Yinlin leading Wuthering Waves recovery after launch troubles

Issues remain, but sales are picking up

Kuro Games

Kuro Games’ open-world RPG Wuthering Waves didn’t have the smoothest of launches with tons of technical problems plaguing the experience of players on top of complaints about the game’s story and presentation. Revenues from the game’s first week on the market reflected this rough release state, remaining below the point Kuro likely wanted to be.

Admitting the existing problems, the developers promised to tackle them as their top priority. Additionally, Kuro Games made a daring gamble by pushing the release date of version 1.1 forward by a week, thereby dodging the launch of HoYoverse’s Zenless Zone Zero and also getting the banner with new Wuthering Waves character Yinlin into the mix more quickly.

This last part may have been a crucial move, because it seems like Yinlin is leading a strong recovery for Wuthering Waves in terms of revenue at the moment.

Wuthering Waves reached the top spot in AppStore sales in Japan for the first time since it came out, jumping up 47 places and dislodging Genshin Impact from first rank. Things were similar in South Korea when the banner changed yesterday. 

In the US, Wuthering Waves jumped 168 positions, breaking into the top 20.

Yinlin is a puppet master, using her little helper in combat. / Kuro Games

Perhaps it was a bit of a blunder to launch with Jiyan, a male character that isn’t especially interesting or alluring, instead of the attractive and cool Yinlin. It helps that she’s an incredible asset in terms of her gameplay: It’s simple to have fun and feel very powerful with Yinlin, as she provides a ton of damage and is easy to fit into rotations. What’s more, she comes with a high skill ceiling as animation canceling can really upgrade her damage potential. 

In short, she’s everything you’d want a limited character in a gacha game to be, so people are laying down money to pull for her and her signature weapon.

After a rough couple of weeks, this should be welcome news for Kuro and give the developers some breathing space – it’s not easy to bounce back in the hyper-competitive gacha market, which makes Wuthering Waves proving that it can’t be written off so easily quite important for player perception.