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The story
A thread on 5ch’s “Nandemo Jikkyo G” (Anything Live-Commentary) board claimed that Chinese-developed mobile games like Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, and Goddess of Victory: NIKKE are losing their shine in Japan. While some posters recalled logging into Genshin, Star Rail, and NIKKE every single day three years ago, recent comments pointed to Star Rail’s slowdown, a lukewarm Fate collaboration, and cooling reactions to Genshin’s new characters. The thread also branched into debates over whether mobile-only revenue figures tell the whole story, comparisons of character modeling with Uma Musume, and just how much money whales pour into ad-heavy games like Last War.
What people said
Yeah, every single one of them has the exact same vibe.
The pressure to spend is way too intense.
The PlayStation Store is a tiny market though.
Star Rail's revenue share from iOS and Google Play is pretty high though.
Genshin's still sitting near the top of the PS Store charts.
Guess it really earns that "basically a giant smartphone" reputation.
If they hadn't flooded the market with so many releases, Star Rail could've had a longer shelf life.
NIKKE peaked with the Chainsaw Man collab.
Everyone was playing NIKKE back then.
This doesn't capture NIKKE's raunchy appeal at all, and since it's just her back you can't even tell it's a Chainsaw Man crossover — what was even the point?
Nah, that's not it.
That's RED ASH.
Running out of ideas, maybe?
In Japan, Columbina's actually more popular than Furina.
Chinese games have made incredible progress, sure,
but something about Genshin's faces still feels a bit off,
and Wuthering Waves' body proportions are straight-up weird.
Zenless Zone Zero is doing pretty well by comparison.
Uma Musume…? (seriously?)
I play both Zenless Zone Zero and Uma Musume, and Uma Musume's character models are way behind in comparison.
Don't forget they've got Pro Yakyuu Spirits too.
What users actually care about is the Goddess and everything around her.
It used to rank every single year up until last year.
Feels like they burned all their momentum on the Amphoreus arc.
The Fate collab didn't get nearly as much hype as expected.
The story got so out-there it couldn't hook new players, and a lot of existing ones dropped off too.
I feel like the real problem is that almost nobody's even trying to compete on being a good "game" anymore.
From what's leaked, it's basically a collection of multiplayer-focused minigames…
At the very least it's not a straight upgrade over the existing anime-style open-world games, so it probably won't take over the market.
Honestly, it's CEO types who love flexing stacks of cash — there's real demand for games where, as long as you throw enough money at it, you skip the time-sink grinding you'd get in something like a hack-and-slash.
I played it for a bit over a year — it's basically a bunch of ridiculously rich people with tens of billions in assets beating each other with stacks of cash.
Even the top 30% of players routinely drop 20,000 yen a month.
Nobody's out there playing anything demanding enough to need it — you'd be better off just buying an iPad Pro…
Yeah, it's dumb.
I tried streaming on Mirrativ (a mobile live-streaming app) once,
and it told me to drop the resolution to something like 360×720 ><
which kind of freaked me out lol.
But I guess that's about all mobile games actually need, huh.
Background and Key Points of the Discussion
Genshin Impact launched in 2020, NIKKE in 2022, and Honkai: Star Rail in 2023 — all three were fixtures near the top of Japan’s mobile game charts early on. One important point raised in the thread is that these rankings reflect “mobile-only” revenue: since Genshin and Star Rail also generate significant spending on PC and PlayStation, app store sales charts alone don’t fully capture how popular these games really are. At the same time, the fact that long-running domestic titles like Monster Strike and Puzzle & Dragons continue to hold their top spots points to a market structure in which new releases struggle to build lasting popularity. Ad-driven strategy games like Last War and Whiteout Survival are known for business models propped up by a small segment of big-spending players, which lines up with the thread’s claim that “20,000 yen a month is considered normal spending.” As for why momentum has slowed, posters in the thread offered several different explanations — oversaturation and fatigue, excessive pressure to spend, and the quality of character designs — without settling on any single cause.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “[Sad News] Chinese Mobile Games Have Lost Their Popularity in Japan lol”.
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