Genshin Impact and Honkai Impact 3rd developer miHoYo has rebranded itself to HoYoverse. The studio says the new brand are aimed at creating an “immersive virtual world experience” to players through a massive variety of entertainment media. According to miHoYo, the launch of HoYoverse is a show of commitment to miHoYo’s global audiences. Their flagship titles, such as Genshin Impact, Honkai Impact 3rd and Tears of Themis, were well received by players outside of their main country of operations in China.
In an official announcement post, HoYoverse says that the name change was in order to “create a vast and content-driven virtual world” that integrates not only games, but also anime and other types of entertainment. MiHoYo (now HoYoverse) founder Cai Haoyu revealed that the studio will continue its mission to innovate in the worlds of gaming and tech in order to “meet the expectations” of its worldwide fanbase. HoYoverse doesn’t make mention of the metaverse, but it does explicitly talk about “virtual worlds” in their announcement.
This also includes expanding the company’s offices around the world, including Los Angeles, Montreal, Seoul, Singapore, and Tokyo. We already know that their Montreal studio is developing an open-world paranormal shooter, but all these studio expansions certainly open the doors for more content to be created. HoYoverse, née miHoYo, have already worked in areas like anime, manga, music and desktop apps. HoYoverse looks to bring all of those together in the aforementioned “immersive virtual world experience.”
There’s been some suggestion that the HoYoverse branding is only for the Western world. When one visits the Chinese miHoYo website, the miHoYo branding is still intact, but it’s been replaced by the HoYoverse branding on the UK site and other non-Chinese platforms. This possible points to the rebranding as being only applicable to the Western populace; considering miHoYo recently forced to censor some of its character designs in China to appease the CCP. Is this a move by the studio to try to distance its Western operations from its Chinese works?
Otherwise, the future looks bright for miHoYo, with a massive update coming in for Genshin Impact and new projects in progress. If you aren’t already a fan of their current, you should keep an eye out for their future projects, you’re likely to love whatever is being planned in the future.
You can read miHoYo’s transition statement here!
