Honkai: Star Rail Revenue Plummets Over 70% in November — Players Accuse Analysts of Cooking the Books with Inflated PC/PS Multipliers

A game whose defenders were already getting roasted with the meme 'the white knights' smiley-face cope is about to be ripped apart' — has now delivered a brand-new spectacle: its November revenue crashed by ~70%, a drop so steep the community is calling it 'epic-tier.'

On December 10, 2023, a player on NGA posted Star Rail's November revenue chart with a brutally blunt title: 'Revenue literally halved compared to last month, and it looks like December won't be much better.'

As for what caused this nosedive, the comments delivered a laundry list of grievances. One player pointed out November was a 'dead patch with no banners worth pulling.' Another was more blunt: 'Genshin leeched it dry' — suggesting Genshin Impact's own strong banners cannibalized Star Rail's gacha spending during the same period.

One particularly fired-up player laid out four charges: 'No production output. Banners treated as events. Power creep going ballistic. Why would anyone whale on this?' This pretty much sums up the sentiment of paying players — you can't even give us proper story content and events, yet you expect us to open our wallets for new character banners?

Another player added that Version 1.5 didn't even have a main story chapter, yet HoYoverse still dropped two new limited character banners. Their verdict: 'RIP, deserved.' Someone else noted, 'Two limited characters like clockwork every patch, enough teaser characters to last a whole year, yet the story hasn't progressed in over half a year. I've never seen a game dare pull this stunt.'

The character design complaints were equally savage. One player called Huohuo 'a Frankenstein of a kit' — consumes skill points from turn one, can't protect the team, weaker support capability than 4-star alternatives, and can't even generate skill points. 'HoYoverse is power-creeping everything left and right, yet they suddenly got conservative with a character that should've been a fan-favorite' — the implication being that the inconsistency in design philosophy is baffling.

But the real bombshell wasn't the revenue drop itself — it was the explosive controversy over whether the revenue numbers are even real. Players noticed that a popular revenue analyst's data used absurdly high PC and PlayStation multipliers, asking: 'Aren't these PC/PS coefficients way too inflated?'

This skepticism hit a nerve. Another player delivered the iconic summary: 'Of course they're not estimated — whatever's missing gets plugged by PC coefficients, and when PC can't cover it, PS picks up the slack.' In other words, these multipliers aren't derived from actual data but are allegedly inflated numbers used to paper over mobile revenue shortfalls. An even more cutting take: 'PC numbers are a black box you can fill with whatever you want. The game can lose, but the revenue spreadsheet can't.'

Meanwhile, the optimists over on the Star Rail sub-forum kept chanting 'just wait for December' and 'my RMB is ready for Ruan Mei.' The mockery was relentless. One commenter analyzed, 'How many people are actually going to pull for Ruan Mei? Revenue won't turn red until 2.0 brings a new map. They're way too high on copium.' Another top-voted comment predicted: 'Ruan Mei at best barely surpasses the Douyin (TikTok) revenue threshold — it'll be a passable result, nothing more.' Surpassing Douyin revenue is the community's standard benchmark for a 'successful' banner, but even that would only be a bare minimum.

As of this writing, HoYoverse has made no official response to either the revenue decline or the data integrity controversy. But one thing's clear: the debate over 'is Star Rail actually cooked?' is far from over.