A gacha open-world game that was hyped as a competitor to miHoYo's dominance got sent to the "crematorium" by players on its very first day — arguably the spiciest roast in the 2024 gacha gaming discourse. An NGA forum user recently surfaced the early revenue data for Wuthering Waves' Japanese server launch, and the numbers are so brutal that onlookers said they've "never seen a launch this dead on arrival."
The original poster shared Japanese App Store ranking screenshots showing that Wuthering Waves barely squeezed into the top 10 during its launch window, while the competing horse girl gacha (Uma Musume, affectionately called "学马仕" by CN players) was sitting comfortably at the top. The OP did some quick math: even if you multiply the JP revenue by a generous 7x conversion factor, Wuthering Waves only earned roughly one-fifth of what Uma Musume pulled in during the same period. A top-voted reply twisted the knife further: "Even with 7x it's more like 1/8, and that's assuming revenue doesn't drop — but with a launch this rough, it's probably gg."
Some commenters noted that store rankings are accurate but revenue figures are estimates (推算) from third-party trackers, so they shouldn't be taken as gospel. Even so, the performance was clearly far below expectations. "Uma Musume has the power to top the charts, and Wuthering Waves can barely crack the top 10 at launch — that's honestly hilarious," one highly-upvoted comment read, capturing the prevailing sentiment. Estimated first-week JP revenue sat at roughly 1.5 million RMB (~$200K USD), a dismal figure considering that the Japanese market skews heavily toward iOS users with minimal Android/PC revenue multipliers to boost the numbers.
Why did the JP launch underperform so spectacularly? Commenters offered multiple angles. First, Kuro Games isn't a well-known studio in Japan — they lack the long-term brand equity and dedicated player base that miHoYo has built over years of local marketing and recruiting top-tier voice actors. Second, the game's own issues are glaring: optimization is so bad that players ask "who's actually playing this on mobile?", and the Japanese localization quality has drawn widespread complaints from JP players who say they can't understand the story. Most critically, one user pointed out the elephant in the room: "In the current JP gacha market, all-female character rosters still reign supreme, but Chinese devs keep trying to force mixed-gender rosters onto Japanese players" — implying Wuthering Waves' character design direction simply doesn't resonate with the local audience.
The most devastating comment came from the 10th reply: "It's already dead? Birth to cremation completed in a single day — what a speedrun." A player in the 15th reply shared firsthand experience: "My Uma Musume Discord group has been deep in horse girl content lately. A few people tried Wuthering Waves at launch, ran through two hours of story, and said they'd rather go back to the horse-raising grind." When "farming horse races" (养马坐牢) — a notoriously tedious gameplay loop — is still more appealing than your game, you know the JP server is in dire straits. The 9th reply also mentioned that a non-sponsored VTuber did an honest review and dropped the game after being put off by the story.
To be fair, some users urged caution, arguing that launch players are still in the "try before you buy" phase and won't whale immediately — the real test is the month-one revenue data. Others pointed out that competing titles were running major events at the same time (like Puzzle & Dragons' That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime collab), so getting crowded out of the top spots isn't entirely unexpected. Still, these opening numbers have poured cold water on anyone hoping for a successful Japanese market breakthrough. Whether Wuthering Waves can pull off a comeback largely depends on whether Kuro Games can fix the fundamental issues holding it back.
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