Genshin Impact loses over 1m followers overnight as fans are upset over poor celebratory rewards

Genshin Impact has lost over a million social media followers within a day as fans in China are upset over the underwhelming rewards for the Chinese New Year.

The developers recently announced three Intertwined Fate rewards for the upcoming Lantern Rite Festival. However, the Chinese player base has expressed its disappointment, feeling it isn't enough, and the rewards have stayed the same despite the game being active for over three years.

The fans have also accused HoYoverse of buying bots to mask the drop in the follower count on the title's social media pages. Read the entire story below.

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Genshin Impact loses over 1m social media followers as fans are unhappy with the Chinese New Year rewards

During the recent 4.4 livestream, Genshin Impact developers announced three Intertwined Fates rewards to celebrate the upcoming Lantern Rite Festival, a Chinese New Year event. However, many fans in China are unhappy as they feel the rewards are underwhelming and insufficient compared to what the officials are rewarding the players in the global server.

This has led to the country's player base unfollowing the game's official Douyin account en masse. Consequently, the page has lost over a million followers within a day, dropping the follower count from 9.6 million to a little over 8 million at the time of writing this article. Genshin Impact has also lost several followers on its other social media accounts.

Furthermore, the fans are unfollowing the companies in collaboration with the game, including major brands such as KFC, Hey Tea, and Pizza Hut.

To make matters worse, the community has also accused HoYoverse of buying bots to cover up the drop in followers on BiliBili, the biggest video-sharing website in China. These Zombie accounts are easy to identify as they only have "bili" and a combination of random numbers as their username, and they follow only one account: Genshin Impact.

Genshin Impact's reward system has always sparked debate since its release, often drawing comparisons to its sister titles such as Honkai Star Rail and Honkai Impact 3rd with generous rewards for free-to-play users. Following the recent developments, it remains to be seen whether Hoyoverse will implement any changes to the Lantern Rite rewards or not.

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Update: Previously we reported that Hoyoverse had apologized regarding the matter based on an X source. Upon further inspection, we discovered that not to be the case and promptly removed it.