There are 118 Genshin Impact characters you can actually pull for, and they arrived across 71 separate dates between 2020-09-27 and 2026-08-10. That is the whole dataset this post is about, and the first thing worth saying about it is what it excludes: the roster holds 132 rows, and 14 of them are Travellers. Nobody spends anything to obtain a Traveller, so they sit outside every count here.
That distinction is not pedantry. Every excluded Traveller is a five-star, so the same roster answers “how many five-stars are there” with 81 or 67 depending on a choice nobody usually writes down. Most disagreements about Genshin character counts are this, and not a disagreement about Genshin.
The launch cohort distorts everything
26 characters carry a 2020 release date, which makes 2020 look like a boom year. It was not a year of releases at all. 21 of those 26 share a single timestamp: the launch roster, stamped 2020-09-27 upstream, one day before the 28 September 2020 release date Wikipedia records. That one-day difference is a timezone artefact of how the stamp was recorded, not a fact about the game.
Set the launch cohort aside and the picture flattens. Every complete year since has landed between 15 and 17 new characters. Six years, a spread of 2. Whatever else has changed about Genshin, the number of characters it ships in a year has not.
The last bar is drawn hollow because 2026 is not over. The roster’s most recent release is 2026-08-10, so that 11 is a partial year sitting next to complete ones. Read as a like-for-like comparison it shows a decline that has not happened, which is a good enough reason to mark it on the chart rather than in a footnote.
The average cadence never happens
The median gap between release dates is 22 days, and quoting that number on its own would be the most misleading true sentence in this post. The intervals are not clustered around three weeks with some spread. They are clustered around two different values.
25 of the 70 intervals are exactly 42 days. Not approximately — exactly, to the day, 25 times. Another 39 sit at three weeks or under. Between four and five weeks there are 3, and beyond six weeks there are 3, the longest being 84 days.
A distribution with two peaks does not have a meaningful average, and 22 days is a cadence that essentially never occurs. What the data describes instead is a rhythm: characters arrive in pairs a few weeks apart, then nothing for six weeks, then the pattern repeats. Six weeks is also the length of a Genshin version, which is the obvious explanation and one this dataset supports rather than proves — the roster records release dates and nothing about versions.
The elements are more even than they feel
Six years of additions have left the seven elements closer together than the discourse around any given one suggests: 21 at the top and 12 at the bottom, a spread of 9 across 118 characters.
Dendro sits last for a reason that is not a design decision about Dendro: it was introduced years after the other six and has had less time to accumulate anyone. A ranking of totals across unequal lifespans measures age at least as much as it measures emphasis, which is worth remembering before reading intent into the order.
What this does not tell you
Release dates say when a character became available and nothing about whether anyone wanted them. That is a different question and it is the one this site exists to ask — the running answer is on the Genshin rankings, which move as people vote and are therefore deliberately not quoted here. A number printed in a post is frozen the moment it is published; a ranking that recomputes every minute is not something a post can honestly restate.
Everything above comes from the roster committed to this site, which is rebuilt from Project Amber’s character API. The vote data is published separately under CC BY 4.0 if you want to do your own counting.