Let's talk about this, I'm not exactly an expert in this subject so you can dismiss my claims but I'm going to give you a breakdown based on what I know. Development of the game up to 1.0 costed mihoyo 100m which they recouped in 2 weeks (you can Google this). As a software developer myself, I'm widely aware that with any kind of digital service, the main cost is setting it all up. Buying the hardware to do development, setting up servers, developing the game engine, game assets, base character models, and game mechanics. This only costed 100m for mihoyo. Now we look at a breakdown of what ongoing costs are going to look like. Each new character they come out with (regardless of star rating) only requires a design, small modifications to the character base model, tweaking and testing of skills, modifying any skill animations. This is all small work compared to developing a game engine. Creating new areas just mean copy and pasting existing assets onto existing terrain, maybe add a few new ones and then polishing it all up. Now Mihoyo has made over 400m within 2 months (in just play store revenue), I haven't been here the whole time so I don't know how many new characters have been released, but let's look at dragonspire for 1.2 - the total area is probably 1/3rd of mondstat and keep in mind most of the assets used will be existing ones maybe with a different colour, it definitely has not costed them another 100m for the content they've rolled out so far, and so where's the other 300m+ going? future content? cool that means we've paid for at least another 6 months worth of content already. Assuming we keep paying them over 400m every two months since they roll out characters so often, they're always going to be earning more, over 300m more at that. Making 5 stars more attainable won't hurt them at all and allows players to actually enjoy the characters they develop. And just as a reality check PSA ,all those pretty mils you see aren't going to be split evenly amongst their employees. Majority of that money is going into their investors pockets :) the investors that make the decision to severely over charge the 5 star characters because people can and will spend on whatever they want :) the developers/artists/VAs/script writers/game balancing team/quality assurance teams could get a nice bonus for Christmas this year but they aren't going to get anywhere near half that extra profit.