A look at China-made hit fantasy RPG Genshin Impact, as China expands into the video game market once dominated by Japan by imitating its Japanese competitors
Genshin Impact, a nearly picture-perfect reproduction of Japanese fantasy role-playing games, has raked in billions of dollars … Tweets: @andreasharsono Tweets: Andreas Harsono / @andreasharsono : Genshin Impact's success points to a shifting balance of power in the US$200 billion-a-year global video game industry, which has long been dominated by Japan and the U.S. But China still faces significant creative shortcomings https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
When this piece ran in March 2022, Genshin Impact was already two years past a $245 million first month that made it one of the biggest mobile launches on record — proof that a Chinese studio could out-Japan the Japanese fantasy RPG at its own craft. The Times' framing was about a shifting balance of power in a $200B-a-year industry, with Andreas Harsono flagging that China's creative shortcomings remained the open question.
The surrounding coverage fills in both directions of that arc: months after publication, Beijing's approval freeze and slowing domestic user growth sent Chinese studios rushing into exactly the Western markets Genshin had opened (the overseas push), and by 2025 the question of whether imitation could mature into original IP got its answer in Black Myth: Wukong — while HoYoverse itself faced title cannibalization and a revenue decline.
First-order effects
- Japanese RPG developers now compete head-to-head against a near-perfect reproduction of their own genre built on freemium economics, with Genshin converting that formula into billions of dollars of global player spending.
- HoYoverse gains a proven overseas revenue machine just as domestic approvals tighten — the export playbook other Chinese studios then copied when they rushed into the US market.
Second-order effects
- Genshin's success validated the anime-styled gacha template for the whole cohort of Chinese publishers going abroad, raising the bar for Japanese incumbents who can no longer assume genre ownership at home or overseas.
- Commercial proof at this scale helped rekindle investor appetite for Chinese games after the crackdown years, a dynamic insiders later credited again when Black Myth: Wukong's ~$1.1B, ~25M-copy run landed.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, China's industry matures from imitation to owned IP — Genshin's clone-first entry point leading toward original titles like Black Myth: Wukong — eroding the Japan-and-US duopoly the article describes, though Harsono's caveat about creative shortcomings marks where the transition is incomplete.
- HoYoverse's own trajectory shows the structural risk of the hit-driven gacha model: by 2024 its titles were cannibalizing each other and revenue declined, pushing it to diversify genres rather than double down on one formula.
The trend: China's gaming industry is climbing from imitating Japanese genres to exporting original blockbusters, turning a domestic regulatory squeeze into a global market-share campaign against Japan and the U.S.