It's no secret that gacha games make a mindblowing amount of money each and every month, and developer HoYoverse has got the formula down to a tee. Its latest release, Zenless Zone Zero, has debuted with a respectable estimated $96 million in its first month on mobile alone – but that still somehow makes it one of HoYo's weakest recent launches.
RPG game has earned nearly $100 million on mobile, beating heavy hitting gacha games like Love and Deepspace, Naruto Mobile, Wuthering Waves, and even Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail in July 2024.
While the gacha RPG is great, as our ZZZ tier list, it's no wonder people were spending big.
Interestingly, this coincided with an estimated $31 million drop in Genshin Impact's monthly revenue and a $60 million decrease worldwide for Honkai Star Rail, which likely correlate with ZZZ's explosive launch – people spent their money on Zenless during its opening month, rather than the established HoYo classics.
Importantly, these statistics, courtesy of free games right now.
To put this into perspective, however, Zenless Zone Zero's launch is still the weakest of HoYo's big releases. Genshin Impact, the game that arguably put gachas in the mainstream thanks to its Breath of the Wild inspirations, grossed upwards of $245 million by the end of its first month. Likewise, Honkai Star Rail topped $130 million in mobile revenue at launch.
If we're lucky, perhaps HoYoverse will celebrate such a successful launch with free rewards, like fresh next Zenless Zone Zero update, version 1.1, heaps of Polychrome would be greatly appreciated.
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