Introduction: At Apple's developer conference in 2022, Liu Wei asked Cook: "How can you maintain innovation while maintaining growth?" Cook replied, "Only by learning to make trade-offs can you focus on the bigger cause." ”
At the beginning of the new year, miHoYo broke out two blockbuster news.
On January 18th, there were rumors in the industry that Miyoushe was optimizing its personnel, and HR was interviewing the project personnel of Miyoushe.
In the early morning of the same day, Miyo Club's official Weibo announced that it would cancel the MiyoSummer 3rd scheduled for 2024.
For a long time, MiYo Club has been one of the core communities for miHoYo players to gather to discuss game information and strategies. In addition to the collection of Mi games such as "Honkai Academy 2", "Honkai Impact 3", "Genshin Impact", "Book of Undetermined Events" and "Honkai: Star Dome Railway", Miyu Club has also set up a "Daibieno" area to discuss other games or two-dimensional topics.
miyosummer 3rd is an offline creation activity initiated by miHoYo and carrying miHoYo's games and related IPs. The first two editions of miyosummer were held in December 2022 and June 2023 respectively, and received enthusiastic feedback from many players.
Since the organizer of MiyoSummer 3rd is Miyousha, some players will inevitably speculate that the cancellation of the event is affected by the recent events of the Comic Con. However, according to fans who are familiar with comic conventions, some large-scale comic conventions have only been postponed, and miyosummer has directly canceled the event, which is very rare in the history of comic conventions.
According to the author's confirmation from insiders in the industry, the optimization of Miyosummer personnel is indeed happening, and the cancellation of Miyosummer 3rd is actually affected by many reasons. This optimization involves the employees of the offline activity group, and the follow-up MiyoSummer 3rd event may not be available, or it may be replaced by other new activities.
Whether it is personnel optimization or event cancellation, miHoYo is facing the pessimistic expectations of the game industry, out of consideration for reducing costs and increasing efficiency; The increasingly mature AI self-developed model is a powerful tool to help miHoYo implement this strategy.
This change, since September last year, when the founder Liu Wei changed from "big viagra" to chairman, and also entered the "eye of the storm" of miHoYo's drastic reform.
01 The "first knife" of "Big Viagra"?
According to people close to miHoYo, this optimization is considered to be an internal structure adjustment, mainly for the sake of reducing costs and increasing efficiency, and miHoYo will not give up its self-built game community.
The original intention of the establishment of Miyou Club was not for the purpose of profit. In the case of a sluggish game market in 2023, the first knife to reduce costs and increase efficiency will be cut on the head of Miyoushe.
In November 2018, as an exclusive community for miHoYo's gamers, MiYo Club was established. Two years later, on September 28, 2020, during the open beta of the popular game "Genshin Impact", under the influence of "plagiarism rumors", traditional communities such as Tieba, Bilibili, Weibo and NGA all had a very strong "anti-rice" boycott. miHoYo's own Miyou Club has become the last "pure land" for hardcore players.
In October 2020, the number of Miyou Club once rose to the fourth place in the free social application category of the AppStore.
During the epidemic, the demand for games at home exploded, and a large number of players poured into Miyoushe. In February 2021, the cumulative number of users of Miyou exceeded 10 million, and more staff were urgently needed to manage this huge community.
Under the craze of the war for talents, the number of employees in miHoYo has also increased from 2,400 in 2020 to more than 4,000 in 2022, nearly doubling. Many managers recruited from competitors settled in Miyou, and at the same time, community players and part-time "moderators" in the community began to lose on a large scale.
The craze comes and goes fast.
With the end of the epidemic and the return of work and life to normal, the consumption of the game market has also tended to be sluggish. At the 2022 summary meeting, founders Cai Haoyu and Liu Wei reflected on their previous aggressive expansion strategy to all employees. During the spring recruitment of the following year, miHoYo's recruitment department and headhunters both revealed that the senior management of the internal meeting clearly conveyed the need to tighten the HC (headcount, that is, the recruitment position index).
From the creator's side, it can also be clearly seen that the changes in the business ideas of Miyou Club. Some creators have complained that when the community posting data is almost the same, the revenue is now almost halved compared to before.
02 AI Double-edged
Under the management's policy of "reflection" and cost reduction and efficiency increase, the layout and application of AI tools have become a booster for optimizing the internal team structure: on the one hand, the large-scale use of AI will help enterprises streamline teams; On the other hand, AI requires a lot of investment, and enterprises need to adjust the investment distribution of resources accordingly.
According to people familiar with miHoYo's AI development, the text accuracy of miHoYo's self-developed AI model is currently above 99%, which is only 01%-0.2% of this magnitude of the difference.
The reason why it does not use the GPT general model but develops it is mainly because in the game scenario, miHoYo finds that the adaptability of GPT is low, and it is easy to answer the wrong question.
At present, miHoYo's self-developed AI large model is mainly used for R&D, distribution, and commercialization, covering all aspects from text, props, scene effects, and large map generation to purchase volume and content delivery. With the help of the self-developed AI model, miHoYo has achieved a 10% increase in the efficiency of props and characters, and a more than 5% increase in the efficiency of scene and sound effect generation. The efficiency of the text class is more obvious, reaching more than 25%; In the future, the efficiency is expected to increase by more than 70%.
