The popular mobile game Genshin Impact faced controversy as it celebrated its one-year anniversary, which led to fans spamming negative reviews of the game on the Google Play Store, and the company behind the game to offer additional rewards.
The reviews have caused the game’s score to shrink to below two stars, from the almost perfect score it had before the controversy.
In order to celebrate the one-year anniversary, developer MiHoYo has given all players 10 intertwined fates for logging in over the course of seven days, which is enough for 10 pulls on the games event banner.
The company is also hosting several fan creation contests, to give out small prizes to dedicated fans.
The rewards have caused controversy within the Genshin community since many fans were expecting bigger rewards due to the popularity of the title, and that many other mobile games have larger anniversary events.
Fans were quick to point out how MiHoYo can afford to be more generous since they grossed over $1 billion from the title within its first six months on the market, and how the Chinese New Year event, known as the Lantern Rite in-game, gave out better rewards than the anniversary.
This comes shortly after MiHoYo released several characters that the community has considered underpowered, and ignored negative feedback to a change that they made to one of the game’s most anticipated characters, Baal.
The controversy hit an all-time high when on the day of the actual anniversary MiHoYo revealed an advertisement campaign on Twitter using different themed hashtags, as well as a small web event that awarded a tiny amount of in-game currency but said nothing about additional rewards.
In response to the lackluster anniversary, fans took to social media to voice their discontent.
Users spammed the official Genshin Impact Discord server and posting negative feedback on the game’s subreddit. In response the Discord server enabled slow mode, limiting the number of posts allowed, and the subreddit has been removing most posts relating to the anniversary.
Some fans even took it a step further by posting one-star reviews on other unrelated games, with the reviews even reaching Google Classroom for some reason.
Users have also temporarily been unable to change their in-game signature, although it is unknown if this was done to avoid criticism over the event.
MiHoYo sent out a message to all players in-game on Wednesday containing a wind glider skin that was originally going to be part of a paid bundle and 400 primogems. The message also promises three additional rewards to be sent out over the next few days.
The additional rewards were enough to make a large number of players happy, but others are still lamenting the lack of communication from the company towards its players and hope that they will do better in the future.
Not everyone is in agreement over the controversy, as some fans have been calling the people complaining “childish” and are just happy to be able to play the game for free.
Genshin Impact is available to play for free on IOS, Android, PC and PlayStation.