A render of Genshin Impact running on an iPhone 12
When Forrest Liu and his Shanghai-based video game developer company MiHoYo decided in 2017 to build a new mobile game to accompany its successful action RPG (role-playing game) Honkai Impact series, he envisioned an open-world style adventure, in which users can roam freely with their virtual characters.
The problem was, while open-world games have been all the rage in the console and PC space, it had never been done before in the mobile gaming space.
“It seemed like an impossible task,” Liu says. But after three years of development and “over 100 million yuan spent on the project,” the open-world mobile game Genshin Impact made its debut this past September.
It helped that MiHoYo, which was cofounded by Liu and two former college classmates in 2011, already had the smash hit Honkai series, so it wasn’t hard finding investors and resources to devote to Genshin Impact.
The effort has paid off, because the game received 10 million downloads across iOS and Android platforms on just the first day, and it has since been released for consoles like the Sony Playstation 4 and Nintendo Switch.
And today it was announced as the winner of the iPhone “Game of the Year” award from Apple as part of the U.S. tech giant’s “App Store Best Of 2020” awards.
The Apple Best Of award
Proudly flaunting the award—a thick blue block with Apple’s App Store logo on one end and MiHoYo’s name engraved on the other—over a Zoom call this morning, Liu and the company’s VP of overseas business Wenyi Jin shared their excitement at the news.
“People thought we were crazy when we told them we were building an open-world game for smartphones,” recalls Liu, “but we knew that Apple’s mobile chip was powerful enough to handle the task.”
With aesthetics clearly inspired by Japanese anime, Genshin Impact is a free to download and play, but requires in-game purchases for players to “level up.” This has proved to be a lucrative business model for games, as the mobile game business has become a $50 billion industry.
A graphic from the game Genshin Impact
A still from Genshin Impact
Although Liu and Jin declined to comment on revenue, a senior analyst at the research firm Niko Partners estimates Genshin has already generated 1 billion yuan ($152 million) in revenue from iOS and Android platforms alone.
MiHoYo, in fact, picked up what was essentially the Android version of the “Best Game” award just a day before Apple’s announcement. But considering that iOS users on average spend 2.5x more money on apps than Android users, it’s safe to say the iOS success has been more lucrative.
Forrest Liu (left) and Wenyi Jin (right).
The company isn’t done. Liu says the company was founded by “three fans of anime and [American] comic books,” and he sees MiHoYo as an IP (intellectual property) company rather than “just” a video game maker.
To that end, the company has its own animation and comic production house, as well as its own factory to manufacture merchandise.
“We will continue to expand the Genshin universe by creating a line of comics, toys and maybe even a movie,” says Jin.
Liu chimes in: “we want to create our own Marvel universe.”
