It took Genshin Impact five years to slowly walk away from everything that made it stand out in the free-to-play crowd. The game that once sold itself on scale, art direction, and smart design is now leaning more and more on the oldest gacha tricks to keep the money flowing. HoYoverse has been flirting with so-called “power creep” for a long time, but it has never felt as dull and obvious as it does right now.

Back when Genshin Impact launched, the big surprise was that a free game could look and feel like a full-price blockbuster. A huge open world, meticulous art direction, and smooth, satisfying combat made it seem like this was a gacha title that genuinely put the play experience ahead of pure monetization. Over the last two years, however, a different logic has taken over: a steady ramp-up of “power creep,” the pattern of constantly releasing stronger characters and mechanics. It is the worst way to deal with a predictable problem, and HoYoverse has walked straight into it.

Two Proven Facts About Genshin Impact

Getting perfectly accurate numbers on Genshin Impact is tough, but every serious analytics firm is drawing the same picture. Business of Apps, App Magic, Newzoo, Sensor Tower, and Statista all agree that while the player base has only slipped a little, revenue has dropped sharply and is now hovering around historic lows. That does not mean the game is about to shut down – it still generates absurd amounts of cash by normal standards. From HoYoverse’s point of view, though, the important part is that since roughly the middle of Fontaine, the curve has stopped rising and started sliding down.

None of this was hard to foresee, and you did not need to be a genius to point it out in advance. Every live service title eventually hits a phase of stagnation or decline, and every gacha game finds it harder and harder to convince players to spend if it does not reinvent itself in some meaningful way. In practice, you only needed ten or twelve well-built characters and a handful of solid mechanics to clear everything Genshin Impact threw at you. Anyone who had been playing from the beginning already had a complete toolkit a long time ago. At least, that was true until recently.

If the first hard fact is that player engagement and revenue are shrinking, the second is that difficulty is quietly climbing. The Spiral Abyss, one of the toughest endgame challenges in HoYoverse’s open world RPG, has clearly become more demanding. From Version 2.0 (2021) through 4.0 (2023), final bosses sat in the range of three to four million hit points. With the Luna 1 Update (September 2025), we are seeing health pools approach ten million. On top of that, it is increasingly common to run into mechanics that slow you down and force you to deal that damage in a much shorter effective window.

The real issue is that these changes have not been accompanied by systems that let us keep growing our favorite characters to match the new reality. Instead, HoYoverse has simply pushed out new, heavily overtuned units that make the same content feel easy again. Making the game harder is not being used as a design challenge, but as a way to manufacture obsolescence and nudge players toward spending. The message is not “play better,” it is “your character is no longer enough, you need to buy another one,” which traps everyone in an endless loop of yearly power spikes.

HoYoverse Has Run Out of Imagination

In truth, “power creep” has been part of Genshin Impact almost from the beginning, but for a long time it was mild and often even healthy. No one really complained when highly specialized support units arrived that boosted the damage of a particular element and made existing carries shine. When Update 3.0 (2022) brought in the Dendro element, its extremely strong reactions also landed fairly well: there were new team archetypes to build, a new meta to explore, and a fresh incentive to pull for certain characters.

Back then, power creep mostly pushed up the ceiling and broadened the meta instead of just inflating numbers. Picking up a new character so you could make your favorite hero stronger or unlock a new way to play them is exactly the kind of motivation that almost every gacha player accepts. The healthy message is “here is an upgrade for the thing you love,” not “the thing you love has been quietly retired.”

Right now, the problem is not that Genshin Impact is asking a bit more from its players, but that it does so without giving them anything meaningful in return. During the Natlan expansion, which feels like the peak of power creep in the game’s history so far, the core idea was to roll out characters with wildly inflated stats. There were no especially memorable new combat systems to go with them and, more importantly, no strong synergies with many of the older heroes. As Spanish Genshin Impact creator GamesAndChill points out, “of the current top ten teams in the game, more than half are made up entirely of carries and Natlan teams.”

With Nod’Krai, released a couple of months ago, things have taken another step in the wrong direction. The new region adds even more overpowered units and introduces “Lunar Reactions,” a set of modified elemental reactions that hit harder than anything before. The catch is that only a very small group of specific characters, typically new five-star units, can trigger them. Once again, the subtext is identical: buy into these banners and forget about your old roster, because only the new toys can fully engage with the latest mechanics.

If the Goal Is to Generate More Revenue, Other Forms of Monetization Should Be Explored

Genshin Impact had plenty of other options to make new characters appealing. The developers could, for example, have introduced a completely new element. I know that was never part of the official roadmap, and they have always denied it, but neither was the idea of making players wait an entire year for Snezhnaya. They could have shipped new global systems that touched every character in the roster or released balance patches that pulled older units closer to the power level of the latest ones. If the primary objective was to earn more money, they also could have leaned harder on cosmetics for existing heroes. A strong new outfit for Raiden Shogun or a premium Yoimiya skin alone could probably generate tens of millions.

What stings most is that many of us truly believed Genshin Impact was different. It seemed like a game that respected itself and its audience enough not to fall back on the cheap money grabs that define so many other gacha titles. Maybe that expectation was always naive, but I still think there are countless better ways to tackle the current problems in a way that benefits both players and the studio. The path HoYoverse is on right now makes the experience worse for the community and, in the long run, is not doing the company any favors either.

Source: 3djuegos