While the efficiency gains brought about by large AI models are tempting, the investment is also terrifyingly high.
It is understood that the scale of 100 people is required to train a large model in the game, and the overall investment is at least 4 billion to 5 billion yuan.
A senior expert in charge of AI game optimization said that the AI model is a high investment in the short term, but in the long run, it is both a cost reduction and an increase in income.
For example, in the past, it took at least 150 people to spend 3 months on the large map of open games, but AI tools can shorten it to one month. In the long run, games are a content-consuming industry, and in the future, game manufacturers with richer content and faster response to customer needs will be able to occupy more user time to increase revenue.
More importantly, according to the author's understanding from several leading companies, the overall revenue growth of several major game manufacturers in 2023 will only be 5%-10%. Growth is widely expected to be significantly weaker this year than last year, and even to be in the small single-digit range for the whole of 2024.
Therefore, on the one hand, the competition for new products is fierce, and on the other hand, the standards for new projects are improved and the attitude is cautious.
Once the game market weakens as expected in 2024, AI tools may become a game-changer for miHoYo, especially the new chairman Liu Wei.
03 Tech otaku, from "saving the world" to buying land and betting
This personnel optimization did not come suddenly, but has been brewing since September last year.
In September 2023, Cai Haoyu stepped down as the company's chairman, and the legendary "best assistant" big viagra Liu Wei took over the position.
It is understood that after Cai Haoyu stepped down as chairman, he will mobilize more resources in North America and devote more energy to personally research AI technology.
Cai Haoyu said that stepping down as chairman will allow him to focus on the research and application of cutting-edge technologies.
This personnel structure optimization from the virtual community Miyou Club "hands-on", is not only Liu Wei's tacit understanding to practice Cai Haoyu's strategy, but also a "tiger body shock" in the face of pessimistic expectations.
The three founders of miHoYo, Cai Haoyu, Liu Wei and Luo Yuhao, are all alumni of Shanghai Jiao Tong University and are all ACG culture enthusiasts. In the initial stage of the company, "tech nerds save the world" became miHoYo's "mission".
Compared with the low-key and introverted Cai Haoyu and the mysterious Luo Yuhao, "Big Viagra" is more well-known by players and the industry.
Whether it is the entrepreneurship competition to deal with the difficulties of investors, or being interviewed by **, Liu Wei seems to be at ease. When "Honkai Academy" was launched, many of the team's QA, planning, operation, and even some cute jokes were written by Liu Wei. In many levels of "Honkai Impact 3", Liu Wei also appeared as a "big viagra" character many times to interact with players.
At the "Honkai Impact 3" carnival in July last year, the host asked Liu Wei: If there is a time machine, what do you want to do? 36-year-old Liu Wei choked up several times, he said that he wanted to go back and tell himself 10 years ago that it was really cool to save the world with a technology nerd, no matter how difficult it was, just go forward, because the front was all "Captain" (the setting identity of "Honkai Impact 3" players).
Two months later, Liu Wei took over the baton as chairman of miHoYo, which became the biggest personnel change since the establishment of the domestic game giant.
Previously, although Cai Haoyu was named the chairman, this "genius technical otaku" was mainly responsible for technology research and development and game development, and was more inclined to be internal, and rarely "showed up" to the outside world.
miHoYo employees' evaluation of Cai Haoyu is "good at gathering the company's manpower, material resources and time to specialize in a popular model". The project is forward-looking, and the cost paid is several times that of competitors, and Cai Haoyu's all-in strategy has made miHoYo run in the front row of the industry in a low-key manner.
Liu Wei is a Pisces. Unlike people's stereotype of Pisces as hesitant and "slimy", the company's employees can see Liu Wei's decisive side.
According to ** reports, miHoYo's decision to cut some projects in the past came from Liu Wei's instructions. He is responsible for keeping an eye on the company's red lines and avoiding any runaway situations. The adjustment of the platform group of Miyou Club this time, according to a person close to miHoYo, is also an instruction from the top.
One month after Liu Wei became chairman, at the end of October 2023, Shanghai Timejie Technology, wholly owned by miHoYo, was 10The transaction price of 7.7 billion yuan was transferred to the Hongmei Street plot in Caohejing Development Zone, Xuhui District, Shanghai.
It is reported that the land is less than 3 kilometers away from miHoYo's headquarters on Yishan Road in Xujiahui and will be used to build a new office building.
In the transfer documents, there are clear requirements for the sales revenue and taxes of the enterprise in the plot for at least the next three years. In other words, miHoYo must ensure that for three consecutive years from 2023 to 2025, the annual sales revenue will not be less than 1.6 billion, and the total tax contribution will be more than 3.3 billion.
How does Liu Wei deal with the pressure of the "VAM" conditions of the external land plot and the expectation of a slowdown in the growth of the industry inside?
The optimization of Miyosha may be just the beginning.
At Apple's developer conference in 2022, Liu Wei asked Cook: "How can you maintain innovation and growth at the same time?" Cook replied, "Only by learning to make trade-offs can you focus on the bigger cause." ”
According to miHoYo insiders, the incubation of AI products will be about half a year or a year later. For miHoYo or other game practitioners, it will be clear whether it is classified as "taking" or "giving".