On top of last patch before major patch, lack of events and gameplays in general, 2 banners that ran concurrently with characters that are broderline useless if you don't have the previous banner character, 2 banners after that featuring 1 really old support that may not stay meta for a while and 1 dps that Hoyo dislike shilling.
And only having like one fun event at the start of the patch that takes about an hour to do. On top of nothing for 4.0 for so long when we usually would've had a trailer in like November.
The last new release character had their banner start in December, so there were only reruns. And unless you played break specifically there wasn't much of a reason to pull for either Lingsha or Fugue, who covered most of January.
As for the other two who just went up, Sunday got powercrept and is getting double-powercrept soon, and he has 0 vertical investment past an E1 that's now understood to be trash as well.
Aglaea isn't that popular and has had several reruns.
Delayed patch cause the new planet is Japanese but got changed to oblivion due to politics.
Then almost all rerun chara are in a niche archatypes limiting the pool of pullers since once we arrive at the new planet there will be a new meta.
Also, even if there's a third banner of the staple brick support he is rumored to be out meta'd by an old chara, extending the draught.
3
u/dododomoNu Carnival; Noctilucent; Love and Deepspace; HSR; GI; GBFFeb 01 '26edited Feb 01 '26
Rerun characters who aren't that necessary + dry patch because they extended the patch and and the new region got delayed due to the current China-Japan political situation
The big 4.0 release was delayed due to escalating tension between China and Japan (the new region and characters were HEAVILY inspired by Japan).
In conjunction, the re-runs they had to fill in the gaps were mainly dying unit archetypes who have been severely powercrept, so not a lot of incentive for people to spend.
HSR has fallen off a bit due to a numerous things like powercreep, stale storytelling, and little to no events. If you look at the playstation Asia awards which is entirely based on revenue, you'll see that HSR is nowhere to be found.
They extended the patch by 2 weeks due to China/Japan issues. Because of this, they did this thing where there were 6 banners. All the good banners were in December so you can guess what happened here.
Politics affected all media in CN in relation to Japan. HSR feared they got their heads out, so they extended the patch and go crunching time on their work desks in these extra 2 weeks just to change something into non-Japanese planet.
There isn't anything new in January. Game went drought. It wasn't planned, unlike HI3rd.
I also think lot of people quit after 3.7 (end of Amphoreus arc), I also think a lot of players aren't confident in 4.X since we know that because of politic matters that version might have been heavily modified.
Also, players in hsr pay mainly for meta characters and rerun are never meta because of the big powercreep in this game.
4.0 was delayed due to politics. (The new region has heavy Japanese inspiration, and China isn't exactly happy with Japan right now) The delay meant that the entirety of January was just the latter half of Version 3.8, and most sales happen at the beginning of the version.
Additionally, there was only a single new character who supports a team that was already shown to be very vulnerable to powercreep.
Other than the Dahlia, every other character was a rerun, and of those, only one of them is considered meta (Sunday).
Finally, since Yaoguang and Sparxie were revealed to be characters of a new path, many people are saving up for them, since the game is almost definitely going to introduce new mechanics that basically require Elation units to beat easily.
The patch was delayed two weeks because of political nonsense between Japan and China. So there was NOTHING new in January to do. I opened the game a few times to do some grinding, but haven’t spent a penny in that game.
I haven’t rolled either, as Dahlia is niche for Super Break and that’ll probably get powercrept immediately with 4.0 finally coming out in two weeks.
Heck, depending on where you live, their YouTube channel might have not uploaded a single video in January at all. I honestly think the only HSR news I saw in January before the new video last night was the Fortnite news and that they fired Welt’s EN VA.
The CCP decided to escalate tensions in China and Japan, and with the Next planned location being Japan inspired, the devs had to rush and Create a new map, Planarcadia, this meant they needed a patch where NOTHING happens in order to buy time to finish making the world.
336
u/Obanai Feb 01 '26
HSR not top 10. EOS in the horizon bois 😂. /s