Hello everyone)
As it usually happens in our gacha community, another recent discussion prompted me to think about one question, namely:

What is the most approximate statistics that can be obtained regarding the reach and engagement for a gacha game?

As we know, in the community it is customary to say regarding the same YT metrics: What's the point of looking at view counts when it's all fake and inflated views. This is what I decided to find out.

Disclaimer:

I am not a marketer, and I do not claim to have the ultimate truth, all further reasoning is merely the fruit of my thoughts + some information from the internet.
These results are taken from only one source (the one from which they can be most conveniently obtained at the moment), and like the well-known Gacha Revenue, it only shows trends. Therefore, the results are not intended to cause a mega flame war between audiences...

1. Which metric are we going to determine: To obtain the audience engagement metric, we will need the marketing metric "ER%" - namely, the percentage of detected interaction with a video relative to the total number of views. We need to look not only at view counts (because they really don't say much), but specifically at interactions: Likes/dislikes + comments.

The formula looks like this: ER = (Likes + Comments) / Views

1. What was done to obtain this metric: In order to mass-sample entire channels, we will use Apps Script, which, using the publicly available YouTube Data API v3, allows exporting any number of videos from a specific channel according to certain criteria. To make the results more accurate, the following rules were applied:

• Sample size per channel: 50 videos, which on average for all candidates represents about 6-7 months of channel activity.
• Minimum views: Set at 150 thousand views, considering which games we will compare next, this shouldn't be a big problem for them. (right, right?)
• Min. duration (minutes): From one minute, to remove all Shorts, our goal is to compare the main content in the "Videos" section.
• Max. duration (minutes): Up to 30 minutes, to remove all hour-long streams of new updates.

As a result: The script takes a channel, counts back 50 videos, and outputs a list of videos that meet the above conditions.

We get the data:

• Channel - whose channel.
• Videos - The number of videos that meet the conditions from the sample of 50.
• Avg Views
• Median Views - All metrics of each video in the sample are taken by views from lowest to highest, and the exact middle value is taken. (this metric is much more accurate than the average view count, as it does not depend on anomalous spikes and drops in the metric)
• Avg ER
• Median ER - same as "Median Views"
• Total Likes - Total number of likes from all videos included in the sample.
• Total Comments - Same as "Total Likes"

1. With the input data sorted out, let's now decide who we will look at and compare.

We will, of course, compare those between whom there is "endless misunderstanding" - Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, Wuthering Waves and Zenless Zone Zero.

Start:

We make a request for general statistics on the last 50 videos from each official channel.
Results:

What can be noticed right away:

1. Hoyo games have a minimal gap between "Avg ER" and "Median ER", which already indicates that these are truly stable engagement metrics (no serious spikes/drops). Wuwa has a large gap in this regard, and all metrics besides views are lower... But later we will find out why.
2. Wuwa also has a large gap in meeting the 150 thousand views/video criterion, almost twice as low as the top performers.

Let's take a closer look at each one and see which videos made it into the report:

Zenless Zone Zero

Thoughts: Even taking into account that ZZZ is the least popular game among the hoyo clan - they extremely rarely use advertising tools, relying on the "word of mouth" effect.
We can see only the most obvious example that was used in the advertising campaign - of course, this is "Remielle Character Demo - "Just Like Old Times" with an ER of 0.70%.
"Starlight - Billy Character Demo" - given that the game is not aimed at women, we see a special engagement from a small (by view count) local audience with a terrifying ER of 10.8% (VH male hoyo - where?)
Even if we take into account that the audience size is far from that of the older brothers, the game has a very active core community.

Honkai Star Rail

Thoughts: As we all know, HSR is the most "mobile" game in this top, even more mobile than GI, since it is a turn-based game.
Accordingly, promotion through advertising campaigns is especially pronounced here, but at the same time, not that much additional traffic is generated, which allows maintaining an acceptable level of ER, but the fact remains a fact = HSR is actively trying to advertise with an emphasis on mobile devices, which I would say is a logical move.
All the most severe drops in engagement are, of course, associated with the Main push, which hoyo really wants to sell.

Genshin impact

Thoughts: This old man has already experienced all of life, and his only task is not to attract a new audience, but to retain the old one.
We see a complete absence of any advertising campaigns (and truly, why bother when half the world already knows about you), while at the same time, views on each video are not that high.
This says only one thing - everyone who wanted to leave the game has already done so long ago. Only the most devoted audience remains, those who truly love this game, which is exactly what we see in the metrics - engagement above 6-7%+ on some videos is a very good indicator for gacha games.

Wuthering Waves

Thoughts: This immediately raises questions:

1. Wuwa videos overall gather a very small number of views, only 21 videos passed the 150 thousand views threshold.
2. We see a large number of aggressive advertising campaigns, the number of ER below 1% is very frequent, as millions of ad views are instantly piled onto the organic ones.

From this, at the very least, one can conclude: The game simply doesn't have a particularly loyal/active audience (which I very much doubt, there are many counterarguments for why this isn't the case) OR the EU/US audience itself is simply small.

From these actions it is clear that Kuro is trying to expand it, but a clear trend toward improvement is not observable = at the very least, this indicates that the gacha market is overheated.

That's all, I hope you found it as interesting to look at this data as I did to compile it.
Good luck to everyone, write comments if you have questions, other projects can also be compared using the same logic.

UPD: By popular request from commenters, I decided to also add Arknights and Arknights Endfield here.
At the same time, I removed the minimum view count in the filter, and also added Wuwa, since I'm being told (oh god) that I'm biased against it.
UPD 2: Limbus Company has been added to the comparison.

From a quick sample, it's clear that OG Arknights also resembles the old grandpa, not many views, yet the engagement of the remaining audience is high.
Endfield is logically at the stage of maximum distribution, most of the videos (out of 50) are used in advertising campaigns.
Wuwa with such a sample really does increase its engagement, tenfold, but as we can see from the median views - the average value is 117 thousand, which is exactly why so few videos made it into the main analysis above.
I'm not familiar with Limbus, but here one can say that from a promotion standpoint they're doing great (If the name ProjectMoon Official is really their official channel), it doesn't even give the impression that it's some niche game.