Talking AI Game Startups with the Former *Genshin Impact* Lead Developer "Esuo": "This Time, I'm Going to Be the 'Playboy' of the Gaming World"
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👦🏻 Podcast Interview: Koji
🥷 Edited by: Crossing
🧑🎨 Layout: NCon
🚥 This week's guest on "Crossing" is Eshao.
In the gaming industry, Eshao once stood at the very pinnacle — as one of the earliest designers, he helped create Genshin Impact, a phenomenon that redefined the industry.
Recently, he chose to start his own company. Why leave when everyone thought he had already arrived in "Rome"? And why did he deliver such a sharp critique of today's Chinese gaming industry, calling it "a stagnant pool"?
This week on "Crossing," we welcome Eshao, formerly of miHoYo's Genshin Impact, who will take us back to the early days of those now-legendary projects. Through his eyes as a participant, we'll see how they used plastic stools costing a few yuan and an obsessive pursuit of perfection to leave an indelible mark on this era.
Now also an entrepreneur riding the AI wave, with a new product called Krene[1], he shares in the podcast why he's starting over, how AI can solve the "cross-domain collaboration" problem that plagues the gaming industry, and how he wants to use tools to help the next generation of young people create their own Genshin Impact.
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🎬 The video podcast will also be available on @Koji's WeChat Channels, Xiaohongshu, Bilibili, YouTube, and other platforms.
The full interview is quite long (25,013 characters), so here's a table of contents for reference:
🟢 01:08 Lightning Round: Age, alma mater, MBTI, zodiac sign, one-sentence pitch for current company and product, team size, pre-entrepreneurship experience.
🟢 02:08 Gaming's "Wow Moment" and the Power of Accumulation
Why I've been obsessed lately with an old game, Nobunaga's Ambition: Sphere of Influence, and how it reminds me of AI's singularity moment.
🟢 03:45 miHoYo Memories: Plastic Stools and the Miracle of Industrialization
When I first saw the Honkai Impact 3rd demo, my first reaction was: "Oh god, this project is doomed. Can it even survive three years?"
- Decoding "Otakus Save the World"
- Redefining the Company
- The Core Gameplay Breakthrough at Genshin Impact's Inception
🟢 16:56 Personal Transformation: From "Star Designer" to "Architect Behind the Scenes"
- Building a New Team
- The Truth About Industrialization
🟢 34:42 Paying for Love: A Philosophy of Business Models in Content Industries
🟢 45:10 The Entrepreneurial Choice: Now I Want to Be a "Playboy"
I once wanted to be a star producer in the spotlight. But now I want to be a "playboy" — I want to get involved in the creation of thousands of excellent games.
- Krene's Product Ambitions
- The Core Value of AI
🟢 01:06:05 Generational Insight: Why Does Gen Z Prefer "Single-Player"?
- The Future of Content Formats
🟢 01:16:25 Emoji Management and ISTP Self-Cultivation
- Emotional Retrospectives
- Tracing Gaming's Roots
🟢 01:26:36 The Ultimate Question: If I Had $3 Million to Invest, How Would I Deploy It?
👦🏻 Koji
Eshao once stood at the peak of an era. He helped create Genshin Impact, a phenomenon-level game, as one of its earliest designers and a crucial manager. Everyone thought Eshao had already arrived in Rome, yet he told us that the entire Chinese gaming industry feels like a stagnant pool — and that drove him to make a decision: to start a company, to solve problems. Eshao and his team just launched a new product called Krene. They're filled with ambition, wanting to use AI to help more people make their own games, even the next Genshin Impact. Hello Eshao, welcome to Crossing.
👨🏻 Eshao
Hello, everyone.
👦🏻 Koji
We have a tradition — a lightning round before we go deep.
Lightning Round: Age, Alma Mater, MBTI, Zodiac Sign, One-Sentence Pitch for Current Company and Product, Team Size, Pre-Entrepreneurship Experience
👦🏻 Koji
Let's start with your age, Eshao.
👨🏻 Eshao
👦🏻 Koji
Your alma mater.
👨🏻 Eshao
Peking University.
👦🏻 Koji
MBTI and zodiac sign.
👨🏻 Eshao
ISTP, Aquarius.
👦🏻 Koji
Give us one sentence about your current company and product.
