cautiously critical attitude towards it and the wave of "open-world + Gacha" follow-ups it has inspired. This aversion does not stem from elitist arrogance, but from a harsh reality: when a highly precision-calculated "commercial greatest common divisor" dominates the market, the boundaries of games as the "Ninth Art" are shrinking, replaced by a premium industrial product called "content-as-a-service."
According to Sensor Tower data, Genshin Impact's mobile revenue from 2020-2024 exceeded $5 billion, with an average annual revenue of $1-1.5 billion; third-party estimates place its global DAU at around 20-30 million, firmly in the first tier of mobile games. In terms of industrialization, miHoYo initially invested approximately $100 million in R&D, assembling a team of over a thousand people. It used a proprietary engine (based on licensed Unity source code, optimizing the mobile graphics stack's draw calls and deeply customizing its self-developed Visual Scripting system) and a standardized digital asset design and delivery system. It maintains high-frequency content updates (approximately every six weeks), with an estimated annual cost of over $1 billion. These figures attest to its success as a "highly precision-calculated commercial greatest common divisor" and also reflect the ultimate efficiency of its industrial processes.
I. Parasitic Marketing and "Symbolic Borrowing": Deconstructing the Origin of Controversy
The initial entanglement between Genshin Impact and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is often reviewed within the industry as an incredibly successful "breakthrough marketing campaign." But at the level of design theory, this involves a profound symbolic usurpation.
1. The Psychological Anchor for Lowering Cognition
From color science to the physical feedback of environmental interactions, early Genshin Impact heavily borrowed visual language already validated by Nintendo. This was not simple plagiarism, but a strategy of "establishing user expectations at low cost." By borrowing the sense of déjà vu from a top-tier IP, miHoYo successfully achieved extremely low-cost user acquisition (UA) on a global scale, quickly building a psychological illusion that "you can play a console-level blockbuster on mobile."
e.g., During the smartphone explosion, Samsung, by deeply dissecting the iPhone's industrial design language and interaction logic (such as "slide to unlock" and rounded rectangle icons), created a strong "high-end sense of déjà vu" in both visuals and feel. This was not mere imitation, but leveraging the market education Apple had already completed to quickly establish the perception "Samsung = the Android iPhone" in consumers' minds. This strategy allowed it to achieve a rapid leap in brand value while saving on the massive costs of cultivating user habits.
2. Controversy as a Lever for Traffic
From a communication studies perspective, the fan opposition ignited by this strategy is, in essence, a form of "polarization marketing." When opposing sides fiercely debate on social media, the product's popularity is pushed to heights it doesn't deserve. This path, which consumes controversy rather than originality, sets an extremely pernicious paradigm for followers: as long as you win, aesthetic integrity and reverence for originality in the process can be sacrificed.
Pepsi, through blind taste test marketing, deliberately created a binary opposition with the industry leader, Coca-Cola. This strategy did not emphasize the originality of its unique formula, but rather, by inciting a group debate over "which tastes better," it leveraged consumers' identity and polarized emotions to displace market share. This protracted "cola war" transformed consumer behavior into a sociological battle of believers, pressuring Coca-Cola into recklessly launching "New Coke" in 1985, leading to a brand disaster. Pepsi thereby successfully consumed the controversy, and when its brand power had not yet reached its opponent's level, it used the leverage of public opinion to achieve a rapid climb in position.
The Underlying Logic of Polarization Marketing—"In-group" and "Othering" This strategy is known in social psychology as "In-group Favoritism"—in short, it's when individuals believe the group they belong to is superior to others. When a product like Genshin Impact establishes a connection with a top-tier IP through visual symbols and sparks controversy, it effectively carves a chasm within the user base:
Creating the "Other": By challenging established industry authorities (like Nintendo or hardcore gamers), it successfully defines critics as "arrogant elites," thereby triggering a protective instinct in its core audience.
【Modern Warfare Ⅰ: Tencent Suppression】 https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1io4y147No/?share_source=copy_web&vd_source=d62faf7b2afb53b183d0761fe26174bf
Identity Anchoring: Supporters in the debate are no longer fighting for product quality, but for their identity. This "us vs. them" binary opposition induces a defensive psychological suggestion in users, causing cognitive bias towards the product's flaws and negative public opinion, turning a blind eye to them, thus creating extremely high brand loyalty.
Heat Loop: Every clash between the opposing sides becomes a free promotional slot for the product under algorithmic recommendation mechanisms. The darkest aspect of this strategy is that it doesn't care about positive or negative reviews; it only cares about stripping away the "centrists," turning social spaces into a complete meat grinder of emotions to extract the maximum commercial attention.
