Looks like miHoYo isn't perfect from this interview
Shanghai-based miHoYo, the company behind Chinese mobile hit game Genshin Impact, was founded by three engineering postgraduates – Cai Haoyu, Liu Wei and Luo Yuhao. Their slogan: ‘tech otakus save the world’.
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However, because they are willing to do global, the had to change certain elements in their games to be open to a wider audience. That said an aspect of their views is reflective of China's female gaming audience problem.
Sexism in gaming is common worldwide but more openly tolerated in China, where feminism is silenced and stigmatised.
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A virtual boyfriend dating sim kicked off a wave of games in China designed specifically for female gamers.
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MiHoYo certainly not ashamed of their words and deeds...
Speaking about miHoYo's first hit game Guns Girl – Honkai Gakuen at the Gamelook Game Open Day conference in July 2014, Cai said the game had a simple mission: to serve male gamers' yearning to bond with virtual female characters in a game.
"We are making an otaku game … So girls are an important element," Cai said of Guns Girl, which features a legion of cute, gun-wielding girls battling futuristic robots, according to the post-event transcript posted on Chinese media outlet Gamelook's website. At the Shanghai conference, Cai also reportedly said he played popular Korean fantasy game Blade & Soul only because of a user-created script that allowed gamers to strip female characters and accentuate the movement of their breasts.
The open-world, action-adventure game – where gamers play as young, magic-conjuring warriors journeying through a fairy-tale-like world – features some prominent male characters, but its cast mainly comprises young female characters with flirtatious dialogue.
Liu has attributed much of miHoYo's success to its early adoption of this monetisation strategy, which he has referred to as "paying for love": banking on gamers' affection for female characters rather than their desire to gain a competitive advantage by buying powerful weapons in the game.
"We asked ourselves why we would want to pay: it's because we love a certain virtual character that we become willing to pay for her," he said. "This impulse to pay was the opposite of what mainstream games had to offer at the time."