👨🏻 Eshao
Our company is called Nello Technology. We're a group of people who love making games and are very good at it, but right now don't want to just make games. Our product is called Krene. In one sentence: we're architects of virtual worlds, able to take a single spark of inspiration and expand it into a complete world.
👦🏻 Koji
Current funding status?
👨🏻 Eshao
We just completed a Pre-A round.
👦🏻 Koji
Team size?
👨🏻 Eshao
Ten people total right now.
👦🏻 Koji
One sentence on what you were doing before starting up?
👨🏻 Eshao
Before this, we were all at different game companies.
👦🏻 Koji
Last lightning question: what's a game you've played recently that made you go "wow"?
Gaming's "Wow Moment" and the Power of Accumulation
Why I've been obsessed lately with an old game, Nobunaga's Ambition: Sphere of Influence, and how it reminds me of AI's singularity moment.
👨🏻 Eshao
The most wow-inducing game I've played recently is actually an old one — Nobunaga's Ambition: Sphere of Influence. The most stunning design in it is a feature called "Sphere of Influence." It lets your faction, once you hit a certain critical point in the late game, break through resource constraints and mass-produce troops — basically sweep the battlefield with overwhelming force. And this reminds me of AI's Aha Moment, that once you reach a critical threshold, it all accumulates and then erupts with unstoppable force.
👦🏻 Koji
Why old games all of a sudden?
👨🏻 Eshao
I've always liked old games, actually. Most people prefer playing new releases, but I have three reasons for going old. First, I've found that when new games launch, they often come with hype and舆论情绪 — sorry, let me rephrase that — they come with舆论-driven sentiment that can cloud your real judgment of the actual content.
Second, as a game designer, I want to absorb more classic game design, and these old games are the精华 — the distilled精华 — sorry, the essence that has survived the test of time. Life is short, so I try to only play the classics. And third, old games go on sale a lot, so I can grab them during discounts and burn through them quickly.
miHoYo Memories: Plastic Stools and the Miracle of Industrialization
When I first saw the Honkai Impact 3rd demo, my first reaction was: "Oh god, this project is doomed. Can it even survive three years?"
👦🏻 Koji
Let's go back to the beginning. When you first joined miHoYo, what was it like? What was the culture, the spirit, the vibe — with Liu Wei, Cai Haoyu, the whole team?
👨🏻 Eshao
miHoYo first reached out to me right when Honkai Impact 3rd was just being greenlit. At that time, I had just shipped my previous project, also a 3D action game. Commercially, that game was a huge success. But after finishing it, I actually felt lost about the 3D game genre.
👦🏻 Koji
Can you say what it was called?
👨🏻 Eshao
It was NetEase's Tianxia HD. The reason I felt lost was that while making it, I kept wrestling with two questions. First, how do we get the combat feel right — the hit feedback, the sense of satisfaction? And second, how do we monetize through numerical progression systems?
On the first question, I think we delivered a very satisfying answer — possibly even the best one in China at the time. But on the second question, I don't think I did nearly as well. In fact, I developed something of an aversion to the 3D action genre altogether. I told myself I probably never wanted to make another 3D action game for the rest of my life. But I was quickly proven wrong, because right around then, miHoYo came to me with a demo for Honkai Impact 3rd and asked me to join their team. The moment I saw that demo, I decided I had to join this company.
👦🏻 Koji
Was it because the demo made you think they were destined for greatness? That it was impressive?
👨🏻 Eshao
Quite the opposite. My first reaction when I saw that demo was: oh god, this is going to be a disaster. I even had this feeling that the project might not survive three years. Because what struck me about it was that its art quality, its standards for combat feel and handling, and the overall investment into the project — all of it was over-configured relative to the rest of the industry. Although I'm an ISTP, after seeing that demo, my S side kept telling me the ROI on this project was highly uncertain and I should think carefully. But then there was this very N voice saying that if I joined this project, it could become the most brag-worthy experience of my next several years. And if I missed it, I'd probably regret it forever.
👦🏻 Koji
That's quite a unique N-person intuition. But if you saw a demo and thought it might not succeed, how could it become your representative work?
👨🏻 Eshao
Even though I wasn't particularly optimistic about its market potential, I was still deeply moved by the temperament and passion the team conveyed. It made me believe that no matter what difficulties this project encountered, it would definitely ship. So my feeling at the time was: I'm not sure how commercially successful this game will ultimately be, but it will certainly become a milestone in Chinese gaming history.
