Genshin Impact
A free open-world action RPG funded entirely by randomized character pulls — the game itself never ends, and neither does the spending opportunity.
The cost, in short
Pressure
078
To ending
— — —
No scripted ending — live service
How this rating was reached
Score of 78/100 reflects: no content is hard-locked behind payment (the story and exploration are fully free), but new characters are gated behind a randomized purchase system with a 50/50 chance of not getting the one you want even at guaranteed pity, and the game runs frequent limited-time banners that create recurring purchase pressure. No cost-to-progress figure is published: unlike a fixed price, the real cost depends on luck (whether the 50/50 is won), which purchase bundle is used, and free currency already accumulated. Any single number here would be more precise than the truth. hasEnding is false because this is an actively updated live-service game with no final chapter — not because we failed to measure it.
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Why we do not publish one cost figure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.
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.
Sources
- 01Wish (gacha) system — pity mechanicsGenshin Impact Wiki (community-maintained, mechanics confirmed in-game) ·
Full method behind these ratings: see our methodology.
Ratings are editorial judgments based on the sources cited above. They are not a guarantee of current pricing or mechanics, which can change after publication — check the source directly before making a purchase decision.