II. Mechanic Dissonance: The Essential Harm of Gacha Logic to Open Worlds
From a ludological perspective, the "Genshin model" possesses an inherent mechanical contradiction, and this contradiction is being infinitely amplified by countless followers.
1. The Conflict Between Exploration Drive and Numerical Lock
The essence of an open world lies in "curiosity-driven exploration" and "non-linear discovery." However, in "Genshin-like" games, all exploration must ultimately point to numerical growth—a "check-in pilgrimage" performed for gacha resources or leveling materials.
Data Support: According to industry retention analysis of open-world mobile games, after users complete initial map exploration, their core motivation quickly shifts from "discovering novelty" to "resource acquisition efficiency."①
① According to GameAnalytics' industry benchmark data and Solsten's behavioral analysis, there is a clear stage transition in the retention motivation for open-world mobile games. In the D1 to D7 (short-term retention) stage, driven by the first impression (FTUE), a "sense of discovery" and aesthetic experience are the core retention factors. However, once the map's novelty wears off, D30 (long-term retention) rates often plummet to below 10%. At this point, player behavior undergoes an "efficiency turn": research shows that over 70% of active players in long-term operation invest their time in "daily quests" and "stamina consumption" with the highest resource output ratio, rather than in free exploration. This phenomenon is known in the industry as the "content consumption gap," forcing developers to forcibly maintain daily activity through numerically-driven progression systems and time-limited events (FOMO mechanics). This confirms the article's point: under the logic of resource-cycling gacha systems, open worlds often devolve from an "adventure stage" into a "numerical container for efficient grinding."
Consequence: This causes the open world to become a vast, hollow numerical container rather than an organic whole with narrative depth.
2. "Design Mediocrity" Under Path Dependency
To adapt to multiple platforms and a wide age range, such products exhibit strong conservatism in level design. It's difficult to find challenges based on complex physical rules or emergent gameplay in these games; instead, they feature repetitive and fragmented minigames. This is an inevitable choice under industrial production—to ensure high-frequency content output (typically a new version every six weeks), depth must be sacrificed for production speed.
International Case: Ubisoft's "Formulaic" Dilemma. Ubisoft is the originator of the "checklist open world." In the development of its Assassin's Creed or Far Cry series, to ensure thousands of developers worldwide could collaborate and deliver on schedule, levels were highly modularized: constructed around the core of "towers (unlocking fog of war) + outposts (combat loop) + collectibles." In this model, levels had to sacrifice complex systemic interactions to prevent emergent gameplay from causing logical conflicts (bugs) that would slow down the rapid release cycle of every 1-2 years, leading to them being mockingly called "assembly-line games" by players.
Domestic Case: NetEase's Justice Online Mobile "Sewn-together" Design. When developing open-world levels, due to the need to maintain an extremely fast output of a major version every 6-8 weeks, developers tend to directly embed a large number of mature, even borrowed, logics from other minigames (like block-pushing puzzles, jigsaw puzzles) into the map. These puzzle points are often single-logic, script-driven events rather than free solutions based on a physics engine. This conservative design significantly reduces R&D debugging costs and multi-platform adaptation difficulty, but turns the "open world" into a patchwork of countless trivial, homogeneous minigames, losing innovative depth at the mechanical level.
III. The Aesthetic Common Denominator: "Plasticized" Expression Under the Culture Industry
In the field of culture and art, the Frankfurt School proposed the concept of the "culture industry" (Kulturindustrie), where artworks are mass-produced according to a factory model.①
① See Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1947. The authors used "culture industry" to criticize capitalism's degradation of art into exchangeable commodities, emphasizing the erosion of aesthetic diversity by standardization, predictability, and profit-orientation.
1. Excessive Homogenization of the Anime Aesthetic
Genshin Impact and its followers promote a "highly purified anime style." This style pursues absolute safety and appeal in color, proportion, and character design, yet loses the "rough edges" and personal flair most important in artistic creation.
Theoretical Support in Design: Baudrillard's "simulacra" theory posits that when a simulation is more attractive than the real, the real ceases to exist. When all art resources in the industry align with this "industrialized refinement," domestic games are sinking into a quagmire of aesthetic homogenization.②
② See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Simulacres et Simulation), 1981. The author proposes the "three orders of simulacra": counterfeit, production, and simulation, pointing out that when signs completely detach from their referents, the real is "murdered," and society enters a state of "hyperreality."
