Honkai: Star Rail made over $20 million in under a week

Splendid start for HoYoverse’s newest anime game

Marco Wutz | May 12, 2023

Honkai: Star Rail made over $20 million in under a week /

Launching to high marks from critics in April 26, 2023, Honkai: Star Rail joins Genshin Impact in printing money for HoYoverse: despite being available for just five days in April, the turn-based RPG raked in over $20 million globally, which even excludes some unavailable figures from its home market, China.

According to SensorTower, this means that Honkai: Star Rail immediately became one of the five highest-earning gacha games of the last month. Genshin Impact, estimated to have earned over $48 million globally and a slightly lower figure in China alone in April, tops the rankings. Japanese title Fate/Grand Order is second with $32 million, though Japanese gamers are responsible for the lion’s share of $29 million in that case. NIKKE and Uma Musume were still ahead of Honkai: Star Rail by the end of the month as well.

HoYoverse, which had already been strong on the Chinese market before Honkai: Star Rail’s release, has now become an utterly dominant force in the gacha genre – 70% of that category’s earnings in China went into the Shanghai-based company’s pockets. Genshin Impact accounted for 48%, Honkai Impact 3rd for 1%, and the new release for 21%.

Honkai: Star Rail is using the same gacha mechanics as Genshin Impact, allowing players to pull from random banners for specific characters and weapons. After a streak of bad luck, the players are guaranteed to pull rare characters and weapons at a certain point. Players can pay for these pulls by converting real money into currency, or earning it in the game.

Overall, this sort of gacha model is considered to be pretty fair when compared to some other examples, though chance is still the ruling factor.

Another factor for HoYoverse’s success is the general high quality of the company’s games. Honkai: Star Rail launched in a pretty much bug-free state and with a massive amount of content, which is not something that most triple-A games can boast of these days.

Published May 12, 2023

MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg