More than two-dimensional.

Text丨Heike Finance Xu Junhao

The popularity of domestic games is still rising.

The National Day holiday has brought the cultural tourism boom caused by "Black Myth: Wukong" to a new peak. For example, Xiaoxitian, a niche attraction in Xi County, Shanxi, quickly became popular because it was filmed in "Black Myth: Wukong". During the holiday, topics such as the reception of tourists in Xi County and the response of the Bureau of Culture and Tourism have appeared on the hot search list of Weibo, Xiaohongshu, Station B and other platforms several times.

Some domestic players have also set their sights on overseas markets. Black Myth: Goku was recently nominated for "Best Visual Effects" at the Golden Joystick Awards, a prestigious video game award in the United Kingdom. Previously, IGN, an internationally renowned game media, also sparked heated discussions on the evaluation of "Black Myth: Wukong" and the "Best Game" selection.

In fact, "Black Myth: Wukong" is not the first domestic game to be so popular overseas. Previously, as a representative of domestic games going overseas, it was "Genshin Impact" launched by miHoYo in September 2020. Netizens who played homophonic stalks dubbed "Black Myth: Wukong" as "Ape God", and imitated "Genshin Impact Launch" and said "Ape God Launch".

In the same year of its launch, Genshin Impact won the Google Play "Global Game of the Year" award, and in 2022, it won the Google Play "Best Sustained Impact Game of the Year" award; After 4 years of operation, "Genshin Impact" has been shortlisted for the TGA, known as the Oscar in the game industry, every year, and won the "Best Mobile Game" award in 2021. According to data from the research agency Sensor Tower, Genshin Impact has ranked first in the monthly revenue ranking of China's mobile game market for many times, and will be the champion of domestic mobile games in overseas revenue in 2021, 2022 and 2023.

This is the highlight that Genshin Impact brings to the game company behind it, miHoYo.

Before the emergence of "Genshin Impact", the domestic game market has been a pattern of "two superpowers and many strong" in the past 10 years, that is, Tencent is the first, NetEase is the second, and the other companies are far from each other. miHoYo jumped to third place with "Genshin Impact", far surpassing many established game companies.

According to the "China Mobile Game Market Research Report (2024)" released by the research agency Diandian Data, the revenue scale of China's mobile game market in 2023 will be about 256.74 billion yuan, Tencent ranks first with 132.71 billion yuan, and NetEase ranks second with 56.982 billion yuan, accounting for 37% and 16% of the market share respectively; Listed companies other than Tencent and NetEase accounted for 22%, of which Sanqi Mutual Entertainment and Century Huatong accounted for 5% and 2% respectively with 15.898 billion yuan and 7.793 billion yuan, and the rest of the listed companies were not higher than 1%; Non-listed companies together account for 25%.

It should be noted that the report does not directly count the overall revenue scale of miHoYo. The report mentions that miHoYo's revenue from Genshin Impact alone in 2023 will reach 37.36 billion yuan, and with the revenue of "Honkai: Star Dome Railway" (hereinafter referred to as "Honkai") launched in April 2023 of 2.32 billion yuan, miHoYo will occupy at least 15.4% of the market share.

You must know that mobile games account for more than 70% of the domestic game market. Even if other types of games are included, game companies other than Tencent and NetEase will have a revenue of more than 20 billion yuan in 2023.

But now that the data of "Genshin Impact" has declined, other works of miHoYo have not yet been able to reproduce the glory of "Genshin Impact", and the market and players are watching miHoYo's every move. Facing multiple challenges, miHoYo is innovating and changing, moving from focusing on the second dimension to diversification, trying to create more possibilities.

01

Content-based

The ups and downs of the plot and vivid characters are the differentiating advantages of "Genshin Impact".

As an open-world adventure RPG (role-playing game), Genshin Impact has an extremely large world structure. In the game's story, players are called Travelers and explore a world called Teyvat. There are many countries in the world, such as "Mondstadt" similar to medieval Europe, "Liyue" in the style of ancient Chinese painting, and "Inazuma" in the style of Japan's shogunate. As the protagonist, in order to find their loved ones who have been taken away by the gods, the player will advance the story by completing the game's quests, and the many NPCs (non-player characters) encountered in each country will have their own stories.

