Genshin Impact

What the monetization actually looks like

New playable characters are obtained through a randomized "wish" system, not sold directly. Each pull costs 160 Primogems (the game's premium currency), and the system guarantees a 5-star character or weapon by the 90th pull without one — the industry calls this a pity system, and Genshin's version is more player-friendly than most because the floor is guaranteed rather than purely probabilistic.

Even with the pity floor, getting a SPECIFIC new character (rather than any 5-star) is not guaranteed on the first attempt: a 50/50 mechanic means you have a roughly even chance of the pity pull giving you the featured character or a different one, with the next 5-star pity guaranteed to be the featured character if you lose that coin flip.

Why we do not publish one cost figure

You will see numbers online claiming a guaranteed character costs "$150" or "$400" or more. All of them are true for someone, and none of them are the number for you specifically, because the actual cost depends on: whether you win or lose the 50/50 (roughly doubling the pull count in the worst case), which primogem bundle you buy (larger bundles and first-purchase bonuses change the effective price per pull), and how many free primogems you accumulated from daily play, events and the game's own compensation payouts before you started pulling.

Publishing a single number here would give you a false sense of precision on something that genuinely varies by a factor of two or three depending on luck and how you play day to day. We would rather tell you the mechanic honestly than print a number that flatters the page.

What a US federal complaint established about the cost

In January 2025 the Federal Trade Commission, through the Department of Justice, filed suit against HoYoverse over exactly this system. The company settled for $20 million. The complaint is a court document, which makes the numbers in it a different class of evidence from the figures circulating on forums — and two of them are worth quoting.

On cost, the complaint states that a player "may need to open as many as 180 loot boxes, at a cost of $2–3 per loot box (or as much as $360–540 in total), simply to get the prize that HoYoverse features on the Event Banner."

On odds, the complaint reproduces HoYoverse's own in-game disclosure: a base probability of 0.600% of winning a 5-star character, a 1.600% consolidated probability once the guarantee is counted, and a 5-star guaranteed at least once per 90 attempts.

That second set of numbers matters for a reason beyond the numbers themselves. The pity mechanic described above was, until now, sourced on this site to a community wiki — accurate and checkable in-game, but not published by HoYoverse. The complaint reproduces the company's own screen, which means the mechanic is now confirmed by the operator rather than by its players.

This does not change our refusal above

$360–540 is not "the cost of a character", and we are not going to start printing it as one. It is a stated upper bound for one specific case: the worst run of luck on a featured banner, priced at ordinary bundle rates, ignoring whatever free currency the player had accumulated. The section above still holds — what the system costs you depends on a coin flip and on how you play.

What the complaint changes is that the upper bound now has a source, and it is a court filing rather than a forum post. That is the difference we care about.

The game itself has no ending

Genshin Impact is a live-service game with an ongoing main story released in chapters ("Archons") over years, plus a permanent open world and recurring events. There is no point at which the game is "finished" the way a single-player game ends — that is a fact about how the game is built, not a gap in our research.