👦🏻 Koji
So you decided to join miHoYo then. What was the team like at that time? What were Cai Ge and Dawei Ge's daily work and life like? The team atmosphere and culture — are there any stories or details you can share?
👨🏻 Eshao
On my very first day at miHoYo, I discovered the team was extremely small — only about 50 people. More than half were working on Houkai Gakuen 2, and the other half were on Honkai Impact 3rd. Cai Ge, Dawei Ge, and Luo Ye — miHoYo's three founders — came across more like senior classmates to me, since they were only a year or two older. The entire team was very young, so there was this very passionate, energetic atmosphere throughout.
👧🏻 Ronghui
Some sources say miHoYo's culture is "tech otakus save the world." How do you interpret that?
👨🏻 Eshao
Different people feel differently about that phrase. From my perspective, there's a very interesting little prop that conveys my understanding of this team's culture: the small plastic stool. On the Genshin Impact project, you'd often find stacks of these stools at our workstations, sometimes piled up behind us. They're those cheap plastic stools, about 3 RMB each. And they have a history.
One very special thing about miHoYo is that when we work on characters and combat feel, our designers, artists, animators, and VFX artists would sit behind the designer and say things like "move it one pixel to the left" or "one pixel to the right." This debugging process would often last a very long time, sometimes several hours.
At first everyone sat in their own office chairs, so when they came to debug things behind me, they could only stand and point. But sometimes the colleague next to me would be away, and an art lead would come over and drag that chair over to sit and debug with me. Unfortunately, the colleague sitting next to me at the time was one of miHoYo's founders, and he was a super I-person. When he came back and saw his seat taken by my art lead, he could only stare silently for a while, say nothing, then turn and leave. After this happened several times, we felt this wasn't great, so we came up with a solution: we just bought some small stools. And at first we bought those very cheap, colorful, high-saturation plastic ones.
👦🏻 Koji
The kind from rural banquet halls.
👨🏻 Eshao
Yes, exactly — those big-stall stools. We'd put them behind us. Later we discovered this prop worked incredibly well. Because once we had the stools, when art leads came to debug things, they'd just grab a stool and sit behind us for another several hours of debugging. I think one element of miHoYo's corporate culture is "pursuit of perfection," and I think this prop is the best manifestation of that pursuit-of-perfection culture. Even when we did brainstorming and gameplay discussions, we wouldn't book a conference room. Often we'd just pull the stools from behind us, arrange them in a circle, and start talking. It was this very agile, very deep mode of discussion and development.
👧🏻 Ronghui
What kind of reputation did miHoYo have in the industry at that time? What was your impression after joining? For example, what did you see on your first day?
👨🏻 Eshao
On my first day at miHoYo, the founders said something to me that left a very deep impression. They said: "miHoYo is not a game company, but an ACG company." At the time I was skeptical about this. I thought, didn't you recruit me to make games? What's the difference between a game company and an ACG company? But later I discovered that for the next full decade, I would keep revisiting the true weight of this statement.
👧🏻 Ronghui
ACG means A for animation, C for comic, and G for game.
👦🏻 Koji
Positioning yourself as an ACG company — how did this influence some key decisions later on?
👨🏻 Eshao
From my personal perspective, in the early days I might have focused more attention on game mechanics, including how to commercialize, how to design numerical progression systems — directions more aligned with traditional gaming. But one day I suddenly realized that miHoYo's founders didn't start this company in order to make a commercially successful game. They actually had a story they wanted to tell and a complete world they wanted to present to players from very early on. They simply chose games as the medium to tell this story to players, or to present this world for players to experience, and founded the company accordingly.
👧🏻 Ronghui
Can you still recall the circumstances when Genshin Impact was first greenlit? What was the general situation then, and how was the overall story outline created?
👨🏻 Eshao
When we first started the project, our thinking was very simple. We had all played a game called The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and we felt this game was an absolutely incredible existence in the entire gaming world. We genuinely wanted to make a game with that same sense of free exploration.