There are many players attracted by the plot of "Genshin Impact", and Xiao Shen, a post-90s engineer, is one of them. Xiao Shen told Heike Finance that he "entered the pit" on the first day of the launch of "Genshin Impact", and especially liked the role of "Raiden Shogun" and related plots in the Inazuma country.

The game's Raiden Shogun is the ruler and god of Inazuma, a seemingly cold woman who believes that "only eternity is closest to the principles of heaven". To this end, Raiden Shogun did not hesitate to issue the "Lockdown Order" and the "Eye Hunting Order" in an attempt to prevent any other factor from interfering with Inazuma's "eternity". The "Three Missions", the agency in charge of managing specific affairs, carried out Raiden Shogun's orders, blocked Inazuma, and seized the "Vision of God" at all costs, which would have allowed ordinary people to use elemental power.

Players will experience first-hand the devastation caused by the Eye Hunt Pass and try to change that. As the plot deepens, players will also see the story behind Raiden Shogun's obsession. Raiden Shogun, who lost his family and friends in the war, believed that human desire would bring loss, and that the eternity of nothingness was close to the truth. In order to protect eternity, Raiden Shogun enclosed himself in the consciousness space "Pure Land", and set up a puppet to handle affairs in the outside world instead of her, in order to avoid the "wear and tear" brought by time.

This type of character is called "beauty, strength and misery" - the characters are beautiful, extremely combative, and have a tragic background. This is exactly wh players such as Xiao Shen love Raiden Shogun. In the follow-up plot, the player helps Raiden Shogun open her heart, she begins to learn to contact the outside world, and shows more humane characteristics such as loving sweets "milk dumplings" and not being able to read "light novels", and the characters are three-dimensional and plump.

What's more, Genshin Impact's portrayal of Raiden Shogun does not affect the arc light of other characters. For example, someone stood up against the "Eye Hunting Order", challenged Raiden Shogun, and faced Raiden Shogun's special move "Thoughtless Knife", and finally died under the knife. This character has no name, but he left the classic line "There will always be creatures on the ground, dare to face the majesty of the thunder" in the relay of others, which has been talked about by many players to this day.

The change is happening in 2023.

The plot "water injection" began to arouse heated discussions among players at that time. Station B user "Man Yi" specially made a related complaining video, thinking that there is not much useful information about the large number of plots in the country of "Fontaine", and the traveler has met a lot of people and done a lot of tasks, but it is not very helpful to the main line, "There is a feeling that the screenwriter and planner are forced by the leader to expand the content." miHoYo's own game community, "MiYo Club", also has a lot of related discussions.

Some of the character creation also caused dissatisfaction among players. The updated plot of the character "Skirmisher" is quite typical: the Skirmisher in the early story is a villain who plots a war and kills countless innocent people, including the player's friend "Teppei"; The Balladeer in the new version of the story moves closer to the positive character because of "amnesia", and also uses "three betrayals" as a reason for him to do bad things. Station B player "Tangerine and his editor Leng" edited his dissatisfaction with this character into a video, calling it "the most failed character in design", and the video has now reached 257,000 views. Xiaohongshu's topic of "why is the plot of stragglers hated by netizens" now has more than 50,000 notes.

According to Diandian data, the MAU (number of monthly active users) of Genshin Impact in 2023 is declining after several version updates, and the overall trend is downward, falling from a high of nearly 32 million in March to about 28 million in December.

What can be compared is that the Raiden Shogun plot updated in 2021 of "Genshin Impact" and the card pool that can draw Raiden Shogun, and in 2024, there will still be netizens posting videos and strategies on how to draw the character. Even after 3 years, good characters and plots are still outdated in the minds of players, which is enough to prove the attractiveness of high-quality plots to players.

02

The gameplay is not easy to develop

In fact, Genshin Impact's content quality issues are a common problem faced by all long-form content creators.

MOBAs (multiplayer online battle arenas) such as "League of Legends" and "Honor of Kings" and shooting games such as "Peace Elite" and "PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds" mainly rely on gameplay and matchmaking and battles between players to attract users. "Genshin Impact" is a story-based RPG, and player operations are mainly based on exploration and PVE (player vs. player battle environments including monsters and bosses). Closer to a single-player game, Genshin Impact does not have a PvP (PvP vs. Player) mode that is common in RPG mobile games, and the player-to-player interaction is only a "Abyss" racing mode.

In other words, players can entertain themselves in Genshin Impact and only experience the story and exploration. The experience of the plot is one-off, and miHoYo must add new content stably for a long time to retain players.

