Analysis Bloomberg: Zenless Zone Zero did not perform on par with Hoyoverse’s expectations

[ethomaz]

​

 

[anonpuffs]

The company’s spokesperson declined to comment for this article, saying only that it contained several inaccuracies and unverified claims, without specifying or elaborating.

“They’re dealing with cannibalization,” said Sensor Tower analyst Sam Aune. “The launch of Zenless Zone Zero shows they may be approaching market saturation for what they can do with role-playing games.”

Yes and no, Zenless's main issue was that one of their main game modes at launch wasn't appealing to people, it's not saturation with rpgs so much as the onboarding for the game was not done well. A lot of these games live or die based on word of mouth and they flubbed the launch. As for cannibalization, that's mainly due to so many competitors in the space now. There's hundreds if not thousands of gacha games and because Hoyo's games have been mostly catering to men (lots of attractive women, few attractive men) other games like Love&Deepspace that catered to women came and took that market from them. Yes, the main audience for Hoyo games is Hoyo game players, but plenty play multiple of them simultaneously. I would say the factors that decreased their revenue are many, only one of which is cannibalization.

1) their monetization in HSR and to a lesser extent ZZZ is very greedy in terms of putting out many new characters consecutively and each being more powerful than the last, sometimes rendering older characters useless in a few months. While this drove up revenue in the short term, once people realized that it was pointless to spend heavily as their investment would be outdated very soon, people left or stopped spending
2) the scenario writing and world development becoming bloated, overcomplicated, and unrelatable especially with the overreliance on complex terminology and foreign loanwords (especially bad in genshin, which is why i dropped it)
3) zenless in particular suffers from a lack of content and its core gameplay is inspired by fighting games which is already a niche genre. Even though it's a hack and slash arpg in practice there are lots of concepts from fighting games like combo routes and optimizing your rotations that are lost on the general audience. There's plenty of room for skill expression but most people are casuals who don't care.

 

[Killer_Sakoman]

I played a little and got bored of it after 2 hours.

 

[anonpuffs]

I played a little and got bored of it after 2 hours.

The onboarding for the game is not very good, the main attraction is endgame and you don't get there until 20ish hours. They really messed it up because you have a lot of low effort/unengaging gameplay until the real game starts, and to make it worse it's time gated in real time so you can't even blaze through it but you have to do the typical gacha daily bullshit for weeks