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It's been a while since miHoYo recruited employees for 5 pre-research products, but the discussion on the Internet continues.

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In terms of the information expressed in the recruitment itself, many of the reasons are clear at a glance. It can be seen from the current income of miHoYo's several games that the growth point of the two-dimensional track can no longer satisfy them.

But the trend behind this matter is worth further discussion. This is not only because of performance and scale, but also because of their business logic -

Standing at the crossroads, miHoYo no longer thinks about problems as in the past.

01

When miHoYo gets complicated

Guo Weiwei, CEO of Xishanju, once said that as long as a game company can make a super product, then you will win. Before making a super product, miHoYo could be said to have only one strategy: to make the best game.

In the beginning, the process was certainly exciting, but also incredibly simple: a group of people slept late for their ideals, even regardless of the return. But when there are more successful projects and more parallel projects, things tend to get complicated.

Can the industrialization process of a game bid farewell to local steelmaking and provide accumulation for more projects? Do the core members who have achieved financial freedom want to retire after success, or do they want to continue to create and achieve continuous success? If you want to support more people's creation, which track, which IP, and which gameplay has the most opportunities? How should resources be allocated?

While solving these problems, the characteristics of some large manufacturers such as Tencent and NetEase have inevitably appeared in miHoYo.

First, in the past two years, miHoYo has become more focused on actual business benefits. It was revealed that at the beginning of this year, Big Viagra specifically asked various teams to align their goals, asking everyone to find the most direct business that helped the company's revenue and user growth. At this point, how to continue to grow has become one of the most pressing issues for miHoYo.

Some people may ask, why do miHoYo care so much about income after making so much money and new projects continue to make money? No way, this is the fate of all mature companies: as long as the growth rate is enough, all problems can be solved; Only a sufficient growth rate can solve most problems. It is said that there is a famous saying in MihoYo: "MihoYo's expectation is to exceed expectations".

Second, the difficulty of personnel management has begun to increase. For example, the so-called mountains are numerous, the taste of big factories, and seniority...... These problems are not new, and every major factory is no exception.

But many people may not realize that the number of people in a single project of miHoYo is more than 99% of Tencent NetEase's projects: according to relevant sources, the team of "Genshin Impact" has exceeded 1,400 people, and "Crashing Iron" and "Jeopardy Zero" are also around 700-800 people. In terms of the difficulty of managing a single team, they may far exceed most large manufacturers.

Third, it has become more difficult to move forward with the workflow. Former employees who worked through Honkai Impact 3 and Genshin Impact projects said that many in-game changes have become more cautious since the company has grown. For example, he said, even if you want to send an email, it needs to be reviewed by several departments, each of which will challenge your decision, and finally if you want to push it forward, you can only find a way to contact your boss to finalize it.

Others said that various departments will also have misunderstandings due to the division of labor between upstream and downstream. It is revealed that in miHoYo, the status of the planning team is higher than that of the operation team, and in the event of a product accident, the two parties will cause disputes over the division of responsibility.

However, miHoYo is not just having the feeling of a big factory this year. A year or two ago, they had already encountered quite a few similar problems. As we have previously reported, at the summary meeting at the end of 2022, Cai Haoyu and Liu Wei reflected on the previous aggressive expansion strategy to all employees.

At that time, Liu Wei bluntly pointed out the company's "big company disease": all departments were hiring frantically, which made the company fall into an "organizational crisis"; There is not enough communication between the senior leaders and the grassroots leaders, and the former doesn't even know what talents the latter has recruited; Many new hires don't read Handbooks, and they don't practice the culture of "doing what you say, speaking up, only taking credit, and pursuing the best...... Liu Wei said that in the future, more attention should be paid to the top-down communication of corporate culture to avoid values degenerating into formalism.

In the past two years, miHoYo has done a lot of organizational optimization and personnel iterations, and has also developed an office suite similar to Feishu in an attempt to improve management efficiency. All these measures also mean that miHoYo seems to be embracing the changes that must be made to become a big factory.

02

When All in is no longer suitable for miHoYo

According to Grape Jun's guess, the core change is that they can no longer adopt the all-in strategy as before. This may be based on a number of practical considerations.

The first is to make the best use of resources.

With the rapid development of miHoYo in recent years, they have a considerable reserve of talents, funds, and technology. Even if they wanted to go all in, I'm afraid no project would be able to eat up to so many resources.

What's more, if the project is expanded for the sake of expansion, it will also bring unnecessary risks at the project management level. In this way, they must find ways to provide space for the extra resources to be used and make them valuable and avoid idling. In the current industry environment, there are not many suitable investment targets, so it has become a natural choice to establish so many projects.

The second is to increase the success rate.

miHoYo's growth so far has been mainly through rounds of All in to bring explosive growth. The success of each product will take them to the next level.

But as they've gotten bigger, it's been pretty difficult to get to the next level with just one game. And once it fails, the blow to the company will be even more fatal.

In the case of a super blockbuster, it has become the only way to create a series of products that can be called successful, accumulate the capabilities of each module, and gradually move closer to the next level.

