Genshin Impact,
properly explained.

When Genshin Impact launched in 2020, the state of the guides was rough. The official wiki was out of date, the big sites were full of SEO-bait 'Top 10' posts, and the actual theorycrafters (the people running damage calcs in spreadsheets) were scattered across a dozen Discord servers.

KQM started as a place to put what that community already knew. It grew into the biggest Genshin guide site on the internet, not by outspending anyone on marketing but by being the site the theorycrafters themselves used and recommended. Four million page views a month later, it's still community-run.

"Built by theorycrafters, for theorycrafters. Everyone else just gets the benefit."

Build the publishing platform around the community, not the other way around. Every guide has a named author, a changelog, and goes through a review process by other theorycrafters before it ships.

The site itself is deliberately plain. Content-first, no ads fighting for the fold, fast loads. The reputation was built by the community, so the site's job is to get out of the community's way.

Translation was added when readers in other regions started rewriting the guides themselves. The guides now ship in Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and French, all by contributors.

Four million page views a month and climbing. KQM is now the de-facto reference for Genshin theorycrafting. Even the Fandom wiki pages link to KQM for anything substantive. The Discord is still the heart of it.

The next work is infrastructure: the site outgrew some of its original assumptions and needs to scale differently.