Cai Haoyu's "madness" is that he only has products in his eyes and regards the gold lords of large factories as grass and mustard; it is he who monopolizes the power of research and development and is the only one in design; it is he who insists on creating his heart and his faith is unwavering. Not crazy, not alive.
”
The author | Dong Zibo zhao qinghui
Edited | Lin Haifeng
Cai Haoyu was crazy.
100 billion US dollars, did not buy the dream of Miha You and Cai Haoyu.
In September 2020, "Original God" was released with great results. At that time, the war between the two giants of Tencent and Byte also extended to the game track. Seeing that "Original God" is rising, both companies compete to throw olive branches at Mihayou.
Tencent said that as long as Mihayou can let Tencent take a stake, any conditions can be accepted.
Zhang Yiming even proposed to exchange shares with Mihayou in a 4:1 manner, inviting Cai Haoyu and other Mihayou executives to join the byte as a co-creator, sharing blessings and sharing difficulties. At that time, byte's external private placement price was 400 billion US dollars, in other words, Zhang Yiming offered Mihayou a sky-high price of 100 billion US dollars.
Of course, these are all rumors. If the rumors are true, then the valuation of this $100 billion has long exceeded the netease game and even the entire netease company wealth.
Interestingly, Tencent once offered Zhang Yiming $100 billion to buy ByteDance, which was rejected by Zhang Yiming for self-deprecation of "being a company, not to become a penguin employee".
Zhang Yiming himself knows what a $100 billion offer means to an entrepreneur and the company's related stakeholders.
Although there is no shortage of money in today's Miha Tours, $100 billion is by no means a negligible number. When huge wealth is placed in front of them, too many people are soft on their knees and can only succumb to the omnipotent "banknote ability" of capital.
I don't know what Cai Haoyu will think after hearing this news. Maybe he will think of 2011, when he only had 100,000 yuan of start-up capital and did not even have office rent; or 2012, when he just got 1 million angel investment from Skye Network, but was confused on the road of commercial games; or 2017, when "Crash 3" got 1 billion annual revenue and the company failed in the IPO...
But in any case, eating people's mouths is short, and receiving money is to work for others. As the largest shareholder, actual controller and spiritual leader of Mihayou, Cai Haoyu did not want to do so.
As a result, Cai Haoyu and Mihayou rejected the offers of today's two giants in China and are still "alone" on the game track. One after another solid quality game works are their weapons.
Before rejecting the head, Mihayou's parting ways with station B N years ago is also one of the important famous scenes in the history of China's Internet, of course, the other half of this story, station B is also a fierce character of the Chinese Internet, not only with Mihayou, but also with the folding paper of its investment, there has also been a god reversal of the exchange story, such as the night when a game company refused to invest in the platform, it was hacked by the bridge section, and around the personal dividends, strategic investment and advertising between the cut and chaos.
The story of Station B and the Four Little Dragons of the Shanghai Game is a game version of the Meteor Garden, which is wonderful enough to listen to our next breakdown.
Back to Talk about Mihayou, to this day, Mihayou is no longer the start-up game company that groped in the two-dimensional category, and Cai Haoyu is no longer the college graduate who first entered the society. The main change is that "Original God" made Cai Haoyu's waist plate stiffen, and let Cai dare to break his wrist with channels and platforms.
To say that Cai Haoyu is "crazy" means that he only has products in his eyes and regards the gold lords of large factories as grass; it means that he has monopolized the power of research and development, and he is the only one in design; it means that he insists on creating his heart and his faith is unwavering.
There are many articles about "Original God", others have talked about it, and this article will not talk about it much. The reason why "Original God" can become "Original God" is that some of the mechanisms and reasons are not humane; some are grass snake gray lines, hidden in the entrepreneurial history of Mihayou.
The beginning of Leifeng's "Masterpiece Visit" series begins with "Original God" and the people behind it.
1
The Chinese game world is in a state of flux
In February 1999, an article was published in the Qilu Evening News. The article interviewed a child in Jinan City, whose parents were engaged in computer teaching at a junior college, which made him hear about it from an early age. At the age of 8, he won the second prize in the second national computer animation competition for "Alien Messenger". In 1999, he was awarded the first batch of small academicians of the Chinese Academy of Juvenile Sciences.
In the interview, the child said: "The computer is not a dead thing, it is changing all the time, technology is constantly developing, I must continue to learn, continue to improve, in order to keep up with it." 」 ”
The little friend's name is Cai Haoyu, and he was 12 years old in 1999.
Qilu Evening News in Cai Haoyu's photo (picture from the Internet)
More than a decade later, Cai Haoyu, who was still studying at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, participated in an event called the "Hemp Ball Flash Game Development Competition". At that time, Flash games still had "king-level" traffic on the PC side. With a game called "The Story of The Woman", Cai won the championship and received a prize of 30,000 yuan.
