miHoYo’s games always have a strong appeal to many gamers. From Genshin Impact to Honkai: Star Rail, they all have a huge number of players and were successful immediately after launch. Besides the quality of content as well as the interesting style of play, the strength of the above blockbusters is that they are completely free and gamers can access them easily. That is also the main reason why the number of players of games from miHoYo always reaches millions. However, this will likely change in the future.
Accordingly, it all started when the publisher of Unity – the world’s leading game making software – recently made a pretty big change. Specifically, from January 2024, this platform will implement pricing for each download to charge game developers who use Unity as a platform. If the number of downloads exceeds a certain milestone, game developers will have to pay a maximum price of $0.2 for each subsequent download. Even this decision was made unilaterally by Unity, despite negative reactions and disagreements from game development studios.
The problem is that miHoYo’s famous games like Genshin Impact or Honkai: Star all use Unity to create. Therefore, the policy change from Unity has raised many concerns that in the future, Genshin Impact as well as Honkai: Star Rail will become paid games for users when the number of users is certain to be high. The large number of players will cause miHoYo a headache with the cost of paying for Unity from the beginning of next year.
However, there is also positive information that both of miHoYo’s games are built on a version of Unity specifically for the Chinese market in a previous deal worth $1 billion. Therefore, whether miHoYo will have to pay fees for next year or not is still a question mark. And even in that case, it is unlikely that this developer will charge a fee for Genshin Impact or Honkai: Star Rail.