But in fact, for a long time after greenlighting, we could only do very foundational work, because we hadn't determined what our game's core would be. Honestly, Breath of the Wild is fundamentally a single-player game. If we wanted to turn something like that into a mobile game, or an action game, or a commercialized anime-style game — any of these would be extremely difficult. Because anyone who's actually made games knows that even if I wanted to copy Zelda, I wouldn't know how. Anyone who makes games has this feeling.
So although Genshin Impact later faced some controversy about copying Zelda, anyone who's made games would realize that copying Zelda is physically impossible. So for a long time we were in an exploratory phase, trying to find our game's core. Then suddenly one day we felt this wasn't working — we needed to determine our core quickly. I remember very clearly that several of us core decision-makers had a meeting in a small dark room to discuss this. We stewed for a long time, and finally decided to solve this through something called a "Wow Moment."
Wow Moment — a moment of genuine awe. We discussed: when we played Breath of the Wild, what was the Wow Moment it conveyed to us? Why did experiencing it make us want to create a game that conveyed similar feelings and experiences?
I still remember the scene very clearly. Cai Ge said: "I just think that in Zelda, you can set the grass on fire, and then it starts raining and puts out the fire you just lit. I find that moment incredibly stunning." After hearing this, the first scene that popped into my head wasn't Zelda at all — it was Pokémon. Because I was thinking of the water-fire-grass interaction pattern. So I thought, could we take an elemental system like Pokémon's as our core, and build an exploration and interaction game based on that framework?
👧🏻 Ronghui
Can you still recall what other popular games on the market at that time were conveying in terms of story core? From what I've read, one factor was the accumulated foundation from the previous Honkai series, and another was that you particularly wanted to create an ideal open world. What was your vision for this ideal open world? And in the market environment at that time, why did you believe users would pay for this ideal world?
👨🏻 Eshao
Actually, we didn't think too hard about whether an open world would automatically attract a massive player base. I think we were simply driven by the desire to bring the world in our minds to life. One memory that stuck with me: at Genshin Impact's first annual party, we booked out a hotel and celebrated New Year's together in the ballroom. Everyone wrote down a wish. Mine was for Genshin's DAU and revenue to hit a specific number. When I read it aloud, everyone burst out laughing — "Wow, you really dare to dream. How could we possibly reach numbers that high?" But I later realized that after launch, the actual figures made my wish look like spare change.
Personal Transformation: From "Star Designer" to "Architect Behind the Scenes"
👧🏻 Ronghui
Could you walk through how, at different stages, you gradually shaped the world of Genshin Impact? What were the critical inflection points? What discussions or trade-offs happened along the way?
👨🏻 Eshao
I'd divide Genshin Impact's development into roughly three stages — and coincidentally, my own growth tracked closely with all three. The first stage ran from project kickoff to the point where we locked in the game's core design. Once we settled on an elemental interaction system, that same night we hashed out an elemental interaction scheme built around anime-style female characters, and started executing on it the very next day. That was Stage One. When that phase wrapped, I knew with absolute certainty that we were building something extraordinary, and that I'd be devoting the next several years of my life to it.
Stage Two stretched from locking in the core design to releasing our first PV. We dropped Genshin Impact's first PV in mid-2019. By then, our entire Mondstadt — the first main city — was complete. And our core gameplay loops, including characters, monsters, combat, and level design, were fully formed.
This was Stage Two for the project. For me personally, this was probably when I most embodied the "creator" identity. About 60% of my core work was crafting the game's central content — characters, monsters, interesting mechanical puzzles, even some questlines, all of which our team was building at the time. The other 40% went toward building editors and tools for ourselves.
👦🏻 Koji
Tools and editors for the internal team?
👨🏻 Eshao
Right. Since we were the ones developing the game, we were also the ones hand-crafting countless details. And if you're hand-crafting, you naturally build yourself editors that make hand-crafting easier. That was my main focus at the time. Early in this phase, I was genuinely happy — here I was in this monumental project, able to personally craft and contribute to so many elements and details. But as this stage progressed, I gradually hit a wall, even felt some confusion. I wanted every corner of the game to meet my personal benchmark of perfect quality, so I poured endless hours into obsessing over minutiae.
But I didn't have much energy left for anything else — and this was exactly when new team members were joining at the fastest clip. I found I barely had capacity to guide these newcomers toward meaningful work. In action games and 3D development, we veterans had deep experience, had stumbled into pitfalls and made plenty of mistakes. I didn't want our new people to repeat those same errors. But I was so absorbed in the content itself that I couldn't spare the energy to help them sidestep these problems. It pained me that my experience wasn't effectively transferring to the new hires.