At that time, Cai was already an "otaku" image, and in the video data, he was thin, combed, wearing a blue-gray shirt, with a folded sleeve, and his face was full of student childishness. At the meeting, he showed the Story of The Lady of the Dead, controlling the game character "Yayoi Nanatsu" to run and jump.
What is terrifying is that in the development of "The Story of The Witch", Cai Haoyu uses the Flash game engine he developed himself - Misato Engine. The year he won the award, Cai Haoyu was 23 years old.
Only 1 year after winning the award, Cai Haoyu founded the game company "Mihayou" in Shanghai, and did not mind calling himself an otaku, shouting to the world: "Technology house saves the world!" ”
When it was time for people to speak softly, Cai's voice, not many people heard. So Cai decided to make a game where people could hear him.
If Cai Haoyu had been born ten years earlier, or ten years later, he might not have had today's achievements. Let's first put aside Cai Haoyu's story, broaden the perspective, and look at the current situation of China's game industry.
"To this day, the entire (Beijing) gaming circle is dead, without innovation, addicted to the past little achievements can not be extricated."
When Leifeng Network chatted with a senior practitioner in the industry, he said categorically that the growth rate of traditional game companies led by Beijing companies has slowed down, while emerging game companies have already caught up. Even from the product level, the gap between emerging game companies represented by the "Four Little Dragons" and the older generation of game companies represented by Tencent NetEase has opened up.
The "Four Little Dragons" mentioned by this practitioner include Lilith ("Awakening of All Nations"), Paper Folding ("Miracle Warmth"), Eagle Horn ("Ark of Tomorrow"), and Miha you, founded by Cai Haoyu, is also among them. Once again, amway, why Shanghai has become the Hollywood of Chinese games and even the entire entertainment field, this is an interesting and long topic, and interested readers are welcome to communicate with us.
The current Chinese game industry is the era of the re-emergence of these four small dragons and the Shanghai game industry.
In September 2020, Original God released its 1.0 version. The previously controversial "Original God" sucked up more than $1 billion in just 6 months. According to the most research report released by data analysis agency Sensor Tower, "Original God" will earn as much as $1.8 billion in 2021, ranking third among the 8 mobile games with global revenue of more than $1 billion in 2021.
What's even more terrifying is that "Original God" is not as short-lived as many mobile games that have dominated the list, and from the current point of view, it has gradually become an IP of its own. The activity linked with KFC, "Meet in another world, enjoy the delicious taste", has finally realized the unity of the player's physical and spiritual food, and the scene is hot and even alarms the epidemic control.
Is Protoss special? "Original God" is of course special. But when the times create heroes, "Original God" can be a big fire, in the end, it still caters to the major changes in the game market, of course, plus a little luck. A person in charge of war investment at a large factory summed up this trend in one sentence:
This generation of users has been upgraded.
In the past, the gameplay of the game is constantly educating users, players in the process of continuous accumulation, once the existing gameplay is familiar enough, the game industry will be forced to the next stage by demand, such as players after trying MOBA, battle royale type, (semi) open world game, for mobile gamers, is a very strange but can open the brain a category, console game players although very familiar, but also did not experience what the open world game in the mobile phone is like, so, and "Original God" At the end of the previous stage, it happened to fill the gap in the next stage and had a good starting point.
This trend is true in China and in the world.
Some people say that Mihayou has already predicted the trend of market development, and some people say that "Original God" just happens to bet on the "lucky one" of Bao. In any case, the listing of "Original God" is like a nail, steadily plunging into the gap of market demand.
2
Is "Original God" a "big gamble" by Cai Haoyu?
Such a phenomenon-level game has caused big manufacturers to ask themselves: "Why didn't I make "Original God"?" ”
Yang Zixiao, managing director of Blue Lotus Research Institute, told Leifeng Network an interesting thing: after the explosion of "Original God", he talked to several people from traditional game manufacturers about "Original God", and the first reaction of the other party was unconvinced, and they all felt that if they set up a project, they could also make the same successful products.
First of all, the development power of "Original God" is mostly concentrated in the hands of Cai Haoyu. Cai Haoyu, on the other hand, is one of the rare talented producers in the Chinese game industry. The advent of "Original God" is undoubtedly a big gamble at the level of MihaYou Company.
Since founding Mihayou, Cai Haoyu has been reclusive, rarely showing up and giving interviews. This also casts a veil of mystery over Cai Haoyu and his people. The speculation of Cai Haoyu can only be understood by other people's oral accounts or through his works.
In the interview, Lei Feng network learned that Cai Haoyu is the kind of person who focuses on some "paranoia".
Cai Haoyu
When Cai Haoyu first founded Mihayou, Mihayou was just a small company with only 6 people, working in an entrepreneurial center in Shanghai Da minhang. At that time, Chen Yuetian, who was still an investment manager at the Innovation Factory, wanted to communicate with the founders of Mihayou because he saw the newly launched "Crash Academy", so he made an appointment to visit on a Thursday.
