Genshin Impact

Genshin Impact is a free-to-play, open-world action RPG with anime-style visuals, released in 2020. You explore a huge fantasy world (Teyvat), fight with a swappable party of elemental characters, and follow a long story across regions. Its hook is that it's genuinely free and huge in scope, playable on phone, PC and consoles with shared progress. The catch is how it makes money: a gacha system where you spend (or grind) to randomly unlock new characters and weapons.

Yes, it's free to download and you can play the entire main story and explore the whole world without paying. The money comes from the gacha: you use premium currency to roll for characters and weapons, and you can buy that currency with real money. So it's free-to-play with optional spending, you never have to pay, but the most powerful and popular limited characters are locked behind random pulls, which is where the pressure to spend comes from.

HoYoverse, the global brand of the Chinese game company miHoYo, based in Shanghai. They developed and publish it, and also make Honkai: Star Rail, Honkai Impact 3rd and Zenless Zone Zero. Genshin Impact was the game that turned miHoYo from a niche studio into one of the biggest names in gaming worldwide, it was a massive international hit, not just a domestic Chinese success.

Mostly no, with nuance. Genshin is overwhelmingly a single-player and co-op PvE game, there's no competitive PvP where someone's wallet beats you directly. You can clear the story and most content with free characters and patience. What money buys is convenience and the strongest limited characters faster: it's more 'pay to progress faster' and 'pay to collect' than 'pay to win.' Endgame and speed-running the hardest content is easier with invested accounts, but you're not losing matches to spenders.

It uses gacha mechanics, which share DNA with gambling: you pay for a random chance at a desired character, with rates published and a 'pity' system that guarantees a result after enough pulls. Whether that counts as gambling is legally debated, you always get something and can't cash out, so many regulators don't classify it as gambling, but critics argue it's psychologically similar and risky, especially for minors. Several countries require gacha games to disclose drop rates for this reason. Spend with awareness, and use spending limits if needed.

It's rated Teen (ESRB T, PEGI 12) for fantasy violence, mild suggestive themes and in-game purchases, so it's broadly aimed at teens, not young children. The bigger parental concern isn't graphic content (it's fairly tame) but the spending: the gacha system encourages real-money purchases for random rewards, which can add up fast. If a child plays, parents should set up platform spending limits and parental controls and talk about the gacha mechanics.

Billions. Genshin Impact is one of the highest-grossing games of all time, especially on mobile, reportedly pulling in several billion dollars in player spending within its first couple of years and continuing to earn heavily since. That revenue comes overwhelmingly from the gacha, millions of players each spending on character pulls, which funded HoYoverse's rapid expansion and its other big titles. Exact lifetime figures vary by estimate since the company is private.

Yes. It's made by miHoYo / HoYoverse, a company based in Shanghai, China, so it's a Chinese-developed game, though it was built for a global audience from the start, with full localization, worldwide servers and an art style and story that drew on many cultures. It became one of the first Chinese-made games to be a massive mainstream hit in the West, which is part of why it's so widely discussed.