Since its launch, Genshin Impact has maintained an update rhythm of about 25 days for a minor version and a major version for about 45 days. Station B's UP main "Boundless" edited the "Genshin Impact" full-story compilation video, the content has been updated to version 5.0 of the game in August 2024, with a cumulative video duration of more than 206 hours and a cumulative playback of 2.184 million. Another UP master "Four-Dimensional Confession" released a video of "Genshin Impact Chronicles Feature", explaining and sorting out the game's plot for 15 hours.

Taking the classic anime "Naruto" as a reference, the anime has been updated for 15 years, with a total of 720 episodes, each episode is about 20 minutes, and the cumulative is 240 hours. And "Genshin Impact" has only been in operation for 4 years. Of course, part of the plot of the game is mainly based on text dialogue, and the amount of creation in other aspects such as graphics is not equal to that of animation, and this is only used as a benchmark to illustrate the intensity of Genshin Impact's textual content creation.

Such a huge plot volume is a double-edged sword.

When the plot intrigues players, Genshin Impact becomes a huge treasure trove of IP, and its charm is no less than that of classic anime or novels. A large number of players spontaneously carry out secondary creations, writing "fandom", drawing "fanart", editing "second creation" videos, and are also willing to buy "Genshin Impact" merchandise or co-branded goods in reality. Genshin Impact's "Krypton" mode is also based on this, and players need to top up to draw their favorite characters. These characters have their own skills and mechanics, and a reasonable combination of characters can improve the player's combat ability and better deal with the boss.

If the content is too long, the difficulty of innovation will naturally increase. The plot and character settings are easy to repeat, and it is difficult for players to fall back when their expectations are raised, and it is easy to have a sense of gap. Once the player thinks that the quality of the story is not up to the standard they want, as mentioned above, the game loses its appeal.

This is how the mentality of Kobayashi, a player who has "entered the pit" since the first day of the launch of "Genshin Impact", has changed. Kobayashi said that because he likes "Raiden General", "Zhongli", "Xiao", etc., he has been "kryptonite" in "Genshin Impact", and will buy two monthly cards of 30 yuan and 68 yuan every month, and will also charge 6 yuan, 30 yuan, 98 yuan, 198 yuan, 328 yuan and 648 yuan each recharge stall every year, because the recharge gift of the stall is reset once a year. After playing for more than 3 years, Kobayashi has spent about 10,000 yuan cumulatively. He "abandoned the pit" not only because he couldn't tolerate the new plot, but also because he felt that "Genshin Impact" was too tired to "liver", and the game tasks were becoming more and more boring.

In Kobayashi's words, he transferred his original enthusiasm for "Genshin Impact" to "Broken Iron", because the plot and character creation of "Broken Iron" are like the early "Genshin Impact", positive, such as the character "Dust Gold" He likes it very much; Moreover, the gameplay of "Broken Iron" is turn-based, making the game experience easier.

If you remove the aura of the plot, it is easy to expose the shortcomings of the gameplay. miHoYo's new action game "Jeopardy Zero" launched in July 2024 is a typical case. Many players commented that the game's action gameplay itself is difficult to match with other excellent action works, and the plot cannot be compared with "Genshin Impact" and "Crashing Iron". On the first day of launch, the topic of ""Jeopardy Zero" is boring" immediately jumped to the hot search.

At present, the results of "Jeopardy Zero" are far less dazzling than the original "Genshin Impact". According to Sensor Tower data, Jeopardy Zero ranked fifth in the China App Store's mobile game revenue list in July 2024, but fell out of the top 20 in August. In August, in the top 30 list of Chinese mobile game publishers in terms of revenue, DiandianInteractive surpassed miHoYo for the first time and jumped to third place, while miHoYo fell to fourth place.

03

After the Genshin Impact era

miHoYo's recent performance has not been ideal.

At the FES 2024 carnival of Genshin Impact in August 2024, Liu Wei, co-founder and CEO of miHoYo, said that in the past year, he and the Genshin Impact project team have experienced anxiety and confusion, and heard a lot of sharp voices. Liu Wei even said with tears in his eyes: "If even travelers don't like Genshin Impact anymore, what's the point of everything we do." ”

Despite using the in-game term "Traveler", Liu Wei has not been able to dispel player stereotypes. Since this is not the first time that Liu Wei, who has the nickname "Big Viagra", has cried in public, netizens who don't buy it ridiculed it as "Big Viagra is crying again", and also made the relevant photos into emojis.