Interestingly, Chen Yuetian's boss in the innovation workshop, Zhang Liang, is actually a two-dimensional enthusiast, and we have visited the office of its game company adjacent to Zhihu, Zhang Liang (yes, Zhang Liang is also the co-founder of Zhihu), and there is also a strong Japanese atmosphere. Zhang Liang had previous connections with the founder of Mihayou.
According to Chen Yuetian, the six founders of Mihayou were all crammed into an office, and each had a desk in the corner, and in the middle was a large table full of comics and light novels. In 2013, the first season of the "Secondary Illness also wants to fall in love" animation has just ended, Cai Haoyu and they got more than a dozen light novels and comics, stacked high on the big table, the concentration of the second dimension exceeded the standard.
Chen Yuetian and Cai Haoyu talked several times, and during that time, Cai, who had just finished "Crash Academy", was preparing for the development of a sequel. Chen and Cai talked a lot about the experience of online game business model and numerical design, according to Chen Yuetian's recollection, and Cai Haoyu had just started a business at that time, and there was no systematic idea of commercialization.
After listening, Cai Haoyu said: "This should be learned quickly." ”
At that time, Chen Yuetian only felt that Cai Haoyu had some self-confidence, and even some pride.
Now in the past few years, Chen Yuetian has left the innovation workshop and traveled to Chenhai, and now he has founded Huofeng Capital, focusing on the field of young people's culture. And the Miha tour led by Cai Haoyu has already flown up to the Ninth Heaven. Recalling it again, Chen Yuetian said to Leifeng Network:
"Cai Haoyu is really a genius, blame myself for not being able to tell the difference at that time." I really can't identify how tall a person with a higher rank than me is. In the future, when you encounter similar CEOs, you will definitely not have much nonsense to invest. ”
"Looking back now, the feeling of chatting with Zhang Yiming is also like this." Chen Yuetian added finally. Cai Haoyu and Zhang Yiming have a level, which is the most heard evaluation in our interviews.
This paranoia of Cai Haoyu is also reflected in the establishment of the "Original God".
In the project stage of "Original God", not everyone is optimistic about this project. Xu Yiran, a veteran game industry, proposed three risk points for the "Original God" project to Leifeng Network:
1, PVE, small-scale, light networking elements, although such an attempt has been verified in "Crash 3", "Original God" is an open-world game with MMO genes. This kind of project lacks money-making cases to verify.
2, draw card mobile games, in the country, but the sea may not work. For games such as "Original God", European and American players are more inclined to buy out, and the card drawing system may not work in Europe and the United States.
3. The two-dimensional element, especially the post-celluloid painting style, has a strong Asian characteristic. Whether the European and American markets eat this set or not is still a problem.
In addition to these three major risk points, "Original God" should be an open world, and the magnitude is not small. Although from the beginning of the "Crash" series, Mihayou has a mature "stand-alone gene", it is difficult to say that the management of Mihayou does not play drums in his heart.
Today's game industry has "rolled" out of the new world, a game development cost of tens of millions, open world games are even more. According to the disclosure, the development cost of "Original God" may be more than 100 million US dollars, and this number will only get higher and higher with the subsequent updates of maps, characters, and skins.
A well-known investor in the circle told Leifeng Network that a big factory like Tencent NetEase, no matter how innovative, will never move its own basic disk. Innovation is also mostly "play ticket" nature, and it is enough to invest in millions to tens of millions. This was also confirmed by a former employee of Tencent, NEXT Studio, tencent's indie game group, which has recently begun to carry the pressure of turnover: "It is still too difficult for a commercial game company to suddenly 'grow' an independent game division below." ”
The upfront investment of 100 million US dollars is by no means playing tickets, and Cai Haoyu is to "gamble" on the company's future and external imagination in a game like "Original God".
Of course, Mihayu can definitely afford to do "Original God". Wu Jian, the former president of 360 Games, and Lei Feng Network dismantled the difference between Mihayou and the traditional big factory style: Is Mihayou doing "Original God" a "big gamble"? Definitely not, Miha you himself must have done the accounting, there is a successful "Crash 3" pocket bottom, at least "Original God" will not lose. But for commercial companies, a product is not a loss- and cost-effective, spending enough manpower and material resources, the time cost and opportunity cost consumed are all risks for the company. For giants such as NetEase Tencent, under the pressure of historical baggage and profitability, one product may only earn 1 billion yuan, and it has the opportunity to become a 20 billion hit; while another product can make 5 billion yuan stably, and the giants usually choose the latter.
There is a view that Mihayu does not have this baggage, so dare to gamble. LeiFeng Network has heard a saying from many industry insiders: Cai Haoyu did not think too much about it from the perspective of profit when setting up the project for "Original God".
