when mihoyo stands at a crossroads, will its next stop be tencent, netease, or blizzard?
2024-09-22
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| the next stop is tencent, netease, blizzard, or mihoyo itself? |
when mihoyo gets complicated
weiwei guo, ceo of seasun, once said that as long as a game company can make a super product, it wins. before making super products, mihoyo had only one strategy: to make the best game.at the beginning, the process was of course exciting and innocent: a group of people worked day and night for their ideals, even without considering the rewards. but as more and more successful projects and parallel projects were added, things tended to become complicated.can the industrialized process of a game say goodbye to the traditional method of making steel and provide accumulation for more projects? do the core members who have achieved financial freedom want to retire after their success or continue to create and achieve continuous success? if we want to support more people to create, which track, which ip, and which gameplay has the most opportunities? how should resources be allocated?while solving these problems, some of the characteristics possessed by major companies such as tencent and netease inevitably appeared in mihoyo.first, in the past two years, mihoyo has becomemore emphasis on actual business benefitsit was revealed that at the beginning of this year, dawei specifically asked each team to align their goals and asked everyone to find the most direct business to help the company's revenue and user growth. at this point, how to continue to grow has become one of mihoyo's most pressing issues.some people may ask, mihoyo has made so much money, and new projects continue to make money, why does it care so much about revenue? there is no way, this is the fate of all mature companies: as long as the growth rate is sufficient, all problems can be solved; only sufficient growth rate can solve most problems. it is said that there is a famous saying within mihoyo: "mihoyo's expectations are to exceed expectations."second,the difficulty of personnel management begins to increase。for example, the so-called numerous factions, the big-company atmosphere, and seniority-based promotion... these problems are not new, and every big company is no exception.but many people may not realize thatthe number of people working on a single project of mihoyo exceeds that of 99% of the projects of tencent and netease:according to relevant sources, the "genshin impact" team has more than 1,400 people, and "clash of clans" and "zero" are also around 700-800 people.in terms of the difficulty of managing a single team, they may be far beyond most large companies.third,the difficulty of advancing the workflow has also increaseda former employee who had worked on the honkai impact 3 and genshin impact projects said that since the company has expanded, many changes in the game have become more cautious. he gave an example, saying that even if you want to send an email, it needs to be reviewed by several departments, and each department will challenge your decision. in the end, if you want to push it forward, you can only find a way to contact the boss to finalize it.others said that misunderstandings would arise between departments due to the division of labor between upstream and downstream. it was revealed that at mihoyo, the planning team has a higher status than the operations team, and once a product accident occurs, the two sides will have disputes over the division of responsibilities.however, mihoyo did not just start to feel like a big company this year. as early as a year or two ago, they had already encountered many similar problems. we have previously reported that at the summary meeting at the end of 2022, cai haoyu and liu wei reflected on the previous aggressive expansion strategy to all employees.liu wei bluntly pointed out the "big company disease" that existed in the company at the time: all departments were recruiting like crazy, which put the company into an "organizational crisis"; there was insufficient communication between senior leaders and grassroots leaders, and the former did not even know what talents the latter had recruited; many new employees did not read the handbook, nor did they practice the culture of "doing what they say, speaking frankly, recognizing only merit, and pursuing excellence"... liu wei said that in the future, more attention should be paid to the top-down communication of corporate culture to prevent values from becoming formalistic.in the past two years, mihoyo has done a lot of organizational optimization and personnel iteration, and has also developed an office suite similar to feishu to try to improve management efficiency. all these measures also mean that mihoyo seems to be welcoming the changes that must be made to become a large company.when all in is no longer suitable for mihoyo
according to my guess, the most important change is that they can no longer adopt the all-in strategy as before. this may be based on many practical considerations.the first is to make full use of resources.with the rapid development of mihoyo in recent years, they have accumulated considerable reserves in terms of talent, capital, technology, etc. even if they want to go all in, i am afraid that no project can absorb so many resources.moreover, if the project is expanded for the sake of expansion, it will also bring unnecessary risks at the project management level. in this case, they must find a way to provide space for the extra resources to generate value and avoid idleness. in the current industry environment, there are not many suitable investment targets, so establishing multiple projects has become a natural choice.the second is to increase the success rate.mihoyo's growth to date is mainly due to the explosive growth brought about by rounds of all-in. the success of each product will allow them to reach a new level.but as their size grows, it has become quite difficult to reach the next level with just one game. and once they fail, the blow to the company will be even more fatal.since super hit products are hard to come by, the only way is to create a series of products that can be considered successful, accumulate the capabilities of each module, and gradually move to the next level.in other words, their business logic and workflow need to change from creating a single product to establishing a complete set of mechanisms for incubating projects and teams, so as to increase the probability of each product being successful and becoming a big hit - this is also what big companies such as tencent and netease are thinking about and