Anxiety comes from a good reason.

According to a research report released by BOCOM International on September 6, 2024, miHoYo accounted for two of the top 10 mobile games in China from January to August 2024, and its two main products declined the fastest: "Crashing Iron" ranked ninth, with a turnover of less than 5 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 13%; "Genshin Impact" ranked tenth, with a year-on-year decline of 52%.

The original miHoYo is like the game science behind the current "Black Myth: Wukong", and its works have sprung up because of its excellence, and the entrepreneurial story has been repeatedly mentioned. For example, the H and Y of miHoYo's name (miHoYo) are taken from co-founders Cai Haoyu and Luo Yuhao respectively, and the plus o is Liu Wei, Cai Haoyu, and Luo Yuhao all think that good companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc. have an o in their names. Since HoYo has the same name as other companies, they added mi from the two-dimensional famous character Hatsune Miku (Miku).

Although Liu Wei is one of the earliest co-founders of miHoYo, he is not in miHoYo's name, which has aroused the curiosity of netizens, but miHoYo has never responded to this question.

The founder himself loves the two-dimensional culture, and the ideal is "technology nerds save the world", which is very similar to those "middle two" and enthusiastic characters in the two-dimensional works. Since the launch of Honkai Academy 2 in 2014, miHoYo has formed a user mentality of "seriously making two-dimensional games" among players, and players have recognized "Mijia Game". The success of Genshin Impact is even more heroic: the founders took the money they had accumulated and "gambled" to develop a product that the market had never seen before. Moreover, the "Krypton" mechanism of "Genshin Impact" is very simple, and it can be played as a stand-alone game without Krypton.

But today's changes are quite dissatisfying to players.

This is where game operations issues are listed. In January 2024, in order to thank players for their 3 years of companionship, Genshin Impact on the occasion of the New Year mentioned in the live broadcast that players will be given 3 "Entangled Edges" in the game, and the price of these 3 props in the game is 480 original stones, which is 48 yuan according to the recharge. The value of this giveaway is not high compared to the common giveaways in Genshin Impact or other RPG mobile games, so many players complain about miHoYo's "slamming the door".

The direct impact of the welfare incident is the official account "losing followers". Previously, the number of followers of the official Douyin account of "Genshin Impact" was nearly 11 million, and it fell to 8.3 million in February 2024. As of October 9, 2024, the number of followers of the account is 8.604 million.

Xiao Yang, a game enthusiast, told Heike Finance that the two games he recharged the most were "Honor of Kings" and "Genshin Impact", with the former recharging more than 40,000 yuan and the latter recharging more than 20,000 yuan. In his opinion, the above benefits are simply "insulting", and the plot is becoming more and more boring, so he no longer plays "Genshin Impact".

According to multiple media reports, when Genshin Impact was established in 2017, miHoYo had only about 300 employees. According to a report by Hunan Daily on the September 2024 Internet Yuelu Summit, miHoYo's annual revenue now exceeds 30 billion yuan and it has more than 6,000 employees worldwide. miHoYo was originally just a "small but beautiful" game company focusing on two-dimensional, but now it has some "big factory" appearance in the domestic game industry.

miHoYo has also begun to break away from its usual story-based strategy. In July 2024, miHoYo's newly developed business simulation game "Xingbu Valley" won the game version number. "Xingbu Valley" still adopts the two-dimensional art style, but the simulation management is a game field that miHoYo has never set foot in before.

In September of the same year, miHoYo's recruitment picture circulated on the Internet, exposing 5 pre-research products of miHoYo, with labels such as modern city, realistic fantasy, European and American cartoons, etc. miHoYo did not further disclose the details of these products. Judging from the tags alone, some games are quite different from the two-dimensional content.

In the case that the results of "Jeopardy Zero" are not eye-catching, the pace of miHoYo's research and development has accelerated significantly. Genshin Impact also gives players more benefits while updating the version, which Liu Wei describes as a "fresh start".

In terms of game development and company size, miHoYo's upward momentum is extremely rapid. The market still has high expectations for miHoYo, hoping that there will be more high-quality hit games after Genshin Impact. What players want to see is not the tears of big viagra, but miHoYo to create more surprises like when it made "Genshin Impact".

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