An early investor of Mihayou sighed, Cai Haoyu is really a person who continues to bet on the future, the collapse series makes money, thinking about whether it can be dividends, Cai Haoyu when he first auctions out a hundred million DOLLARs from a billion yuan profit to do new projects, and the rest of the money has to maintain the normal operation of the collapse series; the original god began to make tens of billions of money, Cai Haoyu will spend 5 billion yuan to do brain science, and many other investments in the future. Like Zhang Yiming, Cai Haoyu is very resolute and indomitable in betting on the future and can achieve a positive cycle with the present.
A good producer often has excellent game instincts. They are born to know what a good game is, and they just need to keep polishing their work until they can reach the state of satisfaction in their hearts, then this game must be a blockbuster. If you think of it this way, everything may make sense.
The story behind it is well known, "Original God" did it, and "Original God" was on fire.
"Paranoid" game producers are not uncommon. It just so happens that Cai Haoyu's "paranoia" is used in game innovation.
Wu Jian, former president of 360 Games, told Leifeng Network: "The concept of Mihayou has not changed in essence, and it is constantly proving itself, from the "Crash" series, to "Original God" to the new open world projects being done, each of which is doing a very drastic breakthrough innovation. ”
The establishment of "Original God" is of course related to Mihayou's previous works, technology, and management accumulation. From the very beginning, the "Crash" series has firmly done quadratic elements, PVE, and content-oriented updates, and thus formed one of the largest private domain traffic pools in China. In this way, rather than saying that "Original God" is a new work on IP, it is better to say that it is a "sequel" based on the tradition of "Collapse".
Not only in the accumulation of user pools, "Crash 3" also made a good start in the development of "Original God".
In terms of art, "Original God" inherits the original celluloid style of the Crash series, as well as the 3D modeling and texture level that was verified in Crash 3. In addition, the development experience of 3D action games, "Crash 3" also laid a good foundation for "Original God". Even in terms of plot, some players have even dug out the connection between the "Original God" and the "Crash" series; there are also predictions that in the future, the world of the "Original God" is likely to be linked to the world of "Crash".
HoYoverse, the Miha Universe, may also meet users in the form of works linked.
Crash 3
"Original God" has just come out, and rumors of "plagiarism of Zelda" are rampant. On the Internet, in response to the question of "whether "Original God" is plagiarized", the online scolding war between mobile game players and end gamers is also in full swing. Today, more than a year after the original god was launched, there is less and less controversy about plagiarism.
The mutual reference and learning of the game industry is not a "matter of principle", after all, the pearl is in front, and it is also common sense for people to want to "pay tribute to God's work". According to an insider in the development team of "Original God", "Original God" absolutely "learned" Nintendo's famous work that year- "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wilderness": "In the early days, it will definitely be borrowed, and in the early version of the research and development period, it may not be so concerned as a whole." Therefore, in the testing stage, some of the content of the game, mainly art resources, will have a strong sense of vision. ”
Comparison of the original god and Zelda (image from the Internet)
The classmate said that in fact, the scolding war of that year was mainly caused by the chain of contempt in the game circle. "Some console players who do not play mobile games have seen their 'noble' console games copied (there must be a gap), coupled with the amplification of public opinion, and only then did this incident brew."
Of course, the look and feel issues are optimized as the game is developed. The planner of Mihayou said that in fact, with the continuous iteration, updating and revision of art resources, more and more new content is added, and the old content is constantly diluted. Especially after more elements with national style have been added, the gap with Zelda has also widened.
To say that "copying" this matter, Cai Haoyu mentioned it in an interview many years ago. When setting up the project for "Crash Academy", Cai only had one core gameplay, and it was not clear how to commercialize, design the system, and adjust the values. "We didn't understand how to do this thing, and then we copied someone else's system, and it was as simple as that."
The game industry is originally a creative industry, and it is not shameful to "steal teachers and learn art", only as the "unspoken rule" of the game industry, or a secret that cannot be said. It's just that Cai Haoyu can be so frank, to some extent, it is indeed enough to be commendable. Of course, just plagiarism is not Cai Haoyu's personality, he must add his own things and brand his works. In this way, it can be regarded as "cai haoyu production".
Cai Haoyu's game does have a strong personal style. Quadratic, PVE-dominated... Mihayou's creative preferences have long been talked about by too many people, and I will not repeat them too much in this Leifeng network. And there is a perspective that few people mention:
In fact, what Miha you does is not a game, but content.
An employee inside Mihayou said that Cai Haoyu is a person who sinks his heart into content, and rather than paying attention to the game, Cai Haoyu wants to tell a good story and do a good job of content, and the game is only a carrier of content.
Here Lei Feng Network suddenly remembered that Cai Haoyu has won awards since he was a child and has done computer animation; and his first award-winning "The Tale of Shu Po" is just a fan game of Cai's own novel "The End of the Grid", and making a game is his "halfway out of the house".
