The archive · Consumer Apps · Product decision · 2011–2026
miHoYo's self-funded Genshin bet: ¥100k loan, no IPO, ¥78B year
Three SJTU roommates grew a ¥100k loan into a ¥78B-a-year game studio — one angel round ever, no IPO, no later funding.
miHoYo
What the business is
miHoYo is the Shanghai studio behind the anime-style Honkai series and Genshin Impact, making free-to-play gacha games monetized through in-game spending.
Starting capital：¥100,000 interest-free loan plus a rent-free 50-square-meter office for six months (2011); a ¥1M angel round at the end of 2011 that the founders say was the only external investment miHoYo ever took.
How it started
In 2011 three Shanghai Jiao Tong University students — Cai Haoyu, Liu Wei and Luo Yuhao — started miHoYo in their dormitory on a ¥100,000 interest-free loan from Shanghai's science-and-technology entrepreneurship center after failing to find angel money for anime-style games. They released their first self-made game, Fly Me 2 The Moon, in Sept 2011, and took a ¥1M angel round at the end of that year — the only external investment the company has ever taken.
What happened
The second game, Honkai Gakuen (2012), sold poorly at ¥6 while the founders paid themselves ¥4,000 a month. Honkai Gakuen 2 broke through in 2014 and pushed revenue past ¥100M that year; Honkai Impact 3rd (2016) raised the quality bar again. Genshin Impact launched worldwide on 2020-09-28 after about $100M of development, with founder Cai Haoyu saying the studio planned to spend about $200M a year keeping it updated (Gamepressure, 2021-02-23). By Q1 2022 its mobile revenue had passed $3B, hitting the first $1B in 171 days and averaging about $1B every six months (Sensor Tower via mobilegamer.biz, 2022-05-03).
How it ended up
Still private as of April 2026: main-business revenue of ¥27.34B and net profit of ¥16.145B in 2022, then about ¥78B of 2025 game revenue (+38% year on year) and about ¥40B of net profit, with about 70% of revenue from overseas and Genshin Impact's lifetime mobile revenue above $9B from 218M+ downloads (NetEase, 2026-04-23).
Background
miHoYo began in 2011 when three Shanghai Jiao Tong University students — Cai Haoyu, Liu Wei and Luo Yuhao — started building anime-style games in their dormitory on a ¥100,000 interest-free loan, after finding no angel investors for what was then a niche hobby in China. Their first self-made game appeared in Sept 2011, and a ¥1M angel round at the end of that year was the only external capital the company ever took.
The bet was that each success could self-fund a bigger version of the same taste: Honkai Gakuen 2 broke out in 2014, Honkai Impact 3rd raised the bar in 2016, and Genshin Impact — which cost about $100M to make, with plans to spend about $200M a year on updates — launched worldwide on 2020-09-28. It was the world's highest-grossing mobile game in its first month ($245M) and passed $3B of mobile revenue by Q1 2022, averaging about $1B every six months.
The company never listed and never raised again. Main-business revenue reached ¥27.34B with ¥16.145B of net profit in 2022; by 2025 game revenue was about ¥78B (+38% year on year) with net profit near ¥40B, about 70% from overseas, and Genshin Impact's lifetime mobile revenue had passed $9B from 218M+ downloads (NetEase, April 2026).
What has to be true
- China's market barely understood anime games in 2011, so no one would fund the idea — the founders learned early that players, not investors, had to pay the bills.
- The single ¥1M angel round (end of 2011) never repeated: each hit's profits became the next game's budget, so no outsider ever controlled the roadmap.
- Genshin's ~$100M development cost and ~$200M-a-year update budget only made sense for a company with no debt, no investors and years of accumulated cash.
- Genshin's global launch proved the bet: $245M in its first month and about $1B of mobile revenue every six months, largely from players outside China.
What can be applied
Refusing further money and listings let miHoYo put every profit into a bigger bet on the same niche; compounded taste made it rich enough to fund a ~$100M game alone.
Aftermath
As of April 2026 miHoYo remains founder-run and unlisted, with no financing rounds or debt reported. NetEase reported that its roughly ¥78B of 2025 game revenue made it more profitable than the whole A-share gaming sector, though it had slipped to fifth among global mobile game publishers as Tencent and NetEase pushed into its genre. On 2026-04-04 the three founders donated to a new Shanghai Jiao Tong University fund backing AI and frontier research, and the studio continues to reinvest profits into new games, a unified AI development platform and a Genshin-themed entertainment program.
Sources
- miHoYo founder Liu Wei: passion is how you survive the challenges
- Genshin Impact Shows the Development Costs of a Live-service Game
- Genshin Impact has topped $3bn on mobile, makes $1bn every six months
- Why miHoYo stays private while earning ¥78B a year
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