Image source @ Visual China
Wen | Mirror Entertainment, author 丨 Liang Jialie
Recently, Mihayou's new work "Absolute Zero" first exploded PV and opened a test recruitment, and the day after the PV was released, the number of reservations for "Absolute Zero" exceeded one million.
Compared with Mihayou's head IP "Original God", the style of "Absolute Zero", which focuses on the ACT action genre, is a lot of niche, but standing on the shoulders of "Crash" and "Original God", the market and heat are basically natural.
If the game's real machine and PV maintain the same level, then "Absolute Zero" will become the next "Crash" level IP is just around the corner, but limited by the game positioning, it is not realistic to compare with the probability of "Original God".
There is a very key factor behind the success of "Crash" and "Original God", that is, Mihayou's judgment of the consumption potential of the domestic secondary market is accurate, and the success of "Original God" gambling has deepened Mihayou's confidence.
Nowadays, the emergence of "Absolute Zero" means that Mihayou's IP expansion after "Original God" has begun, in addition to "Absolute Zero", Mihayou's expansion plan also includes "Kochel Front", "Crash 4 Galaxy", "Crash: Star Dome Railway", "Project X" and many other two-dimensional works.
However, Mihayou's ambitions do not stop at the game itself. While enriching the IP of its games, the capital map of Mihayou is also slowly opening up. In recent years, Mihayou has started its own whole industry chain layout with the two-dimensional game as the core, and in the past one or two years, Mihayou has focused its investment on the hot meta-universe.
Nowadays, building an "oasis"-like virtual world with games as a carrier may be mihayou's ultimate ambition.
The gamble continues
For a two-dimensional game, it is extremely rare for the number of reservations to exceed one million in a day, not to mention that "Absolute Zero" is still an "airborne project" to some extent. In 2021, the only new projects announced by Mihayou are "Kochil Front", "Crash 4 Galaxy", "Crash: Star Dome Railway", and the only news before the exposure of the "Absolute Zero" PV is that it registered its trademark at the beginning of the year.
However, despite the lack of publicity and warm-up, "Absolute Zero" still stands on a higher starting line, because "Crash" and "Original God" have paved the way for Mihayou's new works. It can be seen that the UP owners on station B, such as Thunderstorm, Leaves, Sao Orange, Muc Void Wings and other video works related to "Absolute Zero", are basically heavy players of "Original God". On overseas forums, most of the players who discuss "Absolute Zero" are also veteran players of "Original God" and "Crash".
For a game and a game company, it is important to accumulate a group of users, and today's Mihayou has obviously completed the first stage of user accumulation. At the same time, the brand influence and word-of-mouth precipitation of Mihayou is also the key factor in the debut of "Absolute Zero" to usher in the peak, which can be seen from the fact that "Absolute Zero" has not yet opened the internal test, and some players have bluntly said that "the real machine of Mihayou will not be worse than PV".
From the perspective of the drawing style, there is a great difference between the painting style of "Absolute Zero" and Miha's previous games. Crash and Hara are more japanese fantasy, while in Breaking Zero, characters, costumes, music, street scenes, industrial realism and hardcore cyberpunk are more pronounced. In addition, in the past game PVs, Miha You is more inclined to the fusion presentation of story, characters, and battle demonstrations, while the PV of "Absolute Zero" emphasizes the sense of rhythm and trend, as well as a stronger visual impact.
The change in style may also be related to the creative team behind "Absolute Zero". According to reports, unlike mihayou's previous projects led by the "big three", the project team responsible for "Absolute Zero" is a project team spontaneously formed by the new team within Mihayou.
Cai Haoyu, CEO of Mihayou, once admitted that he had some concerns about game creation, he was afraid that he would not be able to grasp the needs of users after the age of forty, but it was still a very bold decision for a game company to hand over the project entirely to a young team. However, boldness and gambling are indeed the consistent style of Mihayou, just as it invested all the money earned from "Crash" into "Original God", and gambled on the success of "Original God", which is unrealistic for many game companies.
At present, many players are also worried about the high popularity of "Absolute Zero", because the game has not yet opened the public beta, and the quality is still unknown, at this time, players will set off a carnival, which is inevitably optimistic. But in fact, the reason why the popularity of "Absolute Zero" is high is not only that a group of two-dimensional gamers have a high loyalty to Mihayou, but also related to the current development status of the domestic two-dimensional game market and the gap of ACT games.
