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How Genshin Impact’s Chinese creator miHoYo found success with otakus willing to ‘pay for love’

  • Genshin Impact has been touted as the biggest ever global launch of a Chinese game
  • The slogan for Shanghai-based miHoYo, the company behind the game: ‘tech otakus save the world’

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Genshin Impact is an open-world, action-adventure game, where gamers play as young, magic-conjuring warriors journeying through a fairy-tale-like world. Photo: Handout
Josh Ye

The men behind Genshin Impact , touted as the biggest ever global launch of a Chinese game, have made no secret of targeting otakus – a Japanese term for male geeks who are socially awkward with limited romantic lives, and who are often diehard fans of games or anime featuring “cute” or “sexy” female characters.

The slogan for Shanghai-based miHoYo, the company they founded: “tech otakus save the world”. And Cai Haoyu, co-founder and president of Genshin Impact creator miHoYo, has identified as a bona fide otaku himself.

Speaking about miHoYo’s first hit game Guns Girl – Honkai Gakuen at the Gamelook Game Open Day conference in July 2014, Cai said the game had a simple mission: to serve male gamers’ yearning to bond with virtual female characters in a game.

“We are making an otaku game … So girls are an important element,” Cai said of Guns Girl, which features a legion of cute, gun-wielding girls battling futuristic robots, according to the post-event transcript posted on Chinese media outlet Gamelook’s website. At the Shanghai conference, Cai also reportedly said he played popular Korean fantasy game Blade & Soul only because of a user-created script that allowed gamers to strip female characters and accentuate the movement of their breasts.

Women make up nearly half of all gamers in China but account for less than a quarter of gaming revenue, according to a report by government-run game industry association CGIGC, and video games in the country are still predominantly created by and for men.

In this environment, miHoYo’s dedication to serving otakus has paid off. Founded in 2012 by three engineering postgraduates – Cai, Liu Wei and Luo Yuhao – with only 100,000 yuan (US$14,750), it is now one of China’s biggest gaming companies. In 2018, miHoYo reported nearly 2 billion yuan (US$298 million) in revenue, according to a report by Chinese state-owned news outlet The Paper last year.

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