I don't know whether it is a mistake or Cai Tiansheng's intuition as a gamer, at present, the attention to content is gradually entering the vision of major manufacturers in the game circle. Whether it's Miha Tours, or Folding Paper or Eagle Horn, content and stories are their main products. In the "Four Little Dragons", Lilith, who is more "backward" in content, has also begun to recruit copywriting planning.
It is not difficult to understand why there are more than a hundred people in the planning team of "Original God". And 5 years ago, it was also planned by the low-status copywriter in game development, and today's demand and treatment are also rising rapidly.
But doing content is not just as simple as "recruiting people". After finding the person who does the content, the decision-maker must also clarify various important management supporting measures such as content planning and pipeline combing, and the accumulation of management experience and company culture is equally important. Many manufacturers that have moved have consciously lagged behind other competitors, and the current game circle is so "rolled".
3
Cai Haoyu's One Word Hall,
Mihayou's weapon or original sin?
Cai Haoyu's "paranoia" is not only reflected in the "big gamble" of the project, but also in the development of his monopoly.
A fact that has not been confirmed by the parties is that before Cai Haoyu decided to gamble on "Original God", one of Mihayou's early investors quietly reduced some of its shares, of course, it still owns 15% of Mihayou's shares, and its investment in Mihayou is still the most successful angel investment in the history of Chinese games. Is it that Mihayou is confident enough to reduce its holdings at a high point to improve asset allocation or to take the initiative to avoid risks at "Original God", perhaps both.
According to a person in the circle, as the main helmsman of Mihayou's products, Cai Haoyu must be personal and like to do "micro-management". The development layer of Mihayou is almost Cai Haoyu's "one-word hall", and he rarely gives up power. But at the same time, this is why from the "Crash" series to "Original God", Mihayou's works all reveal Cai Haoyu's personal aesthetic and style.
Also in an interview in 2014, Cai Haoyu told the media that he should have the greatest degree of decision-making power in the aesthetics of the product: "At the beginning, we must lay the art style of the game pure, and the taste should be right. What's right? For our team, what I think is right is right. ”
Don't forget, the size of the original god development team is definitely not small. The size of the original god's development team is 800-1000 people, and as the project progresses, this number has already exceeded four digits. To "micro-manage" such a large team is certainly not an easy task.
And the same system, under the big factory, will never work. Leifeng network once heard a gossip, penguin ace king glory at the beginning, ten days can make a skin, but now each skin is several groups to do together, and then carry out internal PK, various arguments, toss for a long time to go online. It is no wonder that the glory of the king, the glory of the king studio currently has a huge volume of 4,000 people, photons also has a volume of 3,000 people, 3,000-4,000 people. The decision-making within the factory may face "disputes among the princes" between various departments; and the same decision-making, Cai Haoyu, who is the "emperor" in Mihayou, only needs a big hand to solve. In this way, in terms of mobility, the big factory is far worse than Miha tour.
Of course, Cai Haoyu's "one-word hall" is not an invincible strategy. According to a person who knows the inside story of the original god team, the lack of long-term incentives, overtime work of "vigorous miracles", "like the new and dislike the old" in employment, and external gold dollar offensives have made the departure rate of the "Original God" team higher than the general level in the industry. Cai's dictum of the product is rumored to have inflated the power of the company's "eunuch layer" (that is, the middle management responsible for conveying Cai's instructions and orders).
When seeking to verify this, he was refuted by an internal employee of Mihayou: "Although the individual has little direct contact with Brother Cai, his personal impression is still not so wordy, he has been on the front line and for the things he cares about will be more detailed than in my cognition, but he is still very open to listen to opinions, and I feel that there is a certain discrepancy with my personal impression." I have very few personal impressions of leaving the core position, at least very few who have direct contact with me on development. ”
The employee said that Cai is an actionable idealist, and under the leadership of Cai Haoyu, the people below can also be infected by his temperament to delve into content. As a result, many people work overtime voluntarily, not because of the company's "coercion and inducement", but because of their own internal driving force.
Employees within Mihayou will always have an "invisible pressure": they always feel that they are surrounded by industry cattle people, and they feel inferior to others, so they have to constantly improve themselves. At this point, it's like ByteDance. In Byte, especially in some innovative departments, the debut is the peak of the situation has also begun to catch on. The inner volume is still an invincible virus on the Chinese Internet.
In any case, no matter how strong Cai Haoyu is, he can't take care of all the development of "Original God" by himself. In terms of team building, Cai Haoyu also has a way.
First of all, in terms of technology, Cai Haoyu is originally from a technical background and has higher requirements for the technical team. Mihayou's technology development mouth will always occupy the largest page on job postings. Rumor has it that the technical art of the game industry, half in Shanghai, half in Miha. Popular science, technical art is a "rare corner" in the industry, you have to understand art, technology must pass, link program development and art creation, usually a representative of high-level talents. Of course, salaries are not cheap either. Good technical art is a million annual salary, or even more than a million. Because of the success of the original god, Penguin invested at least four teams to do similar things in Caohejing, where Miha you was located, and frantically dug people on the spot, thus flipping the technical art position into a super hot post of magnitude with the artificial intelligence algorithm engineer.
