I am pretty sure you're alluding to WuWa. In which case I respectfully disagree, the initial buff matters a lot more than you think. The initial hype pretty much decides the best possible future of the game, aka the ceiling. The game may do worse than that depending on how they manage the game, the marketing, the PR etc. But they can't get over the absolute ceiling the initial hype and launch success have already set. Genshin has had a ceiling far beyond any other gacha game and it's not even remotely close. Obviously the game has been doing really well ever since which reflects on its current sales.
On the other hand, WuWa started very poorly with CBT2 story rewrite that completely butchered early Jinzhou story because Kuro chickened out from harsh Chinese player feedback and ended up writing out a bunch of scenes and characters that used to be there (or planned) on CBT1, very buggy initial release and inaccurate weapon descriptions that led to massive distrust towards Kuro as a company after people were misled by Jiyan's weapon effect as though it was the best weapon for Calcharo (when it wasn't), among other things. Its absolute ceiling had already been severely below Genshin's. But they have learned from their mistakes, fixed most of the issues, released banger regions and kept improving on the story so that the game is close to its ceiling now. And anyone who thinks WuWa will ever approach the 2 main Hoyo games in terms of popularity or revenue, or Kuro as a company to Hoyo, is delusional, especially given Kuro is now a Tencent subsidiary while Hoyo is an independent mini-conglomerate. It's not even remotely comparable and unless some really insane stuff happens in the far future, it never will be comparable, long overdue that both sides should stop meaningless tribalism
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u/Particular_Web3215 Jenshin | Limbus 6h ago
what having the largest gacha playerbase does for a game