Genshin Impact is an RPG from China and is currently doing very well in the West. It features characters that can be quickly sexualized. This was a conscious decision confirmed by one of the heads of the developer miHoYo.
What is the situation with the game? Genshin Impact offers various characters for you to play. In the game’s community, they are not only ranked by their strength, but also by their “Waifu” and “Husbando” level.
It is mainly about whether the characters are particularly cute or sexy and match personal taste. MeinMMO editor Irina Moritz has already dealt with the topic and suspects that the sexualization of the characters is the intention of the developers.
The colleagues from the South China Morning Post have discussed this topic with the developer miHoYo. They confirm that the characters were deliberately chosen to earn money from lonely men.
Girls are an important gameplay element
What exactly do the developers say? Cai Haoyu, co-founder and president of miHoYo, describes himself as a well-meaning otaku. It is a Japanese slang term for nerds who do not leave their homes. It is also used in a derogatory sense.
The game is aimed precisely at this target group, according to the developers, and Cai Haoyu therefore considers “girls an important element” in the game.
He himself played the MMORPG Blade and Soul in the past because there was a user script to undress women and track breast movement.
Does the system work? Genshin Impact relies on a gacha system for monetization and therefore a lot of randomness. This works and has already helped the RPG recoup its entire development costs within 2 weeks of release. Although it is technically free, more than 100 million dollars have been generated.
Some of you have already spent money in the game, as our survey has shown.
Liu Wei, one of the co-founders of miHoYo, sees the strength of their monetization mainly in the women. Players are supposed to “pay for their love for characters” and are even willing to spend more on these than on stronger weapons:
We asked ourselves why we want to pay for it: because we love a certain virtual character, we are willing to pay for them. This payment impulse was the opposite of what mainstream games were offering at the time.
Liu Wei at the China Games Industry Annual Conference 2017
That this works is also shown repeatedly by players who are willing to spend $2,000 or even more in pursuit of their desired character.
The game has a system: Games with cute and sexualized characters are not new to the developers. In 2014, they already released the game “Guns Girl – Honkai Gakuen”. This is a zombie shooter that is rated positively with 4.4 out of 5 stars on Google Play.
Here, too, various characters play an important role, as well as their appearance.
However, Genshin Impact can also be excellently played without focusing too much on the characters. Furthermore, the RPG is supposed to be a service game and constantly developed. Among the new content, there will naturally be new characters.
