HoYoverse games devour each other, Zenless Zone Zero failed - on the release of AI, GTA and the rejection of anime
The creators of three hits, Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero, faced the fact that their games simply began to devour each other.
2025-05-29
It seems that HoYoverse is having problems. The creators of three hits, Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero, faced the fact that their games simply began to devour each other. And this is clearly not good for finances.
With the launch of a new project, the audience of the Chinese company moves into it, and revenue from the previous smartphone game has fallen by about half in just two quarters. ZZZ did not live up to expectations at all and, according to Sensor Tower's statistics, scraped together less than half of what its predecessors brought in the first quarter. According to Niko Partners, HoYoverse earned 23% less in 2024, only $4.7 billion.
Cai Haoyu took up the search for a solution: a couple of years ago, one of the founders of the company and the richest entrepreneurs in the Celestial Empire left the leadership post. He now runs California-based startup Anuttacon and explores the possibilities of AI in non-traditional interactive media. Although Tsai took a number of colleagues from MiHoYo, the official position is that these are two "completely independent organizations."
HoYoverse has the slogan "technootaku save the world" and invests in nuclear fusion, space rockets, and brain chips, comparing itself to Apple and SpaseX: "We've never been a gaming company." However, by 2030, the Chinese want to create a virtual world that will be "more real than reality."
HoYoverse hires Western developers from Ubisoft, EA, and other big-name studios to try their hand at open-world games and farming sims, moving away from anime RPGs to expand their audience. But it's not that simple: Project Shanghai, in the spirit of GTA, more ambitious than Genshin Impact, has already been rebooted twice. It was Tsai who was in charge of the project, but the team from the United States was fired due to the difficulties of coordination in different time zones.
However, all these facts are presented in a long Bloomberg article based on information from former and current employees, while a representative of HoYoverse declined to comment, only noting that the material contains a number of inaccuracies and unverified claims.