That was a genuinely difficult, confusing period for me. But right then, I noticed something surprisingly positive. As a content creator, you tend to have a big ego — you believe you're the best, that your work sets the standard, that you need to establish a benchmark for everyone else to follow.
Yet during this period when I failed to pass on our experience, many newcomers, working within our framework, developed their own methodologies — and produced work that genuinely stunned me. So I made a decision: I would shift from my previous identity, what felt like a "star designer" in the spotlight, to an "architect" working behind the scenes. This was the change I wanted to make toward the end of Stage Two.
👦🏻 Koji
What specifically did you do to make that transition?
👨🏻 Eshao
What I did was fairly straightforward — I talked to our founders. I'm deeply grateful to miHoYo's founders; they gave me tremendous support during this confusing period. After I shared my thoughts, they provided ample resources to let me put my ideas into practice. They even let me establish an entirely new organization to pursue these goals.
👦🏻 Koji
What organization?
👨🏻 Eshao
An internal group we called TD.
👦🏻 Koji
What does that stand for?
👨🏻 Eshao
Technical Designer.
👦🏻 Koji
Technical Designer — is that a term you coined, or something common in the industry?
👨🏻 Eshao
Overseas 3A teams have had Technical Designer roles before. But for our team at the time, we only borrowed the name. In practice, much of what we did differed significantly from the traditional Technical Designer role — we were figuring out this business direction as we went.
👦🏻 Koji
What was the Technical Designer organization trying to achieve?
👨🏻 Eshao
We functioned something like special forces within the larger team. With a project as massive as Genshin Impact, the team scale was enormous, and we often needed to serve as pathfinders — laying down foundational frameworks for the newcomers coming in behind us.
👧🏻 Ronghui
You just covered Stage Two. What about Stage Three?
👨🏻 Eshao
Stage Three was one that both Genshin Impact and I entered together. By then, Genshin faced several enormous challenges: we needed to launch across multiple platforms — mobile, console, PC. For mobile, that meant both Android and iOS. And we needed to support 16 languages from day one, since we were building a global game from the start. But the biggest challenge was our decision to release a new version every six weeks after launch, with each version requiring a full year of internal development.
It's hard to overstate how unprecedented this was — even globally, no one had attempted anything like it. So I took this challenge as my opportunity to put my "architect behind the scenes" philosophy into practice. Our new team's entire purpose was solving these industry-level problems that had virtually no precedent.
👧🏻 Ronghui
It sounds like your role shifted dramatically — from a specialist in a relatively vertical domain to someone thinking about overall strategy. You mentioned full-platform launch — if I'm not mistaken, no game had done this before, right?
👨🏻 Eshao
Almost no game had achieved this standard. And our "full-platform" wasn't just launching everywhere — we even had fully unified player data across all platforms. That was genuinely a global first. For us, it started with two platforms: mobile and PC. Then we realized: if we're building to so-called 3A standards, and 3A games live most on console, why stop at mobile and PC? That was our thinking.
👧🏻 Ronghui
So it was a step-by-step deduction?
👨🏻 Eshao
Perhaps. I've noticed a major difference between miHoYo and other companies: we don't treat ROI as the paramount factor in decision-making. We believed that if we were going to do full-platform, we should commit to it from day one. We'd already built up so much technical capability, and we're fundamentally an ACG company — so we should hold ourselves to that full-platform standard.
👧🏻 Ronghui
Content companies that succeed really do need that kind of mindset sometimes.
👦🏻 Koji
We rarely hear these early Genshin Impact stories. I think what we're recording here is going to be quite valuable.
👧🏻 Ronghui
And you mentioned the investment was roughly estimated at $100 million — it's even on Wikipedia: "The game uses the Unity engine, with a development and marketing budget of approximately $100 million, making it one of the most expensive video games ever developed." Was there internal anxiety about this at the time?
👨🏻 Eshao
When I first joined miHoYo, I honestly thought the company might collapse within three years, because Honkai Impact 3rd was burning through cash like crazy, around 2012–2013. But then I realized something: Honkai Gakuen 2 was far more profitable than I'd imagined. The games industry operates on fundamentally different logic from most other sectors. In internet, for instance, people think in terms of major growth waves — mobile phones in the past, AI perhaps this year. Once mobile traffic红利 [red ocean; market saturation] reaches its limit, it's rare for startup teams to suddenly produce a breakout success.