Not only that, in addition to the "regular projects" of game companies such as client gameplay and game servers, research work such as NLP deep learning researchers, senior speech recognition researchers, and action generation deep learning researchers are also recruited positions for Mihayou. It makes people feel deeply: Mihayou's technical fanaticism is terrifying.
In terms of recruitment, Mihayou is absolutely willing to dig up people with heavy money, and walks confidently and uniquely on the road of recruiting in the game industry. In an article that has been deleted from Station B, it is said that the average monthly salary of Miha Tour in 2020 is 21,740 yuan, and 25% of all employees can get 30,000-50,000 yuan per month, while the average monthly income of Chinese online game companies in that year is only less than 12,000 yuan.
It is rumored that being willing to spend money is not a feature of Mihayou, "heavy cash, light (or zero) equity" is. On the one hand, Mihayu does not hesitate to promise short-term interests with high temptation, so that people can ignore the longer-term equity returns to a certain extent; on the other hand, Cai Haoyu is not afraid of the flow of personnel, still dead "grasping" the control of the company, and single-handedly controls the rudder of Mihayou.
At the same time, Cai Haoyu also trusts the newcomer enough. People with internal ties to Mihayou said that Cai Haoyu prefers "airborne talents" and has even some more trust in newcomers than "old people", which is rumored to have caused dissatisfaction among some "old people".
Fortunately, Cai Haoyu still holds the power of development and minimizes the organizational obstacles to development, and it is also this almost "radical" innovative idea that makes "Original God" maintain a sharp and enterprising posture at the beginning of the project.
Previously, Lei Feng Network chatted with people inside Miha Tour about recruitment, and learned that the people recruited by Miha You are very young, a group of people who know more about the second dimension, and business ability is the main assessment factor. In addition to being young, what is more important is that the young people in the "Original God" team have little ambition for power, and they all have dreams for games, and can drill into vertical fields such as planning and art to the extreme.
NetEase, Tencent and even ByteDance, the game people in these big factories, generally focus on doing a few years of technology to transform into management, because the salary of management positions is higher, the treatment is better, and management is the road to more career development.
Studioization, and the consequent gradual bureaucratization, is the "poison" of the corporate system toward rigidity. The management model of Mihayou is more similar to Cai's model in the era of independent game development - hierarchical self-driving, with the project team as the unit, decomposing the big tasks into different topics and breaking them separately. The company's internal direct relationship is relatively small, taking planning as an example, there are only 2-3 layers above the grass-roots planning. Management and technology also receive roughly similar salaries, with no faulty distinctions.
Mihayou does not do R&D progress conferences, and even if there is a conference, it is only a synchronous project overview. Meetings are mainly group meetings, usually held separately, or together with directly related other groups, and the project team leader is responsible for filtering unnecessary information and combing the information pipeline.
Without layers of reporting and PPT culture, the company's efficiency is naturally higher. However, this management model also has drawbacks, that is, the producer must have a strong coordination ability and overall view, and coordinate thousands of troops with one person's strength, which is probably one of Cai Haoyu's "superpowers".
"There is dependency between departments, but there are fewer BBs. In Miha, if you want to do things, you don't have to care too much about how you behave. An employee of Mihayou told Leifeng.
In the company's team, there are not fewer brothers who accompany Cai Haoyu to start a business.
Cai Haoyu (second from left) and 4 brothers who started a business together
Liu Wei (called "Big Viagra" in the circle) is the absolute façade of the company, responsible for handling most of the company's external affairs, helping Cai Haoyu, who is reluctant to PR, block one interview after another. At that time, Chen Yuetian and other investors came to Miha for exchanges, and Liu Wei was also responsible for docking.
According to Huang Yimeng, the boss of the Heartbeat Network, the visit of Miha You in 2013 was also Liu Wei's initiative to write an email and seek a visit. Pulling Cai Haoyu and Luo Yuhan, Liu Wei and the three of them came to No. 700 Wanrong Road in Shanghai, which is still the office address of Xinxin Network 9 years later. Huang Yimeng did not want to disclose what he and Liu Wei and his party talked about, only saying that they asked some questions about the direction of the game.
"It's a long and sad story that I'll keep telling in the future." Huang Yimeng said.
It is reported that tapTap's daily active volume can reach 4 million; while Mihayou's player community "Miyousha", daily active has reached 1 million, accounting for 1/4 of TapTap's daily active, and a large part of the users are overlapping.
