Is Elon Musk Really Going To Be In 'Genshin Impact'? Don't Count On It

One of the most popular mobile games in the world announced it was launching an interesting marketing campaign that involved the world’s richest person. Due to fan backlash, the campaign was ended before it even started.

What Happened: “Genshin Impact” created a Twitter Inc TWTR contest to push its account @paimon2themoon to gain followers. The account was named Ella Musk, after a minor character in the game.
The rewards for getting the Twitter follower increases for the account were going to be:

• 500,000 followers: @genshinimpact will be renamed back to Paimon
• 1 million followers: @genshinimpact will follow @elonmusk
• 3 million followers: @genshinimpact will invite @elonmusk to stream Genshin Impact
• 5 million followers: CEO Dawei will invite Elon Musk to visit miHoYo HQ

The tweet was put out at 10 p.m. ET Wednesday and immediately saw backlash from fans and the game community who weren't too keen on the Tesla Inc TSLA CEO being used as part of a marketing campaign.
The Twitter account for “Genshin Impact” took the tweet down at 2 a.m. ET Thursday, around four hours after its initial release. The tweet had around 20,000 quote retweets, which can be a negative as it usually leads to a negative comment by the person sharing the original post.
Despite the tweet being deleted, Musk saw his thanks to thousands of notifications, which prompted this response:

Several articles criticized the marketing attempt by “Genshin Impact.”
“And frankly, nobody wanted a collaboration between Elon Musk and their beloved gacha game,” Kotaku said in an article.
The article criticized that the team behind the game might be “out of touch” with the game’s community.

Related Link: 5 Things You Might Not Know About Elon Musk

Why It’s Important: “Genshin Impact” is a top-selling video game that was released in 2020 on the Playstation 4 for Sony Corp SONY and PC. The game was also released as a mobile game for Android by Alphabet Inc GOOGGOOGL and iOS on Apple Inc AAPL phones.

Musk has a love of video games and anime. The Tesla CEO and the world’s richest person shared some of his favorite animes. “Death Note,” “Evangelion,” “Ghost in the Shell,” “Spirited Away,” “Princess Mononoke,” “Full Metal Alchemist” and “Your Name” were listed by the CEO as his recommendations to a Twitter user.

“Genshin Impact” is a free-to-play mobile game that continues to drive strong revenue for parent company miHoYo despite its 2020 release.

In September, “Genshin Impact” was the top grossing game with $341.7 million in revenue, according to SensorTower. The game saw 31.6% of revenue from China, 21.7% from the U.S. and 21% from Japan as its top three regions.