But gaming is different. Even if you look at the biggest game companies, their rise to prominence is actually pretty evenly distributed. They didn't all suddenly emerge when mobile took off. In fact, you'll find that miHoYo released Honkai Impact 3rd in 2016, while Genshin Impact didn't launch until 2020. Hypergryph, the studio behind Arknights, only went live in 2019. And more recently, whether it's Reverse: 1999 or Century Games, or even the now-famous Black Myth: Wukong — these breakout hits only appeared in 2022, 2023, 2024.
This is completely different from traditional industry trends. I realized that content industries are entirely about the content itself. As long as you have one hit product that resonates with users or players, it can generate a massive concentration effect at the top.
Ronghui
Right, but I think this kind of resonance with content really has to connect with user psychology. That "Pay for Love" concept of yours — it fits extremely well with where users are at mentally and emotionally right now. Because people like us, when we were younger, it was hard to pay for love.
Eshao
Everyone's like that to some degree. I used to have a small habit — I liked digging into the early origin stories of game company founding teams, or some internal history. Take Hypergryph and Sunborn, for example. Their core members, before making games, came from doujin circles — groups that specialized in fan creations and original IP projects. Hypergryph released its first product in 2019. The first month, it was rumored to have done 600 million RMB in revenue, 6 million DAU — that's data the outside world might know.
Koji
A miraculous result.
Eshao
Right, but this kind of thing happens again and again in gaming. And I can basically say this: these things will keep happening in the coming years. So here's the question — for us as a team wanting to work on game productivity tools, this state of the gaming industry is actually the biggest precondition for what we're building. Because we believe that in a few years, there will be new miHoYos emerging. This is inevitable. And when they appear, what methods will they use to develop games? What philosophies will they use? That's the revolution we can define today, or iterate on today.
Koji
There's a popular book recently called Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, written by two OpenAI researchers. In your view, could Genshin Impact's greatness today have been planned? Or can any historically great game — past or future — be planned?
Eshao
I think this is a very interesting question, because I've found that the content creation industry, or the gaming industry, differs from other industries in one major way: gaming doesn't seem to be plannable. Take Caohejing, for example. Over the past decade or so, it's produced many valuable new top-tier game companies. But when these companies started their first projects, they weren't thinking about how many users, what metrics, what revenue, or what scale of game to make.
They were saying, I used to be a fan artist, or I wrote fanfiction, or I made game mods. There was one founder who was actually the creator of a美少女 [pretty girl] mod patch for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. You'll find that over the past decade or so in our gaming industry, all these top-tier game companies had founders with backgrounds like this.
Koji
So everyone's starting point wasn't "I want to make a great game" — it was "I want to make something I deeply love." That's quite interesting, because we're recording this podcast right here at the AI Hacker House in Caohejing. Within roughly 300–500 meters walking distance are the headquarters of miHoYo, Lilith Games, Moonton, plus Hypergryph and Sunborn nearby. So this area has birthed so many remarkable games, but walking down the street you'd never feel it — it just seems like an ordinary part of Shanghai. Still, returning to your earlier point: greatness can't be planned, especially in gaming. So today, when we see a game founder say "I want to make an amazing game," is the only way to judge whether they'll succeed to look at whether they have enough passion, original intention, and desire?
Eshao
I find the gaming industry to be truly unique. In this industry, most star company founders on day one weren't thinking about making some great game, or how many users, or how much commercial revenue. They just wanted to transform the inspiration and emotional investment from their previous fan creations into an original world, presented to their audience or players. They just wanted to tell their story, or present their expression, their scene, their image. So you'll find that in Caohejing, these top companies' first products, their first projects, were often things that seemed extremely simple on day one — even baffling to many gaming industry analysts.
Pay for Love: The Business Model Philosophy of Content Industries
Ronghui
You just mentioned the business model and the 42-day update cycle — what drove those decisions?