practicing.third, it is to retain talent.for sufficiently outstanding industry talents, in addition to income, they also want to realize their career ambitions. however, the all-in strategy requires all members to serve only one project at a time, which makes it difficult for these people to achieve their goals.therefore, if you want to retain the best talents, you can only provide more opportunities for them to become the top creators. when grape jun talked to chen xinghan before, he said that if you want to make the talents in the company, "either let them make a new game, or make something that no one else has done, something that is new and epoch-making."from the current perspective of mihoyo, david jiang, the producer of honkai impact 3, and li zhenyu, the producer of zone zero, are all new creative talents emerging from mihoyo; and the art director cici has now become the producer of star cuckoo land. if they want to continue to attract and cultivate more such people in the future, they also need to start more projects.fourth, it is for their ultimate goal.in mihoyo's handbook, they set the ultimate goal of the team to create a virtual world that is more "real" than reality. to achieve this goal, they must exercise their abilities in different fields, which can only be practiced one by one. therefore, it is not impossible for them to expand more business areas like tencent and netease.for example, hoyo-mix has already established its own brand appeal, and the pv animations that mihoyo launches for each game also have a good reputation among the audience. if they also make further developments in the music and animation businesses, perhaps mihoyo will also transform from the current game company to a more comprehensive technology and entertainment company. this more mature form of a large company will actually help them realize their ideals.in general, if they want to achieve the above goals, they can only transform from the previous organizational structure and system that is more suitable for a single key project to a more complex but more efficient operating system. in this regard, it is almost inevitable to follow the path of large companies such as tencent and netease.the organizational structure that mihoyo hopes to achieve is called "team of teams" according to the handbook, which means dividing the large team into several small teams. in their description, these small teams have their own core nodes, and each decision is either made by a single node or by the nodes working together.this statement sounds quite ideal. however, once the scale of enterprises and projects expands, it becomes increasingly difficult for each node to grasp the overall information, and it becomes difficult for them to make decisions. based on the consideration of the division of responsibilities, the decisions made by these nodes still need to be finalized by someone at a high enough position. judging from the current information, mihoyo may have returned to the most traditional but more efficient tree structure like many large enterprises.the next stop is tencent, netease, or blizzard?
of course, if mihoyo wants to take this step, it will also have to face many challenges.first of all, with mihoyo's brand influence, users have high expectations for their products. as a result, they are naturally full of pressure to break out of their traditional advantage track. if they fail to make a splash, it will easily arouse doubts from the user group.secondly, 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, and the distribution of credits and benefits of employees in different projects and functions. this is also the reason why tencent and netease have established many studios and business units.the third is the large-scale incubation and verification mechanism just mentioned. even if their first wave of products is successful, can they continue this trend and make the second and third waves of products continue to be successful? this is when we can truly witness mihoyo's project incubation capabilities.but the most important challenge is not tactics, but strategy: if mihoyo can eventually become a relatively traditional commercial company with a large scale and numerous projects, is it absolutely the right thing for them?in the past two years, many successful emerging companies have set their next strategy as continued expansion. in our underlying logic, it seems that this should be the development goal of a game company.but in and outside the industry, many people once expected mihoyo to become a pure creative cp, like blizzard, which was at its peak in the past. similarly, there is game science, which has just achieved great success. it is difficult for us to imagine what it will be like if they also take the path of becoming a big company in the future.we don’t know whether mihoyo’s other road is full of flowers, but perhaps this question is worth thinking about: is it an industry rule that if you have money, you must expand? if you don’t expand, can a team that has achieved great success survive in the industry?this is difficult to answer. some people say that when making gaas games, the team is getting bigger and bigger, and more and more is almost a foregone conclusion. even supercell, which claims to be driven by gameplay and insists on being small and beautiful, had its ceo publicly reflect at the beginning of the year that they previously believed that larger teams, more structures and processes, and middle-level management were almost cursed, but later found that they might be too obsessed with small teams and should have increased the number of people long ago. not to mention a company like mihoyo, which is almost entirely content-based products with extremely high production capacity requirements, and has not had any product discontinued.a general manager of a large company once said that their biggest challenge is that the income from previous projects cannot be reduced, and everyone has to seek new growth and do new projects. therefore, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ensure the quality of the team, and the organization is inevitably getting bigger and bigger - even if the boss does not want to make money, the employees also want to create, get promoted and get a raise. the problems they face may also be the problems that mihoyo is facing now.at this point, mihoyo seems to be standing at a crucial crossroads. will they continue along the path of their predecessors, or will they find another way to solve the problem? facing such a company that has brought countless surprises to the industry, i also look forward to them being able to bring equally surprising solutions in this matter.