Since last year, a number of works have been launched in the domestic two-dimensional game market, such as "Magic Tower", "Zero Battle Line", "Deep Space Eye" and so on, but the market feedback is relatively mediocre. In 2021, the annual turnover of 62 domestic two-dimensional games reached 37.1 billion yuan, and the "Original God" family contributed 7.37 billion yuan, accounting for 32.6%. Last year, the support of the two-dimensional game market was still "Original God", "Yin and Yang Division", "Tomorrow's Ark" and other old games.
The two-dimensional game market needs to be stimulated, the unique style and appearance time of "Absolute Zero" are just right, and the two-dimensional game market needs fresh blood, and the two-dimensional ACT game. If you want to recommend a two-dimensional ACT game, then many people may only think of "Devil May Cry", because the pure two-dimensional ACT masterpiece has become a rarity, and now most of the two-dimensional games are BASED ON ARPG, cards, and shooting, and the ACT theme is seriously blank.
In this context, it is not difficult to understand that players are looking forward to "Absolute Zero". However, whether "Absolute Zero" can bring new wind to the two-dimensional game market still depends on the color after the table.
Expansion of territory
The emergence of "Absolute Zero" means that Mihayou is accelerating its own diversified layout and enriching its two-dimensional IP matrix.
A brief review of the content output process of Mihayou, in 2011, Mihayou launched the first game "FlyMe2theMoon", followed by the appearance of the "Crash" series, followed by the hit "Original God". Before the exposure of the "Absolute Zero" PV, Mihayu also launched the Otome game "Undetermined Event Book". It can be seen that from the beginning of "Original God", the diversified layout of MihaYou has landed.
In addition to the "Absolute Zero" and "Crash: Star Dome Railway", which have been exposed PV, Mihayou's satellite projects at least have "Kochel Front", "Crash 4 Galaxy" and "Project X" three works. Among them, "Crash: Star Dome Railway" and "Crash 4 Galaxy" continue the world view of the "Crash" series, but there are breakthroughs in gameplay, such as "Crash: Star Dome Railway" positioning is a turn-based card game.
At present, there is not much news released by "Kochil Frontline", and it is reported that it is likely to be the same as "Warcraft" and "StarCraft", which is an RTS game.
Some players have quipped that in the past ten years, Mihayou has only done one thing, that is, to do two-dimensional games. It can be seen that Mihayou's new projects do have two-dimensional elements as the core keyword, but the types of games are different, and it is clear that Mihayou intends to explore different types of gameplay and accumulate experience in different game areas. From the perspective of the audience positioning of these games, Mihayou is also looking for more subdivided two-dimensional gamers.
The positioning of "Absolute Zero" 16+ is the best proof. As the signature IP of MihaYou at this stage, "Original God" is positioned 12+, which is closely related to Mihayou's development preset of "Original God", which points to all-age gamers facing the global market from all levels of design and marketing, and it can also be said that it is the flagship game of Mihayou at this stage.
In contrast, "Absolute Zero" is positioned as a non-flagship game, and its hardcore drawing style and more adult plot content are all born for the niche market. Moreover, ACT games are inherently high in terms of operating threshold and difficulty, and the fun of the game is basically limited to the pleasure of combat, unlike the RPG game of "Original God", which can integrate action, cultivation, collection, exploration and other gameplay, and can absorb a wider audience.
"Absolute Zero", "Crash: Star Dome Railway", "Kochel Frontline", "Crash 4 Galaxy", "Project X" And the highlight of several works and the next flagship IP, most likely "Project X".
At the end of 2021, Mihayou announced that it would open a new studio in Montreal, forming a team of 100 employees to create a new open world AAA action adventure game, and last year, Mihayou also hired Zheng Kai, the former chief level designer of Sony's Santa Monica Studio, to join the newly established studio. Previously, Cai Haoyu had described "Original God" as a "simple open world", and it is conceivable that the magnitude of "Project X" is much higher than that of "Original God".
At present, the volume of Mihayou is still difficult to match Tencent and Netease, so on the road of diversified development, Mihayou also has to weigh the proportion of investment, after all, the cost of a flagship game is huge. Taking "Original God" as an example, its research and development cost is as high as 100 million US dollars, and the follow-up Miha Tour also invests 200 million US dollars in the follow-up development and update costs every year.
