Mihoyo Undergoes Major Personnel Shift as Founder Cai Haoyu Takes Step Back

On September 19th, miHoYo adjusted its registered legal representative and director filing list on the 15th of this month. Founder Cai Haoyu no longer serves as the legal representative and chairman of miHoYo, both positions have been taken over by another founder Liu Wei.

For this adjustment, the official response from miHoYo is: in order to adapt to the future development needs of the company, miHoYo founder Cai Haoyu will invest more energy in research and application of cutting-edge technology, new project development, as well as connecting domestic and overseas research resources. The management affairs of the company will continue to be handled by miHoYo founder and president Liu Wei.

The three founders of miHoYo, Cai Haoyu, Liu Wei, and Luo Yuhaohao, all graduated from Shanghai Jiao Tong University as postgraduates. In 2012, they jointly established this game company and have successively released game products such as the “Honkai Impact” series, “Genshin Impact,” and “Tears of Themis,” as well as the community application “miHoYo Community”.

In 2017, miHoYo submitted an application for listing on the A-share market to the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC). After waiting in line for three years, miHoYo experienced the explosive success of ‘Genshin Impact’ and subsequently abandoned its plans for going public.

At the same time, MiHoYo’s company scale began to expand rapidly, growing from a thousand employees to over 5000 in a short period of time. In terms of size, MiHoYo has become a leading company in the gaming industry.

Previously, the three founders had divided their responsibilities as follows: President Liu Wei was in charge of public appearances and team management; Chairman Cai Haoyu and another founder Luo Yuhao took a backseat. The former focused more on technology and was responsible for setting the overall strategic direction of the company, while the latter handled tasks such as research and development, as well as operations.

SEE ALSO: miHoYo’s Video Game Honkai: Star Rail Is Now Available Globally

In the latest edition of Fortune China’s “40 Under 40 Business Elites” list and Hurun Research Institute’s “2023 Hurun Global Self-Made U40 Billionaires List”, all three founders of miHoYo are included.

In the Hurun List, 36-year-old Cai Haoyu ranks 18th with a net worth of 21 billion yuan. Liu Wei and Luo Yuhao have respective net worths of 11.5 billion yuan and 11 billion yuan. The three founders collectively possess a wealth exceeding 40 billion yuan.

In February 2022, MiHoYo, a company with thriving career development, launched the global brand “HoYoverse”. The studio covers five cities, including Montreal, Los Angeles, Singapore, Tokyo and Seoul. Its founder and CEO is Cai Haoyu.

In fact, since last year, Cai Haoyu has spent a lot of time in places like Singapore and Canada. Many of the daily management affairs of the company have been entrusted to Liu Wei. The employees of the company no longer see him in person as frequently as before.

Mihoyo previously indicated that Cai Haoyu will focus more on integrating technical resources in the North American market and researching AI technology.

Cai Haoyu resigned as the legal representative and chairman of the company, marking another significant personnel change for miHoYo in the past week. On September 12th, Chen Zhiyi, the music director of miHoYo’s project “Genshin Impact,” announced his departure, which also attracted great attention from the public.

One of the main reasons why Genshin Impact is so popular in the gaming community is its music content. The previously viral song “The Divine Damsel of Devastation” was composed by Chen Zhiyi.

Chen Zhiyi initially composed music in the film and television industry, creating music for works such as “Painted Skin 2” and “The House That Never Dies“. Later, he ventured into the gaming industry and collaborated with top game companies like NetEase and Tencent.

Chen Zhiyi has composed music for well-known products such as the large-scale MMO game “Zhen Hun Qu” under NetEase and Tencent Games’ “The Magic Blade”. Especially after producing music for “The Magic Blade” in 2017, he began to gain a reputation within the Chinese-style gaming community.

According to official information, HOYO-MiX, the original music team under miHoYo, was established in 2011 and is led by Cai Jinhuan, the current Music Director of miHoYo.

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The team has created a large number of music works for miHoYo’s “Honkai Impact” series of games and has provided many music creators for projects such as “Genshin Impact,” “Honkai: Star Rail,” and “Juequ Zero”.

After the establishment of the “Genshin Impact” project, there was a high demand for music, especially symphonic music, which put a lot of pressure on the Hoyomix team at that time. As a result, Cai Jinhao started to contact Chen Zhiyi and persuade him to cooperate with miHoYo.

Initially, both parties maintained only an external cooperative relationship. After the official release of the Genshin Impact open beta, Chen Zhiyi formally joined HOYO-MiX as the music director for the project. He led the music composition for the first four regional expansions (Mondstadt, Liyue, Inazuma, and Sumeru) and also released the first digital OST album for Genshin Impact titled “Wind and Wanderer”.

In the official information released by miHoYo, it can be seen that Chen Zhiyi has ensured the consistency of the music style in “Genshin Impact” and also coordinated the rhythm between the music team and the product team. Chen Zhiyi mentioned in public occasions that after HOYO-MiX achieved success in “Genshin Impact,” they recruited many new composers to meet the increased production capacity of the game.

However, as “Genshin Impact” enters its mature stage of development and the project team expands on a large scale, the quality of this product has started to become unstable.

In the live preview event of version 4.1 of Genshin Impact, which just ended last week, the official has publicly announced that the total number of game texts has reached 10.878 million words.

This news has sparked a lot of dissatisfaction among users in the gaming community. These players believe that the game content quality of “Genshin Impact” has significantly declined in recent versions, including but not limited to frequent contradictions, an increase in useless information, and the lack of a “skip” option for players.

Similarly, in a previous live-streaming event for the popular game “Fate/Grand Order” (abbreviated as “FGO”) under Aniplex, a large stack of A4 papers was displayed to showcase the length of the main storyline in the new expansion. This was done to demonstrate the amount of plot written by scriptwriter Nasu Kinoko. As one of the pioneers in IP-based games, FGO offers a “skip” option within the game for players who do not wish to watch or read through the storyline.

After the launch of “Honkai Impact: Star Rail” this year, its revenue data has consistently exceeded that of the “Genshin Impact” project for several months. As a growing company, miHoYo is still learning how to manage its different large-scale projects and teams, and the changes in management are just the beginning.