Text | Old Nine
From surviving, to changing the world, to creating the world. The success of The Miha Tour is a triumph that belongs to the Technical House.
Even if you are not a player and hardly pay attention to the game, I am afraid that I have heard the name of "Original God". This homegrown Chinese game, just launched in 2020, has squeezed into the top five of the global mobile game download list. By 2022, relying only on iOS revenue, the game has once again sat on the throne of the Q1 global revenue champion. Culture goes to sea, "Original God" is properly "the light of domestic goods". In China, games not only have a large number of fans, but also become a cultural phenomenon. In the just-announced 2021 "Top Ten National IP Selections", "Original God" ranked first in the game sector.
The picture shows that the official website of the "Top Ten National IP Selection" in 2021 has a large number of fans as the backing, and it is reasonable for the game to reach the top. Interestingly, "Crash 3" and "Undetermined Event Book", which ranked 2nd and 3rd, actually came from the same production company as "Original God" - Mihayou. What is the origin of this company that dominates the list?
The birth of Mihayou is a victory for the schoolmaster. In 2009, Liu Wei, Cai Haoyu and Luo Yuhao, three computer science graduate students at Shanghai Jiaotong University, were assigned to a dormitory. Three computer geniuses with technology and ideas, good relationships, and all want to do big things in the Internet age, so as soon as school starts, they live a hard life of taking classes during the day and doing web pages and communities at night. I can practice every day, I can indeed accumulate experience, but I am still a hundred million points away from realizing my dreams. Just in 2010, the production of "Flash mini-game" exploded, like to play games Cai Haoyu, caught up with this outlet, he used "Misato" (homemade falsh engine) developed 2.5D game "Mother-in-law Story", won the "Hemp Ball Flash Game Development Competition" campus group champion.
Pictured from Tencent Game News Liu Wei and Luo Yuhao felt that this matter was reliable, so the three of them formally merged and established the game production team "miHoYo" (Chinese Mihayou). In 2011, the wave of entrepreneurship was in full swing, and three young people who had just entered the society also joined it. After they got an interest-free loan of 100,000 yuan from the University Student Entrepreneurship Foundation, they embarked on a long road to entrepreneurship. In the same year, the mobile game "FlyMe2theMoon" was born, this debut work is not perfect, the sales are not good, but the hungry market, or see their potential. At the end of the year, Mihayou received 1 million angel investment, Mihayou officially upgraded from "team" to "company", and new projects also entered the development stage. Miha's tour without baggage is more efficient than the donkeys of the production team. In 2012, the horizontal 2D shooter Crash Academy was launched. Unfortunately, this pure two-dimensional game, because of the small size of the audience, does not sell well. Fortunately, the three people are not discouraged, Liu Wei said in the interview, entrepreneurship is because of love, "it is also very good to serve such a group of users." ”
"Crash Academy" game screen / Picture from the network For love, they have not suffered less, especially in money. Three high-achieving students at Shanghai Jiaotong University and the owner of a game company can open 4,000 yuan for themselves in a month, which is the least earned among the same class of students. At the same time, there is no money to hire people to publicize, Liu Wei also personally went to battle, not only as a "customer service lady" for a year, but also to interact with players in various game communities, and fell into a good popularity. According to his recollection, in addition to the original art painting is too technical, at that time, all kinds of work were done. After 2 years of suffering, Miha you made "Crash Academy 2", and everything got better. Relying on the first-class plot, good art, plump character design and the in-app payment system of drawing cards, "Crash 2" made Mihayou's revenue exceed 100 million yuan that year. History is called the domestic two-dimensional legend. It is also worth noting that Mihayou regards the two major secondary elements of A and B stations as the main battlefield of publicity, and also opens the android inside of station B, breaking the mode that the game must be bundled with the app store at that time. Three young people who are tight-eyed, relying on their ability to make games and understand the ability of players and the market, have fought a beautiful turnaround battle.
"Crash Academy 2" game screen / Picture from the network More epoch-making is "Crash Academy 3" two years later. When "Glory of Kings" turned out and squeezed the market share of the hand game, Miha You insisted on its own game style. Without changing the core gameplay, the 3D action game of the exclusive PC was ported to the mobile phone. With high-quality game content that can drag down mobile phone storage, Crash 3 opens up the second dimension and ordinary players. According to statistics, in 2018, the game turnover reached 2.3 billion yuan, ranking second in the domestic two-dimensional mobile game revenue list. It is also worth noting that the overseas market performance of "Crash 3" is not bad, and it has long been listed in the top 30 of the revenue list of sea manufacturers.
"Crash 3" game screen / Picture from the network from the niche two-dimensional game manufacturers, to the output of Chinese games, the three technical houses of the year, the road has been widened.