2. The Fragmentation and Invalidity of Narrative
To accommodate long-term operation, the narratives of these games are often drawn out and severely padded. This "never-ending" structure strips away the tragic or conclusive sense that a complete work of art requires. Players no longer consume the story itself, but a meticulously calculated "emotional connection" with virtual characters.③
③ This phenomenon can be corroborated by the theories of German sociologist and media theorist Siegfried Kracauer and postmodernist scholar Fredric Jameson on "consumption fragments" and "aesthetic termination."
The most incisive academic citation comes from the renowned contemporary Japanese cultural critic Hiroki Azuma's "Database Consumption" theory proposed in his seminal work, Otaku: Japan's Database Animals:
"In postmodern cultural consumption, grand narratives have withered, replaced by the consumption of 'moe elements' and 'character databases.' Consumers no longer pursue the integrity or profound meaning of a story, but instead derive emotional satisfaction from the constant recombination of specific symbols (such as character attributes)."
In-depth Analysis
Azuma points out that in contemporary anime and gaming culture, a work is no longer seen as an artistic entity with a closed ending, but rather as an "eternally open database."
Deconstruction of Narrative: To maintain commercial longevity, narrative must be demoted to a supporting tool for keeping characters active. As you stated, this "padding" is to ensure the database is constantly updated, preventing players from aesthetically disengaging due to the "end of the story."
Affective Labor: What players invest in is not an aesthetic appreciation for literary tragedy, but a "simulated link" meticulously designed by algorithms and numbers. This connection is spatial (constantly adding new characters) rather than temporal (moving towards a final judgment and conclusion), thus completely depriving the work of the "sense of finality" it should have as a complete piece of art.
【【Rebroadcast】Why has Genshin Impact become so utterly terrible? [In-depth Analysis]】 https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1htT3zEEc5/?share_source=copy_web&vd_source=d62faf7b2afb53b183d0761fe26174bf
IV. Hidden Worries of an Industry Winter: The Crowding-Out Effect on Innovation Capital
The most concerning aspect is the long-term impact of this model on the industry's ecosystem.
Capital's Risk Aversion: When investors see the astonishing return rates (high ARPU and LTV) of the Genshin Impact model, they instinctively shy away from original projects with an experimental nature, single-player experiences, or strong narrative drives.
This phenomenon is known within the industry as the crowding-out effect following the "Genshin Impact Shock."
Case Study of Capital Flight: After the massive success of Genshin Impact, Sony explicitly pivoted to a "Games-as-a-Service (GaaS)" strategy, announcing in 2023 that it would allocate 60% of its R&D budget to it. This directly led to the de-prioritization or even cancellation of strongly narrative-driven internal projects like the multiplayer mode for The Last of Us.
Academic/Industry Theory: Gaming studies scholars note that the "survivorship bias" from high returns has reshaped investment portfolio models. According to Niko Partners data, since 2020, global VCs' premiums for anime/gacha projects have far exceeded those for traditional indie games, as the latter lack the predictability of "long-term operation (LTV management)."
Domestic Status Quo: Between 2021 and 2023, a large number of mid-sized domestic teams attempted to replicate the "industrialized open world," leading to highly experimental, purely single-player projects being forced to add monetization points during their funding stages due to their limited ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) ceiling, or otherwise struggling to get approved.
The Talent Meat Grinder: A large number of excellent programmers, artists, and planners are being funneled into this high-intensity, low-innovation "content assembly line." In the long run, the industry will lose the soil to nurture the next disruptive product like Baldur's Gate 3 or Elden Ring.
We are entering an era of "many followers, few pioneers." Every project proposal benchmarks Genshin Impact, every system learns from its commercial closed loop. This collective path dependency is, in fact, a slow strangulation of Chinese gaming's original creative capabilities.
Epilogue: Searching for the Future on the Ruins of Prosperity I do not hate the success of Genshin Impact as a commercial product, but I deeply detest the industry atmosphere it has fostered—a terrifying Orwellian ethos of "games as a service, service as numbers, numbers as everything." If the future of domestic games only consists of exquisite models, proficient gacha mechanics, and endless numerical competitions, then this prosperity is but a grand false prosperity.
What we need are madmen who dare to seek expression outside of commercial logic, creators willing to innovate in mechanical design, not factory apprentices injecting plastic into mature molds.
Roger, First Edition, July 2023, Chaoyang, Beijing. Second Edition, November 2025, Minhang, Shanghai.
The original text was stored on Google Drive. It has now been modified with added images and migrated to the blog.
Postscript This "blog" itself is also a simulated expression of a certain viewpoint and does not represent a comprehensive negation of any specific product or team. If you have a different opinion, rational discussion is welcome. After all, the purpose of criticism is for better construction, not merely for venting.