Genmugames thinks global players deserve less
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Genmugames is a gacha publisher who focuses on bringing niche titles from China and Taiwan into the global (and other Asian countries) market, with a few interesting choices along the way.
This is one of the few gacha companies that I actively try to avoid and always recommend people to skip and not touch anything they publish.
Why you ask? Because they make every single English version they publish worse than the original title and even the other servers they themselves operate.
We’ll go into all the details, but first some information on the company and operation they are running.
Company background and lack of information
This whole operation is a Japanese company with a reclusive Chinese CEO who uses a nickname and, honestly, is quite hard to find any information on.
I’m a huge advocate for online privacy and keeping your life separated from the internet, so I’m not complaining about this.
The company itself has some information and gives us more context to what possibly was going on.
It was originally registered in Japan in 2019 as 株式会社幻夢ゲーム, years before any game was published. No activity, no product sold, no nothing.
They moved addresses multiple times until 2022 where they finally renamed to 株式会社幻夢テクノロジー, changing only a few characters.
On their own website they cite the company was established in 2024, meaning this was either a shell company they bought or simply a small company doing ventures that were listed nowhere online.
This is also clearly a lie since there are records on when the company was established.
After that, from what I could find in Japanese registries, they seem to have around 9 employees and they always list their director as 陳勛, who, like I already said, I could not find any information on.
That’s cool and all but… why do you hate them?
A quick TLDR before we move into all the games they’ve published:
They always try to shaft their global audience, either by nerfing rewards or selling a game that’s already dead in the original server.
Gacha games are already bad enough in this industry to also have to deal with companies who see you as an inferior client who deserves a lesser product.
I guess the only good thing they do in contrast to Crunchyroll is to keep their games alive even when revenue is at all-time lows.
For more information, let’s actually go title by title and see their track record.
Haze Reverb
Waifu collector where the girls are actually giantesses (or well, they transform for battle) with a lot of fan service.
Since I was playing the Taiwanese version, I could see all the changes in global first hand. For some reason, they said the game was “too generous” and decided to nerf daily, weekly and monthly income for the Global servers.
This, paired with the outdated gameplay considering the game was released in 2024 made for a really rocky launch of the game, which is still alive nowadays.
Haze Reverb’s developer literally collapsed ten days after the official Taiwanese launch.
36kr has a great article covering everything that happened during 2023 with 听舟网络, the developer who announced it was dissolving ten days after publishing their TW, Macau & Hong Kong version.
This was a company with 130 employees, which honestly seems massive for the type of game Haze Reverb is and their other titles. They split some of the team into a new company and fired everyone else (with, allegedly, 4 months of unpaid wages).
Former employees then saw a new company advertising from the same office, with photos that included even the same in-office cats from their previous employer.
The new company 飞魔网络 was incorporated in February 2023, the same time period when they stopped paying salaries in the original company, which is really shady.
Then April to June directors and legal representatives began moving from one company to the other, and from July onward they faced 34 lawsuits totaling about 1.2428 million yuan (about $185k with current conversion rates).
For some extra context, Haze Reverb was supposed to be a Bilibili commissioned custom project that took over three years to build and was originally developed under a different entity called 上海萌窝网络.
After the agreement with Bilibili fell through for unknown reasons, the Japanese version was launched under INDEXG in October 2023 and passed to my favorite gacha publisher 幻夢ゲーム in May 2025.
Funny enough, three of the top executives on all the companies involved have been the same since 2015 across five companies: 上海幻天, 上海幻流, 上海幻鼎, 上海氪豹网络 and 上海暹瑞.
Could any of them be our mystery CEO? Honestly that’s more tinfoil hat theory and schizo territory but I think it could be funny if true lmao.
Elpis: Fallen Star
No rabbithole or schizo theory here, just a great autobattler waifu collector that’s doing pretty well on their Japanese server but… obviously global players do not deserve the same treatment.
This game changed MANY things for global players, including:
- Making meta low rarity units higher rarity so they were harder to obtain
- Removed paid currency to buy skins for free from time to time on events
- Changed monetization and packs to make some of them worse
- Reduced rewards for events, daily and weekly missions (just like Haze Reverb)
After all of this came to light, what was the response from the publisher?
“The reward adjustment was due to regional operational planning, but we understand it caused inconvenience”. You can check this yourself by reading 1-star reviews in the Play Store.
