An anime-style role-playing game called miHoYo’s Honkai: Star Rail recently surpassed Genshin Impact to become the biggest Chinese video game to launch internationally.
The Shanghai-based video game developer miHoYo has almost tripled its revenue over the past three years, making it a significant domestic rival to Tencent Holdings and NetEase in the largest gaming market in the world. miHoYo has provided financial information to authorities as a private company.
The company made a net profit of 16.15 billion yuan in 2022, according to a report released on Thursday by the state-run newspaper Guangming Daily. Revenue for the year was 27.34 billion yuan (US$4.2 billion). The company was also included in the list of China’s “Top 30 Chinese Culture Enterprises” in the report.
The newspaper had earlier reported that miHoYo’s revenue would surpass $20 billion in 2021 without providing a specific figure. According to a different official Shanghai newspaper, the casino’s revenue in 2021 was estimated to be 10.3 billion yuan, or roughly one-third of the amount reported for 2022..
MiHoYo’s revenue has increased as a result of the resounding success of its Genshin Impact game, which has helped it rise to become the third-largest gaming company in China, behind Tencent and NetEase.
Tencent, which runs the largest video gaming company in the world, reported revenue of 170.7 billion yuan in 2022, a 2% decrease from the previous year, while NetEase’s gaming revenue increased 10% to 74.6 billion yuan.
Since its founding in 2011 by three Shanghai Jiao Tong University engineering postgraduates named Cai Haoyu, Liu Wei, and Luo Yuhao, miHoYo has remained a privately held company. Neither the company as a whole nor any of its individual game titles have ever disclosed financial information to the public.
The state-owned newspaper also lauded miHoYo as a successful example of a domestic video game developer expanding internationally, noting that it has “created a window for foreign players to understand China” and that this makes Chinese elements “an important gene” when it comes to the international expansion of Chinese video game titles..
Launched in September 2020, Genshin Impact became one of the most popular Chinese video games by the end of 2022 after generating $4 billion in global revenue. The second-highest-grossing mobile games publisher in China is MiHoYo, a Chinese company that publishes mobile games.
In November, MiHoYo overtook NetEase in terms of sales. Even though NetEase reclaimed the top spot in January and March, miHoYo did so in April and May.
An anime-style role-playing game called miHoYo’s Honkai: Star Rail recently surpassed Genshin Impact to become the biggest Chinese video game to launch internationally.