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It’s no secret that gacha games make a mindblowing amount of money each and every month, and developer HoYoverse has got the formula down to a tee. Its latest release, Zenless Zone Zero, has debuted with a respectable estimated $96 million in its first month on mobile alone – but that still somehow makes it one of HoYo’s weakest recent launches.
Zenless Zone Zero is somewhat the black sheep of HoYoverse’s lineup, receiving significantly less hype than Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail, despite exceeding a staggering 40 million pre-registrations. Nevertheless, the RPG game has earned nearly $100 million on mobile, beating heavy hitting gacha games like Love and Deepspace, Naruto Mobile, Wuthering Waves, and even Genshin Impact and Honkai Star Rail in July 2024.
While the gacha RPG is great, as our Zenless Zone Zero review explains, this strong launch was undoubtedly helped by the sought-after debut ZZZ banners. With Ellen already becoming a fan-favorite character, followed by the powerful Zhu Yuan and backed up by a solid collection of standard characters that rank highly in our ZZZ tier list, it’s no wonder people were spending big.
Interestingly, this coincided with an estimated $31 million drop in Genshin Impact’s monthly revenue and a $60 million decrease worldwide for Honkai Star Rail, which likely correlate with ZZZ’s explosive launch – people spent their money on Zenless during its opening month, rather than the established HoYo classics.
Importantly, these statistics, courtesy of GachaRevenue, only include mobile revenue. Since Zenless Zone Zero launched on both PC and PS5 – with the latter being available on day one unlike prior HoYoverse releases – this is only a fraction of the revenue that ZZZ will have made. Unsurprisingly, this makes it one of the most successful free games right now.
To put this into perspective, however, Zenless Zone Zero’s launch is still the weakest of HoYo’s big releases. Genshin Impact, the game that arguably put gachas in the mainstream thanks to its Breath of the Wild inspirations, grossed upwards of $245 million by the end of its first month. Likewise, Honkai Star Rail topped $130 million in mobile revenue at launch.
If we’re lucky, perhaps HoYoverse will celebrate such a successful launch with free rewards, like fresh Zenless Zone Zero codes and new ZZZ events. As we head towards the next Zenless Zone Zero update, version 1.1, heaps of Polychrome would be greatly appreciated.
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