Wuthering Waves surpasses Genshin Impact to be the #1 grossing iOS app in Japan

Wuthering Waves has just surpassed Genshin Impact to be the highest-grossing gacha game on the Japanese iOS market, according to an analysis by Game-I. Since its release on May 22, 2024, the latest action adventure RPG from Kuro Games has been steadily increasing its market share. Just after 16 days of debut, it has finally overtaken HoYoverse's biggest title amongst the country's iOS players.

This is no easy feat considering Gesnhin Impact has been a dominant player in the Japanese gacha game market, which is amongst the biggest in the world.

Furthermore, Wuthering Waves was also subject to a major controversy in Japan after release due to a mistranslation of a 5-star exclusive weapon, which makes this all the more impressive.

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Wuthering Waves becomes the top-grossing iOS app in Japan

Japanese iOS rankings (Image via game-i.daa.jp)

Game-I JP is a Japanese website that tracks the revenue, downloads, and other statistics daily for the country's Android and Apple app stores. According to the latest information, Wuthering Waves surpassed Genshin Impact as the top-grossing gacha game on June 6, 2024.

While the title from Kuro Games was ranking in the 40s yesterday, and trailing behind at rank 26 this morning, by 4:30 pm JST, it had overtaken Genshin Impact on the iOS app store. It's extremely remarkable considering the latter has held the #1 spot for a considerable amount of time.

While the extreme hype surrounding Wuthering Waves' release certainly must have helped their growth, the title's release was plagued with bugs hindering the gameplay experience, raising complaints from many.

Moreover, the game faced immense backlash in the Japanese market following a mistranslation of Jiyan's 5-star Broadblade, Verdant Summit. While the limited-time weapon provides a Heavy Damage Bonus after casting Intro Skill and Resonance Liberation, the faulty text suggested the conditions were to cast Intro Skill and Resonance Skill.

Naturally, many players felt cheated and demanded a refund from Kuro Games via e-mail. However, in an unfortunate set of events, the situation got worse when the developers responded to them but forgot to enable the BCC function. This led to the accidental leak of e-mail data of over 200 players.

As expected Kuro Games provided generous rewards to the playerbase to control the situation, and it certainly seems to have worked given Wuthering Waves' rise as the highest-grossing gacha game on the Japanese iOS market.