UPDATE 16/7/2024: Wuthering Waves’ viewership data in the final graphic has been corrected and is lower than originally published
Gacha RPGs offer a unique way for the community to engage with their favorite games. The gacha mechanic provides an array of characters to bond with, customizing each players’ experience based on the luck of the draw. The latest gacha from Chinese game developer miHoYo, Zenless Zone Zero, continues this trend from their earlier games Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail.
Zenless Zone Zero generated a massive amount of hype thanks to its fashionable urban fantasy world inspired by the street aesthetic of 2000’s fiction. Additionally, characters in the world run the full gamut from humans to robots to half-animal hybrids. All of this is combined with one of the most satisfying combat systems for a Gacha RPG so far. Heading into its 4th of July release date, Zenless Zone Zero had over 45M pre-registrations – more than the pre-registrations for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail combined.
It’s time to see if this pre-release hype translated to viewership on live-streaming platforms, and whether or not the winning streak of Gacha RPGs will continue.
Zenless Zone Zero Hooks Viewers With Brand New Characters to Pull
The number of players engaging with Zenless Zone Zero translated well to live-streaming platform viewership. Viewers racked up just short of 7M hours watched of Zenless Zone Zero content, hitting a peak viewership of 162K on the game’s release day. Naturally, some people may have avoided coverage of the game in these opening days so that they could experience the game themselves – an effect which is stronger for F2P games that have a lower barrier to entry for consumers.
Apart from miHoYo’s legacy of high production value, high quality gacha games, there’s a more fundamental reason that viewers tuned in for Zenless Zone Zero. A new gacha game means an entirely new roster of characters (and weapons) to collect, which piques the interest of fans of the genre. Members of the community were also interested to see how miHoYo responded to the release of Kuro Games’ Wuthering Waves earlier this year, to see if miHoYo could maintain their status as the #1 gacha game developer.
Streamers for the game were instrumental in backing up this pre-release hype by giving Zenless Zone Zero the attention it deserves. Tectone provided the most support to Zenless Zone Zero, generating 328K hours watched for the game over 36 hours of streaming. PirateSoftware streamed a relatively small amount at roughly 14 hours, yet fans tuned in for 197K hours to hear the indie game developer’s opinions on the game’s new battle system and revamped gacha balancing mechanics.
Interestingly though, no single streamer contributed an overwhelming proportion of Zenless Zone Zero’s viewership, which suggests that the game was instead enjoyed by a wide selection of streamers instead of a few celebrity streamers bolstering interest in the title. From a viewer perspective, this makes sense: Watching more streamers means a greater chance of seeing the full complement of pulls available in Zenless Zone Zero, and more variety in the player’s party composition based on their random accumulation of pulls.
miHoYo Gambles with Zenless Zone Zero’s New Gacha System
Much of the online discourse around Gacha RPGs is from fans of particular games comparing their respective merits. One method for determining each games’ relative popularity is to look at live-streaming viewership. Across the three so-called HoYoverse games, Genshin Impact remains the most popular. In its best week on live streaming, Genshin Impact generated 14.5M hours watched compared to just 11.4M and 7M for Honkai: Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero, respectively. Each game’s best week was also its release week, suggesting that even though Zenless Zone Zero has only been out for one week, it won’t top 7M weekly hours watched again.
This low performance matches the lower sales of Zenless Zone Zero as reported by AppMagic. Zenless Zone Zero made $24.6M in its first five days, which is less than both Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail each made in their first five days at $35.3M and $55M, respectively. Apart from being less popular, the lower sales figures may be a result of Zenless Zone Zero’s more generous drop rates when compared to either of the other two titles. Gacha games rely on players purchasing pulls to generate their money, and so while more generous drop rates encourage players to adopt the game, they do so at the cost of profit.
It’s worth remembering that Zenless Zone Zero still performed exceptionally well when compared to other Gacha titles on the market. In particular, Chinese-developed gacha games continue to outperform both Korean and Japanese-developed gacha games. Chinese-developed games tend to reach into the tens of millions of hours watched in their best weeks, yet the best non Chinese-developed gacha games like Monster Strike and Goddess of Victory: Nikke have reached just 2.3M and 1.4M hours watched, respectively.
As for why Zenless Zone Zero failed to reach the viewership heights of its fellow Chinese-developed gacha games, the answer is unclear. It may be that Wuthering Waves is still holding the attention of much of the gacha game audience – certainly the gacha market is quickly becoming saturated. These games have monumental production values, and if their monetisation system starts to falter due to divided player attention then it could make the genre no longer commercially viable. Stream Hatchet will be watching live-streaming platforms to see which gacha games can still hold players’ attention moving forward.
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