In other words, their business logic and workflow need to change from the creation of a single product to the establishment of a complete set of incubation projects and team mechanisms, and in order to improve the probability of each product succeeding and becoming a big hit, which is also something that Tencent, NetEase and other large manufacturers think and practice.

Third, it is to retain talent.

For those who are good enough in the industry, they need to realize their career ambitions in addition to income. The all-in strategy requires all members to work on only one research project at the same time, which makes it difficult for these people to achieve their goals.

Therefore, if you want to retain the best talent, you can only provide more opportunities for them to become the number one creative position. Previously, when Grape Jun talked to Chen Xinghan, he said that if you want to achieve talents in the company, "either let them make a new game, or do something that no one else has done before, cross-generational things"

Judging from the current miHoYo, David Jiang, the producer of "Honkai: Star Dome Railway", Li Zhenyu, the producer of "Jeopardy Zero", etc., all belong to the new batch of creative talents emerging from miHoYo; And the art director CiCi has now become the producer of "Star Cloth Valley". In the future, if they want to continue to attract and develop more of these people, they also need to start more projects.

Li Zhenyu

Fourth, it is for their ultimate goal.

In miHoYo's Handbook, the team's ultimate goal is to create a virtual world that is more "real" than reality. In order to achieve such a goal, they must exercise their abilities in different fields, which can almost only be separated and practiced one by one. Therefore, it is not impossible for them to expand more business areas like Tencent NetEase.

For example, HOYO-MIX has already formed its own brand appeal, and the version of PV animation launched by miHoYo for each game also has a good reputation among the audience. If they also make deeper development in the music and animation business, perhaps miHoYo will change from the current game company to a more comprehensive technology and entertainment company. This more mature form of large factories is conducive to their realization of their ideals.

In general, they can almost only move from an organizational structure and system that was more suitable for a single key project to a more complex but more efficient operating system if they want to achieve these goals. In this regard, it is almost inevitable to move closer to the path of Tencent, NetEase and other large manufacturers.

At present, the organizational structure that miHoYo hopes to achieve, according to Handbook, is called "Team of Teams", that is, the large team is divided into several small teams. In their descriptions, these small teams have their own core nodes, and each decision is either made by a single node or by a collaborative judgment between nodes.

This statement sounds quite ideal. However, once the scale of enterprises and projects expands, it becomes more and more difficult for each node to grasp the overall information, and it is difficult for them to make decisions. Based on the consideration of the division of responsibilities, the decisions made by these nodes still need to have a person in a high enough position to make decisions. Judging from the current information, miHoYo may have returned to the most traditional but more efficient tree structure like many large enterprises.

03

Is the next stop Tencent NetEase or Blizzard?

Of course, miHoYo wants to take this step, but it also has to meet many challenges.

First of all, in terms of miHoYo's brand influence, users have high expectations for their products. As a result, they will naturally be under pressure if they want to jump out of the traditional advantageous track. In case it doesn't work, it's easy to cause questions from the user group.

The second is that opening multiple fronts will test the management ability of the leadership. This requires miHoYo to rethink the division of organizational structure, the accumulation and focus of different teams, as well as the distribution of credit and benefits of employees in different projects and functions. This is also the reason why Tencent NetEase has established many studios and business divisions.

The third is the large-scale incubation and verification mechanism just mentioned. Even if their first wave was successful, will they be able to continue that trend and continue to be successful in the second and third waves? This is the time to truly witness the incubation ability of the miHoYo project.

But the most important challenge is not tactics, but strategy: if miHoYo can finally become a relatively traditional commercial company with a large scale and many projects, is it absolutely the right thing for them to do?

In the past two years, many successful emerging manufacturers have set their next strategy as continuous expansion. In our underlying logic, it seems that the development goal of a game company should be like this.

However, inside and outside the industry, many people once expected miHoYo to become a purely creative CP and become a Blizzard that was in full swing back then. Similarly, there's game science, which has just been hugely successful. It's hard for us to imagine what they will be like if they also go on the road to becoming a big factory in the future.

We don't know if miHoYo's other path is full of flowers, but perhaps this question is worth considering: is it the law of the industry to expand if you have money? If you don't expand, can a team that has achieved great success survive in the industry?

It's hard to answer. Some people say that making GaaS games, the team is getting bigger and bigger, and more and more is almost a doomed result. Even Supercell, which claims to be play-driven and insists on small but beautiful, publicly reflected at the beginning of the year that they thought that larger teams, more structures and processes, and middle management were almost cursed, but later found that they may be too obsessed with small teams, and in fact, they should have increased the number of people a long time ago. Not to mention a company like miHoYo, which is almost all content-based products with extremely high production requirements, and none of the products have been discontinued.

A general manager of a large factory once said that their biggest challenge is that the income of the previous project cannot be reduced, and everyone has to seek new growth and do new projects, so it is becoming more and more difficult to ensure the quality of the team, and the organization will inevitably become bigger and bigger - even if the boss does not want to make money, employees also want to create, want to be promoted and raised. The problems they face may also be the problems faced by miHoYo at the moment.

Today, miHoYo seems to be standing at a crucial crossroads. Will they continue along the path of those who came before them, or will they find other ways to solve the problem? With a company that has surprised the industry so much, I look forward to seeing how they can bring the same surprising approach to this matter.

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