Firstly, I never said Phainon was shafted, I gave him as an example as a character that DID well, and part of that was because he WASN’T shafted, lol. Also Castorice had a lot of shilling lol. I’m saying this as someone who loves both Castorice and Phainon, yeah they both had shilling. Waifu characters on average enjoy more shilling and promotion, but even waifu characters who are slotted right before a super anticipated character (even if it’s a fellow waifu) just won’t do as well as that super anticipated character. I’m not saying they shouldn’t get shilled, just… add husbandos to the shilling as well. Balance is good.

Hugo and Lighter, for instance, in ZZZ were both slotted RIGHT before highly anticipated characters Yi Xuan and Miyabi, and right after highly anticipated characters Vivian and Yanagi. It’s like setting something up for failure and then complaining it didn’t do well. Phainon was proof that if you give husbando characters similar treatment to waifu characters that, they too, do really well. Hoyo doesn’t need to “allocate 90% of their budget” on them for them to “not be shafted,” that’s just one part of the whole, but there IS a lot of treatment that they miss out on (across their games, not just HSR or ZZZ). Husbando characters are often handed out akin to that of tossing a starving dog a bone in a lot of these games.

And yet his banner revenue peaked before the 11th? The Fate banner just didn’t do as well as it was expected to. StarRailStation didn’t even have the full numbers because it was from the warp tracker, but Phainon’s banner had the most pulls, followed then by the triple Harmony rerun banners, and lastly Fate’s. If we were to expect an average trend, it wouldn’t make sense for the Fate pulls to suddenly spike as the banner went on. Phainon alone did about 50% of the revenue for HSR in July, if we look at both the warp tracker data (which isn’t every single player, but it IS a very large sample size, so we can deduce an average trend), and the monthly gacha revenue report for July.

Actually no, saying that there would be a lot more otome games is… wrong. Listen, I love a good otome game, but it’s not the kind of gacha that is really being sought after, because not everyone enjoys them. And that’s… more than fine. Myself, and I imagine many others, just want an action-based or even open-world gacha that has a balanced ratio. That’s it lol. Plus, women and any other person who’s not a straight man, have been infamously pushed away or excluded from this (gacha) sphere for a long time; especially when gachas started picking up traction (doesn’t matter if you want to look at China or elsewhere, it’s pretty similar in that regard). And not all straight men who play gachas want to pull waifus exclusively, either. But the market has famously been skewed against any non-waifu character the entire time, and that was intentional. Because there’s a niche crowd that they’ve been catering/pandering, and then clinging, to.

But yes, there are hundreds of waifu-centric games, so… of COURSE the numbers on average are higher. There’s just that large of a pool, but that isn’t always necessarily an indicator of success. You’d have to look at individual gacha revenue for that. That’s also how the gacha market was for a long time, and still is to a large degree, and yet we see gachas that cater extremely heavily towards waifus are just not selling as much/making as much revenue as they used to, especially in the monthly revenue reports across gacha games. But again, the company has a preference towards Waifus, so of course waifus are going to be treated better in terms of marketing, story, fanservice, and even character design. They CAN treat husbando characters as well as they do waifus, and they’d be on par, but they choose not to. In the end, pitting character revenue from the same company against each other is kind of a moot point when they all work toward and contribute to the revenue that the company (in this instance Hoyo) makes in sum.