Mihoyo is still celebrating Genshin Impact's first anniversary, and the developer just announced a new round of community events for players. The announcement isn't going over so well though, and players are heated about what they perceive as greed from the company.
The first announcement didn't go over so well, either. We reported back in August that Genshin Impact's community was left dissatisfied early on, but plenty of players were also quick to point out that more events could still be on the way as the anniversary month continued. Now we're late into September, and the backlash is noticeably worse to the second update. Mihoyo's new plans include web events for the community that are mostly limited to raffles—slim chances for physical prizes—and almost no in-game rewards. Millions of people play Genshin Impact, but even generous assumptions of lower entries don't bode well for your anniversary prize chances.
Genshin Impact's art repost giveaway is raffling three iPhones off and "cash prizes," so you may not get anything for your work there. The 'Recording Your Anniversary Memories' and 'Let's Solve World Puzzle' events limit rewards to 100 Primogems for 1,000 winners. You've also got a 10 percent chance to win a Blessing of the Welkin Moon, or a 90 percent chance to pick up 100,000 in a contest to create anniversary cards. Other prizes include Apple AirPods, a Razer DeathAdder V2, or Genshin Impact merch. There's a noticeable lack of in-game options that are guaranteed for your time.
People aren't happy about it, and Genshin Impact's subreddit is popping off with threads expressing player frustrations. The top comment to the event preview thread notes Mihoyo would give away better rewards if Genshin Impact just went offline for ten hours. These are all community web events, so they probably shouldn't be held to the same expectations, but the running theme seems to be frustration over a lack of in-game rewards that really exceed the usual patch cycle due to the special occassion. Since last month's announcements, players have compared Genshin Impact's deflated celebration to other gacha games.
Mihoyo's own platform saw the developer ratio'd—more people were commenting with complaints and receiving upvotes for those posts than Mihoyo saw likes. The English language Twitter account also shared its event announcement, only to wind up with thousands of angry replies and quote retweets.
Genshin Impact's first year was a wildly successful venture for Mihoyo, earning the developer $874 million in just five months as it outperformed other mobile titans. There's some level of gatekeeping gacha players should expect if they're strictly free-to-play accounts, but ultimately, tons of folks playing Genshin Impact do spend money, and it's not a cheap game. Mihoyo has not responded to complaints surrounding its anniversary event schedule yet.