Although the market share of games is getting higher and higher, under the prosperity, the crisis is emerging. The first is the operational crisis. Unlike the early days when several people used love to generate electricity, after the expansion of the company's scale, all kinds of forces poured in, and love was no longer the main purpose of the company. For example, the "Zero Point Bar Incident". Once "Crash 3" launched a new character "Blood Rose", the official extraction probability is 0.98% (harmonic is zero point bar), but the player's extraction probability is far below this data. In the voice of doubt, Mihayou responded that the probability was correct, but was punched in the face, and the player combined the data in the statement and found that the so-called 0.98%, including the probability of the character fragment falling, was actually a word game of Mihayu, and the true probability of obtaining the character was only about 0.4%. Out of this "krypton" incident, Miha you apologized and compensated for the first time, and carved out an area in the company, named "Zero Point Bar", alerting himself to no longer make mistakes in the future. But the damage has been inflicted, and the "lost tourist" that Mihayou has built over the years is no longer solid.
The "Zero Point Bar Incident" combing / figure from the network is followed by the plagiarism crisis. As early as the launch of "Crash 1", some players pointed out that the game was suspected of plagiarism. But because the audience is concentrated in the quadratic circle, the attention is not high. However, in 2020, when Mihayou released the first PV of the new tour "Original God", "The Stranger Who Catches the Wind", public opinion could not stop it. According to gamma statistics, in the comments of PV, up to 64% of netizens mentioned plagiarism. Many UP masters on Station B have produced comparison videos of "Original God" and "The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wilderness", and the number of views is generally more than 200,000 times. Before it was launched, "Original God" mentioned the name of "restoring the god work".
"The Stranger Who Catches the Wind" / Picture from the network But I have to admit that although this wave of publicity has not been scolded, it has played a circle-breaking effect, in addition to Miha's fans, more players have paid attention to this open world game. Black and red are also red, and after the launch of "Original God", many players have entered the game world with the attitude of trying it out. As a result, it's so fragrant! This Miha game focuses on the game that has been working hard for nearly 4 years, showing the company's advantages in art, plot, characters, open world and many other links. The high level of operation has increased the reputation of the game. In addition, the game also opens up the restrictions of mobile phones and PCs, as long as the account data between the official server, iOS, PC, and Android platforms is exchanged, and players can play between different devices with only one account. Together, Hara Shin and Miha You broke the restrictions of mobile games and moved towards more diversification.
"Original God" official picture / picture from the watermark Finally, "Original God" was crowned at the end of the year with two international awards of "App Store 2020 Game of the Year" and "Google Play 2020 Best Game". At the same time, the game also sat on the champion of China's mobile game overseas income for 6 consecutive months, and was listed in the "National Cultural Export Key Project". From the "shame of national tourism" when it first came out, it was upgraded to "the light of national tourism". Cai Haoyu revealed at an alumni sharing meeting that in 2020, Mihayou's revenue exceeded 5 billion yuan (net income non-flowing water), achieving a year-on-year doubling of revenue. The size of the company has also expanded from 1400 in 2019 to 2400 people. At the end of the speech, Cai Haoyu said, "I hope that in 2030, a virtual world of one billion people around the world will be willing to live in!" "This metacosmic-like concept may be the achievement of the three founders of Mihayou that did not dare to dream."
Miha Tour Development History / Figure from the network
The time comes to 2022, and Miha Travel is no longer what it used to be. From the "three-person trip" of that year, it has expanded to a game giant with more than 4,000 employees. Industry insiders jokingly called it one of the "Shanghai Four Little Dragons". Third-party agency Sensor Tower monitoring data shows that in 2021, the revenue of "Original God" alone will exceed $1.8 billion, and so on, the annual revenue of Mihayou should be around tens of billions. Some practitioners are even bullish on becoming the second largest game company in China after Tencent. Therefore, in the future, continuing to operate old works such as "Original God", "Crash 3", "Undecided Event Book" and continuing to develop new games is the only way for the company. But Mihayou's ambitions don't stop there.
Miha tour LOGO / figure from the network as early as 2018, the profit of the recent miha tour has set up a "reverse entropy studio", in addition to being responsible for the virtual image "Lu Ming", but also set up a brain-computer interface project. More directionally, in March 2021, Mihayou invested in the Encephalopathy Center of Ruijin Hospital affiliated to Shanghai Jiaotong University, and the main content of the cooperation was the development and clinical application of brain-computer interface technology. The two sides also jointly established the "Ruijin Encephalopathy Center Mihayou Joint Laboratory" to jointly tackle key problems in the "Clinical Research on Neuromodulation Therapy of Brain-Computer Interface for Refractory Depression". These two investments are in line with the vision of the three founders of Miha Tour to create a virtual world, and are also considered to be the company's real exploration. In February this year, MihaYou launched a new brand "HoYoverse", which officially aims to create and deliver immersive virtual world experiences for players around the world through a variety of entertainment services. All speculation has settled. In 2020, Cai Haoyu said that he would build a virtual world that brought together 1 billion people. In 2022, after 4 years of experimentation, the world belonging to Mihayu surfaced. From surviving, to changing the world, to creating the world. The success of Miha Tour is a victory for love, but also a victory for a technical house.