Luo Yuhan is a more mysterious person than Cai Haoyu, as one of the founders of Mihayou, it is even difficult to find a photo of him on the whole network, only in a group photo at the beginning of Mihayou's business, you can see his "true face of Lushan". At that time, when he was a little older, he had a "strong" hairline, but the smile on his face was still juvenile.
At the beginning of the business, Luo was mainly responsible for the numerical value and the commercialization closely related to the numerical value. According to people close to Mihayou, Luo Yuhan mainly exerts efforts at the product level and is more practical.
Zhang Qinghua (also known as CiCi) was the royal painter of Mihayou at the beginning of his business. In the Miha tour of "Techno House Saves the World", art and human design are the most concerned content for two-dimensional players. CiCi's art design is definitely one of the important reasons why players love Mihayou's works, and players who regard CiCi's characters as "wives" also call CiCi "father-in-law".
"Art saves Miha Tour" has become a meme that players like to play.
However, Cai Haoyu also understands art and is quite demanding. As mentioned earlier, Cai once said that things in art should be under his own control. How CiCi and Cai Haoyu cooperate, Leifeng Network has not yet known, but CiCi's status in the company is indeed relatively high.
The above four are the founders of Miha Tour that many people know. And there is another one, players may not know much, and Miha Tour is not willing to mention more. His name is Jin Zhicheng, and he was the first co-founder of Mihayou with Cai Haoyu, Liu Wei and Luo Yuhui, who was called the "top four employee" of Mihayou and was also a roommate of the university at that time.
However, Jin Zhicheng "left" three friends who started a business together at the beginning of his business. It is rumored that in March 2012, because of the offer from Cisco, Jin chose the latter in the difficult startup and the world's top 500.
Jin Zhicheng, who worked at Cisco for a period of time, later returned to Mihayou, although he is the founder of "Falling Run", but he is also a technical bull in the friendship of starting a business together, and Jin's status in Mihayou will not be too low.
4
Outside of technology, paranoid innovation of "Original God"
As mentioned earlier, the reason why "Original God" became "Original God" is largely due to the advanced technology and long-term accumulation. However, game development is much more than a technical struggle.
Previously, some NetEase brothers said bluntly: "Games such as Reverse Water Cold and Chu Liuxiang are technically stronger than "Original God". "This is a fact, but they overlooked the point that no matter how good the experience of the cold water is, no matter how good the picture of Chu Liuxiang is, they can only be regarded as the game of the previous generation."
For example: in the traditional martial arts MMO gameplay, the core gameplay is not too much to fight monster upgrades, group brush copies, pay attention to social, pay attention to DAU/MAU and user retention, so in the game play settings, there will be a lot of "daily tasks", "weekly tasks", in addition, in order to meet the Kryptonian gangster's desire to compare and win, will launch a lot of stimulation recharge consumption guidance, moreover, some games will produce some exclusive game content that can only be experienced after consumption. Even if it is a leading NetEase in MMO, it is not exempt from vulgarity.
This kind of play time will only wear down the player's patience a little bit, do not recharge to play, daily tasks like work, play to the later stages without any game fun at all.
And "Original God" is to break this "convention", "Original God" as a need for users, traffic of the network game, actually no longer pay attention to long-term retention, daily login this kind of data, through the annual update of four major quarters, so that players experience the content of continuous updates, and players can play according to their own time preferences, there is time to experience more rich content, no time to play less does not matter, there is updated content you come back, do not play too tired when there is no update content.
Krypton gold, basically "Original God" does not have mandatory consumption, even if the player "zero krypton", you can still enjoy the complete game experience.
This practice reflects a game concept that has hardly been presented in domestic online games, and it is also cai Haoyu's simplest game intention: to be born for fun.
And this seemingly Buddhist game operation concept has gained more loyal players.
In addition, the product's multi-platform interoperability experience has made "Original God" gain the favor of more users. Multi-platform interoperability is not a new thing, very early Blizzard's Hearthstone has done the concept of "eight screens in one", but multi-equipment, multi-platform interoperability, for mobile games, whether it can be done is one thing, whether it is necessary is another, whether it is good or not is another thing, whether it is good or not is another thing.
Leifeng network listened to the internal staff of the "Original God" project team said that at the beginning of the "Original God" project, it was determined to multi-platform integration, and many mobile games after the launch of a PC simulator for hanging up is different, "Original God" for multi-platform optimization is enough to ensure that the game whether it is with touch screen, keyboard and mouse or controller, can get a perfect experience.
It is reported that on the PS5, at present, "Original God" has a lot of income (the specific amount is not known, but it should not be less than some channels), and the great thing about Mihayou is that it is not only the channel that wants PS5, but through cooperation with Sony, gets the opportunity to communicate with some AAA manufacturers and enriches its own product innovation, which is a path that domestic manufacturers rarely take, and even call it a bit "wild".
