Posting under a throwaway account. I have spent around $2000+ on the game. I'm a high net-worth individual (few mil), so that amount of money is ok with me as I'm being quite entertained.

Yes, the game is predatory as you have to spend around $100-120 for a 50/50 chance of getting the banner character you want.

High powered weapons are another story. The chances are less than 50/50 and thus require more spend to obtain.

They made it that getting duplicates of the same character enhances it in powerful ways that incentivizes people to spend more for more power.

GI is not a play to win game since it is mainly a single player experience, but there are events with multiple plays cooperating with each other, and they can join your world but the quest interactions are limited.

Streamers will spend in the five digits to increase their viewership.

I want to thank you for responding and being honest. I understand there is a tail-centric distribution, I guess I am just surprised how tail-heavy it is. I think the media likes to write stories about people dropping 5- or 6-figures on a game. And while I am sure that does happen, I suspect their main revenue comes from the $100-$300 crowd.

Of course it's also possible I am underestimating the popularity and there really could be over 100 million players.

If you take a look at top Twitch streamers for Genshin Impact you'll see a lot of them dropping big money. They see it as an investment to get more viewers (not as many people want to watch you play with low level characters and equipment). Additionally, top end streamers make the money back in subscriptions and donations anyway.

Then these streamers also actually prime their audience to spend more. If you see a streamer drop a couple thousand dollars on stream to get that cool new character, you might feel okay with dropping $100 to see if you can get lucky.

Streamers feed this kind of ecosystem, and keep it running. I suspect that a large percentage of the money that Genshin Impact makes goes back out into marketing and sponsoring streamers and YouTubers to keep the influencer engine running as well.

The numbers are crazy still, but I think it's probably something very top-heavy, like you have 50m players paying $200 each and 1m players paying 2,000 each. It is very easy to spend a _lot_ of money - see https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2021/09/07/what-spend...

Edit: the article seems to say that the number is actually 2.3 billion to $3.5 billion. So, at the low end of 2.3 billion you are looking at "just" 1m "whale" players paying 2,000 each, and 1-3m players paying a few dollars. Google search shows me estimates of about 8m-9m MAU, so this seems possible.

AFAIK, IAPs are not uniformly or normally distributed. The vast majority of players pay nothing or close to nothing, while a few "whales" pay a ton.

"Yet, only 5% of total app users make any in-app purchase (Sterling, 2016), and 70% of those in-app purchases appear to come from big spenders or ‘Whales' who account for only the top 10% of the paying users (Shaul, 2016)." [0]

0. What Causes Users’ Unwillingness to Spend Money for in-App Purchases in Mobile Games? a Structured Abstract; https://easychair.org/publications/preprint/HxVC

Maybe they have proportionally way more whales than other games?

(I strongly dislike the "whales" term. Is there a less condescending synonym?)

I read an article (or HN comment?) a bit ago with someone with insider knowledge and explained that some of the biggest whales are SA royalty kids who spend RIDICULOUS amounts to flash a skin in front of their friends. The cash means nothing to them. Some even give the companies money to get new things added to the game. 1-5% of their users are subsidizing the whole experience for everyone.

The scales for these games are heavily HEAVILY tilted by weak minded, vulnerable whales. They spend thousands of dollars a month because they are addicted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-fxfuWhff0

And a surprisingly high number of people pay quite a bit, even thousands of dollars.

The curve for games like this is steep.