The redditor KeiraFaith drew attention to this. He recalled that the creation of Genshin Impact alone cost miHoYo $100 million. Officially, up to $200 million can be spent annually to support the game. Given that the game has been in operation since September 2020, Genshin Impact’s budget is now possibly approaching the $500 million mark.
The $200 million figure first appeared in an interview that the Chinese edition of 16p took from Cai Haoyu, the president of miHoYo, back in February 2021.
But there is a nuance. His statement about the budget of the game allows a wide field for interpretation. Haoyu stated the following:
“Many publications say that miHoYo spent $100 million on the development of Genshin Impact. The creation of the game really cost this amount. However, none of the publications mentioned that in the first year after the release, the company could spend another $ 200 million on the game. At the same time, the cost of development for us has grown significantly over the past three years.”
Speaking about the increase in the cost of development, he primarily has an increase in the team. At the beginning of last year, 700 of the company’s 2,400 employees worked on the game (in 2014, the entire team at miHoYo numbered around 1,200 people). But whether it includes marketing expenses in the budget, which today often briefly exceed the development, is an open question.
Most likely, yes.
According to Wikipedia, which KeiraFaith refers to, the current estimated budget of Genshin Impact is second only to Star Citizen and Cyberpunk 2077. The caveat is that most companies don’t share how much they spend on supporting and marketing their games. It is quite possible that the conditional Candy Crush Saga has a much larger budget.