MiHoYo may invite entrepreneur and business magnate Elon Musk to play their gacha action-RPG Genshin Impact.
In a now deleted tweet, the game’s official Twitter account (which had reached 2 million followers) posed a challenge to fans. Depending on the follower milestones reached for Twitter account @Paimon2theMoon, various antics would be afoot.
At 500,000 the official Twitter account will be renamed Paimon; after the mascot and helper character in the game. No doubt will this lead to some role-playing tweets as the cheeky fairy. After this however, the milestones are focused around the SpaceX founder, Neuralink and OpenAI co-founder, and CEO of Tesla (among other positions within those companies).
At 1 million followers, the official Genshin Impact Twitter account will follow Musk, and at 3 million he will be invited to play the game. Musk is certainly a gamer, and created a Wario based sketch for Saturday Night Live. The Tesla Model S also comes with a 10-teraflop gaming computer; with games including The Witcher III, Fallout Shelter, Stardew Valley, Cuphead, and Cyberpunk 2077.
If daring to invite one of the richest men on the planet to play Genshin Impact was not ballsy enough; at 5 million followers, MiHoYo CEO Liu Wei (also known as Da Wei as his in-game character in Honkai 3rd Impact) will invite Musk to the developer’s HQ.
The tweet was made on October 13th, and at this time of writing the @Paimon2theMoon account (named Ella Musk, after an NPC in the game who comes from a long line of scientists) has reached 68,400 followers. Nonetheless, Elon Musk seems to have high hopes that fans will succeed; tweeting “Can’t wait to be in Genshin Impact [rolling on the floor laughing emoji]”.
Could the deleted tweet and Musk’s own mean that he will be playing Genshin Impact ahead of the milestone? Do we even take his comments literally as him becoming the next character fans will desperately try to pull? If Aloy from Horizon: Zero Dawn can cameo as a playable character, why not?!
UPDATE: Kotkau reports that the promotional event was outright cancelled, they also claimed the tweet had received roughly 20,000 quote retweets with generally negative comments.
Our own Community Manager Michael ‘CWB’ Winton notes that even when a tweet is deleted, the quote RTs should remain unless deleted by the quote RT’er. Our own search reveals what seems to be only a handful of quote retweets, though some comments there and in reply to the original tweet show confusion and surprise about the focus on Musk.
Even though some had objected to the promotion, Musk’s own comments seemingly approving of it, would have given MiHoYo more incentive to keep the promotion going. Though this depends on the time the tweet was deleted.
If there had been outcry, it could have been motivated by the negative reception to the game’s one year anniversary; due to meager prizes and giveaways.
We’ve reached out to MiHoYo for confirmation on the promotion.
Genshin Impact is available and free-to-play on Windows PC (via the official website), PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Android, iOS, and coming soon to Nintendo Switch. In case you missed it, you can find our review here (we recommend it!)
Additional Images: Pixiv, Genshin Impact Fandom Wiki