Leifeng network has also heard a gossip before, saying that even the Switch platform, "Original God" has tried to get on, Switch's escort masterpiece "Zelda Legend" is once called "Original God" plagiarism object" game by the industry. Although the cooperation of Switch is still far away, it has at least been promoted. It shows the intention.
Cai Haoyu likes to try more new technologies, including the "game on the cloud" of the fire.
Cloud games are not a new thing, Tencent NetEase has been shouting for many years, but it has always been in the "shallow taste" stage, even if it is done, it is also to take a tepid game to explore, and Miha You, as usual radical, directly launched the cloud game version of "Original God". Original God has enough users to generate a lot of data that will support the change and progress of Miha's cloud game. It is said that Cai Haoyu has decided to make the next product, that is, the native cloud game, using the technical experience of "Original God" to explore a new framework for cloud games, which is very worth looking forward to.
The almost paranoid innovation is also one of the main reasons why game upstarts like Mihayou have opened up the gap with old factories such as NetEase Tencent.
5
The Future of Protos and Miha Tours
"There are almost no manufacturers in China that can replicate 'Original God.'" A producer interviewed by Lei Feng Network said so.
Mihayou is running too fast, and other manufacturers can hardly keep up, which is the consensus of many game practitioners.
In the past two years, there have been many articles describing Tencent's panic and consternation about missing "Original God", but more than a year later, Tencent Games is still the Tencent game, the old asset that holds the king, eats chicken, has super high revenue, and has a lot of flowing water, and still occupies half of China's game territory, but the fact is that after eating chicken, Tencent has never produced a decent game again.
NetEase is still that NetEase, like to do advanced products, like to do micro-innovation, but there is no company-level ALL IN courage (when Boss Ding used the strength of the whole company to do chicken products in the past, but also gave the Three Kingdoms Strategic Edition the opportunity and caused the largest wave of netEase talent outflow, but also had Byte Hangzhou and Tencent many innovative projects), has not been able to polish a better product, can only sit on the "Dream Journey to the West", "Yin yang division" merit book proudly. Harry Potter struggled to get up, but compared to the first two epoch-making products, it can only be regarded as a flash of inspiration.
In the previous visit, Leifeng Network learned that in the "talent battle" in 2021, the giant has been hollowed out by penguins, perfect world brain drain is serious, one of the two vice presidents responsible for game research and development - Tielei has also been dug into NetEase. In addition to the game, Chi Yufeng is putting more attention on the entertainment (in other words, the boss of the pool has actually been indifferent to the game, and the game is just a printing machine). At that time, new entrants such as Byte took advantage of the void and were rumored to be digging people at 2-3 times the salary of the industry, gradually encroaching on the "old big factory" such as Perfect. Other old factories of the same level are in the same situation.
The times have begun to shift to emerging game companies. The aforementioned "Four Little Dragons" are the best of them.
Admittedly, Mihayou's future is not a ten-to-nine. For example, in today's game industrialization is very eating "game production capacity" situation, can you maintain the same passion as now, in the specified time to produce more content, especially the "original god" of this PVE game, to regularly produce new copies, new characters, new maps, new gameplay, more need stable production capacity, in addition to doing update creation, want to catch up with the big factory, it is difficult!
But Mihayou's determination and vision should be more than catching up with Tencent NetEase, many people have said the same sentence with Leifeng Network: Mihayou's vision is the sea of stars, Mihayou himself to do what is clear, and in his own field continues to make breakthroughs, the most terrible thing is that he has made remarkable achievements.
In contrast, Tencent's largest Chinese manufacturers, some even say that they can not be regarded as a game company: making good products is not the core of the company's operation, and games are the business that the company has spawned in order to make money.
Opponents are stuck in a lag, and it is when a number of emerging game companies such as Mihayou are catching up. Wu Jian even said somewhat "arbitrarily": "In the next five to ten years, the global game industry MihaYou will thrive, far ahead of other game companies." ”
If one day, Mihayou completely surpassed Tencent NetEase and other veterans, do not feel surprised and regretful, Tencent NetEase has reached a height that many enterprises can not reach for life, although they want to continue to consolidate their position, this is understandable, but this idea is not practical, because since ancient times to fight the world, it is more difficult to defend the world, no one can always stand at the top.
Even if it is possible to think of danger in times, there are many young companies in the era that are as ambitious, passionate and full of desire as Mihayou, although they may not necessarily target the old factories, but they will be closer to young people and more radical innovation, and the old factories will have more constraints, and even self-imposed, you say it is not difficult to keep the world?
Mihayou has already made a masterpiece, and what is even more frightening than the original god masterpiece is their forge ahead and the momentum, which also sounded the alarm for the veterans: legends are very profitable, but not the future of the game!
--
"Dazuo Interview" is a series of topics newly opened by Leifeng Network, which aims to analyze the existing game "masterpieces" at home and abroad on the track, get a glimpse of the development history and prospects of China's game industry, and pass on the most core first-hand information to readers through interviews.
END