Downloading Zenless Zone Zero: What Actually Slows It Down

The Zenless Zone Zero download is around 60 GB depending on the version and platform, and a lot of players report speeds far below their normal internet capacity. That gap between your ISP speed and your actual download speed is what most guides don't address. Fixing it means understanding why the download is slow, not just clicking retry.

The two most common causes are CDN routing and launcher configuration, in that order.

Zenless Zone Zero, like the other HoYoverse games, uses a global CDN to distribute the client. Your download speed depends on which CDN node your launcher happens to be pulling from. If that node is far from you geographically or congested at the moment, your download will crawl regardless of what your internet plan says. This is why the same download at 3 am is often twice as fast as the same download at 9 pm on the same connection: the CDN load pattern is different.

On PC, the HoYoPlay launcher (or the older Genshin/HSR launcher used for ZZZ before HoYoPlay) doesn't let you manually pick a CDN node, but restarting the download often triggers it to pick a different one. If your speed is stuck at, say, 2 MB/s and your normal internet does 50 MB/s, pause the download, close the launcher completely, reopen it, and resume. Sometimes it hits a faster node on the second attempt. Repeat two or three times if needed. This isn't superstition; it's how load-balanced CDNs work.

On mobile, the download goes through Google Play or the App Store on iOS. Both stores have their own CDNs that are usually pretty good, and the same trick applies: pause and resume, or reboot Wi-Fi if speeds are consistently low.

On PS5, Sony's CDN handles the download and it is often the slowest of the three platforms. There is very little you can do beyond going wired, closing other network activity, and letting it run overnight.

A few real speed killers worth eliminating before blaming the CDN.

Background activity on your network. Anything streaming 4K video, uploading to cloud backup, or downloading other large files will cut into your download speed. Pause them.

Wi-Fi on 2.4 GHz. Even if your internet plan is fast, 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi in a household with several devices often maxes out around 30 to 50 Mbps in real conditions. Switch to 5 GHz for the duration of the download, or go wired.

Antivirus scanning every file as it lands. Some security suites deep-scan downloaded content in real time, which throttles the download to the speed of the scan. Temporarily whitelist the ZZZ install directory if the download is going in circles.

A storage bottleneck you didn't know you had. If you're downloading to an older external drive or a nearly-full SSD, the disk itself can be the bottleneck once network speeds are high enough. This is more common than people think for players downloading to secondary drives.

One thing worth mentioning because people ask: a game booster or network optimizer will not speed up your download in a useful way. Those tools are designed to reduce latency on real-time game traffic, not to increase throughput on bulk file downloads. The bottleneck in a slow ZZZ download is either your ISP, the CDN, or your local network, and none of those are what a route optimizer is designed for.

If your download is genuinely slow and none of the above helps, the boring but reliable answer is to let it run overnight when the CDN is less loaded and your household isn't competing for bandwidth. A 60 GB download at 10 MB/s takes about 90 minutes; even at 3 MB/s it's under six hours. The download only has to complete once.