The latest Honkai Star Rail husbando, Phainon, is showing nay-sayers that male characters are wanted and viable units in gacha games. Basically, his banner is doing stonks, and we're happy about it.
The success of HSR Phainon's release pushed Honkai Star Rail to #1 in the charts in China, and SensorTower's recent report shows that HSR shot up to #1 on the iOS charts in Japan, too. This post estimates a revenue of around $12.5m (1.8 billion Yen) solely from iOS users located in Japan. Here's the original source of the data.
There's also this graph floating around showing banners of HSR, Genshin, and Zenless characters compared, but I've not found an original source for it to confirm validity. According to it, Phainon is performing better than HSR's Castorice, Genshin Impact's Skirk, and ZZZ's Yixuan in terms of banner popularity. However, this does group all the current banners together, so it takes Sunday, Sparkle, and Tribbie's reruns into account, along with Phainon's release.
The most successful banners in the game since release are HSR's Acheron, as she raked in around $50 million, and HSR's Ruan Mei with a cool $35 million. We'll need to wait for full figures when his banner ends, but it looks to be one of the most successful - if not the most successful - Honkai Star Rail banners so far.
The reason we're specifically excited about this is that there's a constant idea that male characters don't sell, and a lot of gacha games seem to be waifu collectors with the amount of female characters on offer, especially when they fawn over the main character a lot of the time. Phainon is one of the main characters in the Amphoreus story, so it's not surprising that he's proving popular, but it's still nice to see. Maybe game creators will pay attention now and realise that players do want cool boys on their teams, too.
I'm still holding out hope for a cracked male quantum support character, or a five-star male Genshin character that acts as a reaction enabler like Genshin Impact's Emilie or Genshin Impact's Escoffier. Or, maybe the next Zenless Zone Zero update will have something for us husbando collectors.