miHoYo, the developer and publisher of massively popular online game Genshin Impact, is the latest company to announce a rebrand in the wake of the ongoing “-verse” trend. While miHoYo gained international recognition for Honkai Impact 3rd, an online action RPG initially released on mobile in 2016, the company’s fame and success truly exploded when Genshin Impact released in 2020. It was so successful that Genshin Impact beat Fortnite and GTA 5’s revenue during its first year.
In spite of its massive success, not everything has gone completely well for miHoYo due to some of its decisions with Genshin Impact. The anticipation players always have when it comes to the game’s future updates has led to the rise of leakers among Genshin Impact’s beta testers, which has led miHoYo to try and file lawsuits against them. Unfortunately, the studio going after leakers did not sit well with some members of the game’s community. Furthermore, Genshin Impact’s first anniversary rewards also received a lot of backlash from the game’s playerbase for how lackluster they were. These and other issues have caused a small number of Genshin Impact players to leave the game, although it is still massively popular.
Genshin Impact studio miHoYo (via Kotaku) announced that it’s changing its brand to HoYoverse. Like other companies before it, the company cites the reason for the change as its plans to expand its portfolio of content beyond just more video games. Some of the areas that HoYoverse is expanding into outside of games include technology research, virtual characters, anime, manga, light novels, music, and more. It also plans to get into other fields such as artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and pipeline construction. HoYoverse plans to achieve this by establishing offices across the world, including ones in Montreal, Los Angeles, Singapore, Tokyo, and Seoul.
The HoYoverse announcement comes right before the release of Genshin Impact’s 2.5 update on February 16, 2022, which will finally introduce Yae Miko as a playable character. Genshin Impact’s 2.5 update banners will give players the opportunity to obtain the long-awaited 5-star Electro Catalyst character during the patch’s first half. The new update will also introduce the next chapter in the game’s story, set in the new Enkanomiya region, as well as two seasonal events for players to experience and earn rewards from.
It’s hard to not say that Genshin Impact’s massive success helped HoYoverse to become what it is today and enable this latest change. While the rebranding will unlikely affect Genshin Impact in any significant way gameplay-wise, it’ll be interesting to see how the company’s expansion will allow it to enrich Genshin Impact as well as its other video game franchises, like Tears of Themis, with other content.
Genshin Impact is available now on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, mobile, and PC.