As it was expected with these changes and thanks to players voicing their concern, the global server is doing really bad nowadays in terms of revenue and playerbase.
Kind of offtopic and funny enough, some players in the official discord blame me for my videos as to why the game is doing so bad, which will forever be funny.
ALLFiring
The latest addition to Genmugames portfolio and the one that pisses me the most.
A lot of gacha publishers in recent years are bringing dead games to the global market. For single-player games this is, by no means, a problem.
But these are live service titles that get updated twice a month (depending on the schedule for your gacha), meaning they have a lifespan already decided BEFORE you even download the game in global.
They cannot make new content, they are not developers, they are simply translating and butchering games for global players.
And that is ALLFiring. There’s a bit of story with this game and its development cycle, but more on that below.
For this title, they did not change anything for the global players, really good right? THE GAME IS DEAD ALREADY IN CHINA AND GLOBAL IS NOT GETTING ANYMORE UPDATES, if they also nerfed rewards it would have been the icing on the cake.
So instead of selling you a nerfed product, they give you a corpse.
Global has gotten a few patches with “new” characters but no actual content, since once again, they cannot make content out of thin air and they already ran out of characters to bring from the CN side.
This is a dead game they simply keep alive to see if they can milk unsuspecting players who think they might have stumbled upon a great new live service game to try.
The game was originally called Ring of Fire, later renamed to Prometheus, later renamed in English to ALLFiring, which launched in CN on November 2025 and globally in April 2026.
This company follows the same pattern as the previous one. Developer 月胧吟 was in deep financial issues, and reports say they pre-sold the rights to publish globally to Genmugames.
Finding an official source for this is pretty hard but you can check two Chinese articles that cover everything, one in qq and the other in Zhihu.
The original developer, 上海月胧吟网络科技有限公司 (from now on Dimcroon) was founded in 2019 and they had 2 years to develop the initial concept, releasing the first PV in September 2021 with a pretty small team of 14, mostly recent graduates at the time.
In March 2022 叠纸网络 (Paper Games) bought a small % of the studio, making Dimcroon a company valued at 260 million RMB, around $36 million, while not being even 3 years old.
After that, the game took 6 years to develop and was rebuilt 3 times. Every single beta felt like different games, with quality declining every single time as per CN comments and reviews.
The lead artist, who was the whole reason they attracted investment in the first place thanks to the unique artstyle, left the company after the second beta, with the lead programmer following afterwards.
Considering the high valuation they got for a company their size with a non-existent product (or at least not one ready to be released) it made acquiring new investment impossible, making the producer allegedly sell his house to keep the project going.
The game finally launched in November 2025, but only on Android, with no PC client nor iOS since it was still in review.
They also launched with the worst gacha gaming payment bug in history until the famous Endfield Paypal drama.
For a quick TLDR, anytime you open the game you could see Alipay being opened in the background, which prompted Chinese users to post about how the game was malicious or stealing their money.
Developers did put out an official statement explaining it was bad code and they would never do anything like that but obviously the damage was done already (to be honest CN bros kinda exaggerated here, the Endfield bug was way worse lmao).
Even with all that, after they finally got approved in iOS and with no marketing, they entered top 500 grossing games.
The honeymoon period did not last long, since in January 2026 an employee posted alleging four months of unpaid wages and social insurance for all staff. He also said most people stayed because they loved the project, with people working until 3/4 in the morning a lot of the time.
After all this came to light, most of the updates the game got were broken or simply small cosmetic “updates” that didn’t add anything.
Now, after all that information, when did Genmugames buy the rights for the game? Because if it was AFTER the investment rounds when they had issues with money, this meant they paid someone who never paid their employees.
Like I said earlier there are no sources connecting either company or even confirming this purchase, so it’s really hard to say anything else.
My crusade against Genmugames
I’m someone who enjoys niche waifu collectors and, sadly, companies like this make it really hard to get new products or, when we do, be excited about it since we know it’s gonna be a product worse than the original with no good reason for said changes.
Similar to Crunchyroll, this is a game publisher that I will forever dislike and will continue to make videos if they announce they are publishing new titles.
Even if it only helps a few people see the type of developer/publisher they are and decide to not support them, that’s already a victory in my book.
Saying my crusade against X it’s kinda cringe now that I’m reading the final draft but I’ll keep it since my community always memes on me being a White Knight for Shift Up (and yes, their article will come sooner or later).