China Meta Guide

miHoYo

Chinese name
米哈游
Pinyin
Mǐhāyóu
Registered name
上海米哈游网络科技股份有限公司
Unified Social Credit Code
91310000590397350D registered in Shanghai 上海
Website
Weibo
6415164493

Virtual idol and IP agencies

miHoYo Co., Ltd. (米哈游) is a Shanghai-based game developer best known internationally for Genshin Impact (released September 2020) and the Honkai franchise. It was formally established in February 2012 by Cai Haoyu (蔡浩宇), Liu Wei (刘伟), and Luo Yuhao (罗宇皓).

The company later created the global publishing and branding label HoYoverse for markets outside Greater China, launched in February 2022 and operated via Singapore-registered Cognosphere Pte. Ltd. (incorporated July 2021). The company stated that HoYoverse would handle global publishing and technology research and operate through offices including Montreal, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Seoul, and Singapore, with a Singapore headquarters office announced in July 2022.

Because miHoYo is privately held, comprehensive audited financial statements are not publicly available. Widely reported remarks from early 2021 quote Cai as saying 2020 revenue exceeded RMB 5 billion (about US$770–780 million at the time) and as framing a long-term ambition to build a virtual world that one billion people would want to live in by 2030; this should be treated as an aspirational vision rather than a measurable business commitment. For Genshin Impact specifically, third-party mobile market trackers have reported multi-billion-dollar lifetime player spending on iOS and Google Play within its first two years, while total cross-platform revenue is not publicly disclosed.

In the narrower “digital human” sense of humanlike, real-time interactive virtual beings, miHoYo’s most consistently documented example is the virtual streamer yoyo Lumi (鹿鸣/Lumi). She was introduced in connection with the company’s Artificial Desktop (人工桌面) Windows live-wallpaper app and later brought to wider public attention through a Bilibili livestream debut on July 15, 2022 that Chinese tech and XR media described as real-time rendered performance with motion-capture-driven facial and body animation and interactive segments. Descriptions of the underlying stack often reference Unreal Engine and AI voice components, but detailed, independently verified technical specifications and training-data provenance have not been publicly disclosed.

Alongside Lumi’s public-facing role, credible Chinese reporting has described an internal AI effort commonly referred to as the “Inverse Entropy/Anti-Entropy” (逆熵) research team or department, with company leadership quoted as saying it was established in 2018 to apply deep learning to improve content production efficiency and enable experiences that traditional methods could not easily deliver. More recent mainstream tech reporting indicates miHoYo completed a formal registration for a model named “Glossa” in September 2024 under China’s large-model regulatory filing system, while public details about the model’s capabilities, deployment scope, and productization remain limited.

For external ecosystem links, NVIDIA’s January 2024 announcements around its ACE digital-character microservices named miHoYo/HoYoverse among developers adopting or exploring these speech-and-animation building blocks, including technologies such as Audio2Face and Riva. That level of disclosure does not by itself confirm that any specific HoYoverse title has shipped ACE-driven conversational NPCs or that players can currently access open-ended, real-time dialogue in released games.

Finally, leadership and spinout narratives should be stated narrowly. Cai Haoyu stepped down from miHoYo’s chairman and legal representative roles in September 2023 with Liu Wei taking over those positions, and major business media later reported that Cai founded a California-based AI game studio, Anuttacon, in 2024 and revealed Whispers from the Star in March 2025 as an AI-driven interactive narrative centered on real-time conversation with a character named Stella. Beyond the existence of the studio and its publicly shown materials, stronger claims about multimodal sensing, large-scale adoption, or quantified production gains are best treated as company descriptions or secondary interpretations unless backed by primary disclosures or detailed, independently corroborated technical documentation.

2026

2025