Make a good trade-off, not only related to cost, but also based on capacity considerations. Today, the new studios of Montreal, Los Angeles, Singapore, Tokyo and Seoul have expanded to a team of 4,000 people, which is undoubtedly fast, but it is still a bit stretched compared with the big factories, after all, activision Blizzard has invested more than 3,000 employees in the development of the "Call of Duty" series of games alone.
However, for game manufacturers with big IP in hand, classic IP resources are an inexhaustible gold mine, and the success of "Crash" and "Original God" has laid a solid foundation for Mihayou's future territorial expansion.
Once, "Original God" stood on the shoulders of "Crash", and now, "Original God" is providing for "Project X", as long as each generation of flagship games can stand firm, Mihayou's "old project raising new project" gameplay can continue to continue, and form its own IP ecology on this basis.
The ultimate goal
In recent years, Mihayou has not only rolled out its own game IP matrix, but also a business investment empire.
After 2017, mihayou's investment territory has expanded rapidly, and according to the incomplete statistics of Mirror Entertainment, there have been 19 mihayou investment enterprises so far. On the whole, Mihayou's investment network is based on two-dimensional games as the core to spread outward, such as its investment in The Cat Project, Strange Sound, Heartbeat Network, Wucube, etc. are all content producers in the game industry, which can provide technical support for Mihayou in animation production, animation image design and other aspects.
Dubbing companies such as Qixiang Tianwai, painters' appointment platforms in the game field, and game radio stations such as the machine core network are also closely related to the production and dissemination of ACG content.
In addition to the companies in the middle and upper reaches of the game industry chain, Mihayou has focused on downstream derivative production and sales companies in recent years, such as Pansi Culture, Lingmeng Technology, Twelve Lightyears, etc., which is also related to mihayou's efforts to develop IP peripherals. Nowadays, Mihayou has opened a flagship store and a flagship store of The Original God on the mainstream e-commerce platform, mainly selling derivatives of its IP such as "Collapse", "Original God", and "Undecided Event Book".
Since 2017, Mihayou's investment has not only focused on the game industry chain, but also extended from the game field to the pan-entertainment field. For example, in 2019 and 2021, Mihayou invested in the escape room chain brand Mystery House and the stranger social platform Soul, the former is a hot new consumption outlet in recent years, and the latter is most likely related to the relevant layout of Mihayou in the metaverse.
In 2022, Mihayou set up a new brand HoYoverse, which is split into MiHoYo (Miha You) and Metavalse (Meta universe), in addition, Miha You also launched an original IP virtual idol "Lu Ming". Virtual idols, investment in Soul, and the establishment of a joint laboratory with Ruijin Hospital can all be regarded as Mihayou's forward-looking layout in the metaverse field.
First of all, Soul can provide a virtual world parallel to reality and real-time online in social scenes, and today, Soul is also working on the social metaverse. Secondly, the joint laboratory established by Mihayou and Ruijin Hospital focuses on "brain-computer interface technology", which is also closely related to the metaverse.
In layman's terms, the brain-computer interface is to establish a direct communication and control channel between the human brain and computers or other electronic devices, brain-computer interface technology involves neuroscience, artificial intelligence and many other disciplines and scientific fields, at the same time, it is also an important technical support for the realization of virtual reality games in the future.
Cai Haoyu once proposed in a speech that he hopes that in 2030, a virtual world of one billion people around the world willing to live in can be created, which has been ridiculed by many players as a "bit of a dream of the middle two" and "difficult to achieve the goal", but from the perspective of a series of investment layouts in the metaverse dimension of Mihayou, it may really be marching into the "oasis" world that appears in "Ready Player One", of course, whether it can be achieved is another story.
But there is no doubt that the metaverse is very close to the game, after all, even Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella believes that the essence of the metaverse is the game. Today, we can say that games such as Crash and Original God have built up virtual worlds, but this is definitely different from the all-round immersion, interaction and presence required by the future metaverse. On the way to the future, Mihayu, like other entrants in the metaverse, has to feel the stones to cross the river.
The emergence of "Original God" has made Miha you the most potential game manufacturer in China, but obviously, Miha You also knows that relying on "Original God" alone is not enough. The future of Mihayou needs more "Original God", or beyond the existence of "Original God", to strengthen its competitiveness in the fierce competition of the game industry, and also needs a more forward-looking layout to build a moat for the future.