Genshin Impact's Marketing Strategy

A success story

No one would've predicted that Genshin Impact would be so successful at launch back in 2020. I've personally seen Genshin Impact's attraction to first-time gamers and casual players, making them into die-hard fans of the brand. Genshin Impact also seems to maintain customer retention through various events outside the game. Let's take a look at the marketing and promotion strategies Genshin Impact is doing.

Genshin Impact's Demographics

Although we don't have an accurate statistics regarding most of the data, we can still get a hang of the bigger picture by piecing individual research.

Some hard data

According to LuminesPlayThing on Reddit, Genshin Impact has around 65 million players globally as of Jan 2023. The highest concurrent players can reach around 8.5 million.

Average monthly players remains quite stable despite minor fluctuations due to content updates in patches. It's interesting that from this list below, releasing a new area doesn't necessarily mean more average monthly players. We do see a pattern of more players in major events and story updates - such as the November 3.3 Sumeru finale patch, and January's Lantern Rite.

Players gained/lost is hard to calculate since there isn't official data on exactly how many players uninstall the game, and if the players gained are actually returnees. This rough estimate does further proves that there are attractions to player retention when a patch has more content. With July and August's Golden Apple Archipelago and Sumeru's initial release, there was a significant increase in players. When 3.0 was in its latter half we saw a slight decrease of players. It could mean that some veteran players was almost finishing all the new content and went into hiatus. Other factors could also be contributing causes such as important festivals (Christmas and CNY), time of the year (exam seasons, school holidays), attractiveness of content, etc.

The data on player count is incomplete. The countries with the most downloads outside of China includes. The fundamental scale for these numbers is the total player count which is only an estimate. These numbers shouldn't be accurate but the ratio should more or less be similar to the actual number. It's not surprising seeing the United States having a higher percentage, since it is the second largest game markets after China (around 209.8M players)

Genshin Impact has quite a fair distribution of players from both genders. Around 55% of its players are male, while 45% are female.

For the mobile app on Android, it has an average of 3M downloads every month. We don't know the scope of the downloads. Judging from the number, it would most likely include recurring/returning downloads aside from first time downloads. As of Feb 2023, it ranks 3rd in adventure category for Japan, 4th for Canada, 5th for Hong Kong, Iran, Vietnam, and so on. It's quite an incredible achievement being able to sustain ranks after its 2 year anniversary.

Downloads on Android correspond to the player gained/lost data above. Downloads go up usually when a new patch with new maps and major events is released. December and January have an increase of population most likely due to Sumeru's finale and Wanderer's release, as well as the new desert map and Lantern Rite which is one of the most important tradition in the game. Downloads have since declined due to no significant content updates that can sustain play time.

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Genshin Impact's direction & target audience

We can have a glimpse of how Genshin Impact promotes by taking a look at the game's direction.

The game

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Most of the player base are heavy social media users who use other apps for gamer news such as Hoyoverse's Hoyolab, Twitter, Reddit and Tiktok. Those platforms, together with Pixiv, are also highly used by content creators for artworks, music, fanfic, merchandise, etc. Apart from social media, we can observe them having a correlation with Discord, the gamer communication app, together with other similar apps like Telegram and Facebook Messenger.

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For the Genshin Impact official website, player's main motivation for visiting is to redeem codes that give them free in-game currency. This is observed across countries and regions.

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Genshin Impact's competitors

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Genshin Impact's direction

• All platforms
• Gender distribution
• Casual
• Age distribution
• First-time gamers

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Market characteristics & how Genshin did it

Globally

EU NA

Japan

China

SEA

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