Eshao
The 6-week update cycle is relatively easy to understand, because whether it was Honkai Gakuen 2 or Honkai Impact 3rd, we updated on this schedule. And we found that in gaming, a six-week update cycle probably best matches player expectations — not so long that players lose freshness, not so short that updates feel too frequent. Genshin Impact was special because its business model actually carried over from Honkai Impact 3rd and Honkai Gakuen 2. I think miHoYo's business model is also quite interesting, because before Honkai Gakuen 2, miHoYo had done several projects that didn't use today's business model.
It was after experiencing those two projects that the founders decided they wanted to try a new business model, to deliver a new user experience. And after we tried that new business model, Honkai Gakuen 2 suddenly blew up. So given that result, this new business model became our tradition, and our future projects all expanded from this model.
Ronghui
Did you later analyze why? What user psychology did it fit? My understanding is what you call "generating power for love, paying for love."
Eshao
This is the answer to what the founder told me on my first day at miHoYo: "We're an ACG company, not a game company." Because I found that in this kind of content-driven game, when we experience and spend, we're not consuming numbers, or competition, or progression systems — we're consuming the content of the world itself. Why do Honkai Impact 3rd and Genshin Impact use a character-based consumption model? Because our characters' stories, their backgrounds, the love and hate between characters — this content itself is our world's most precious asset, and the emotion we most want to convey to players. So since the most core and crucial elements of our entire game are our characters and the stories that happen to them, our business model should naturally revolve around these characters. That's why all our projects ended up designed this way.
Ronghui
And regarding the "42-day iron rule" you mentioned — I want to add a question. You said normally this kind of update takes a game company a year, but you needed to do it in 42 days. I think the aspiration is beautiful, but the execution is difficult. Like Crossing doing weekly updates — after sticking with it, we really feel it was the right decision, but it was also an exhausting process. What internal mechanisms or work culture did you develop to make it achievable?
Eshao
This is hard and easy at the same time. It's easy because, since we need to update every 42 days but one update takes a year to make, the best solution is having perhaps a dozen teams in rotation. One team works for a year, then 42 days later the next team starts up. This way, every 42 days a team can land and present their content.
What we make is something coupled, a complete world. The content from our different teams all lands and presents in the same world as the other teams. So with so many teams creating things, how do you fuse them together, maintain consistency, make them seamlessly connect in the same world? No one in the industry had tried this before, or at least not at this intensity. That's why we established these new teams and departments to do this work for our teams.
Koji
Was everyone on board at the time?
Eshao
At the time, it wasn't really about support or not — everyone just knew it was an objective problem. If we were going to launch and meet this 42-day release cadence, we had to solve it. So when facing this problem, "solve it" was the only option.
Koji
So there was consensus, but the execution was still very difficult. And even now, not many teams have pulled this off, right?
Eshao
To this day, I don't think many teams have achieved this at scale.
Koji
So it requires not just team culture, but also industrialized technical support and methodological support.
Eshao
We found that if we wanted a dozen teams to each build their own worlds and then stitch them together into one coherent world, the hardest part was this: we needed to unleash every individual's creative initiative — because each version's content demanded extremely high quality, and the person in charge of each version absolutely had to bring their own creative drive to it — while simultaneously solving the coupling between different teams, and even between different people on the same team.
You'll notice that in content creation, you have different roles, different positions, and they generate dependencies with each other. And these human-to-human dependencies are actually the biggest obstacle to each person's creative expression. So the principle behind our work at the time was to make sure every person had a decoupled creative relationship with every other person — they weren't constrained by technology or excessive project management.
👧🏻 Ronghui
Are there specific company mechanisms for this? Because I feel like a lot of companies might say this kind of thing, but actually doing it and keeping actions consistent — that requires mechanisms.
👨🏻 Eshao
If we're talking about "mechanisms," I think compared to mechanisms, we had some technologies or frameworks that better described our situation at the time. Because I found that mechanisms often require people to manage and maintain them. Everyone says, we set an SOP or a standard for the team, everyone should work in a certain way. I found that this kind of creative mode actually weakens initiative and increases coupling between different people. But the direction we ended up taking was solving this through technology. We provided sandboxes, breaking our game down into small sandboxes. When each person was creating, they didn't need to worry about how to couple with others — they first built what they wanted to express inside their own sandbox. Each person might be making their own little game, a mini game.
And the technical framework we provided at the time was this: after each person finished a sandbox, through a very proprietary, almost magical, enchanted pipeline we built, we could串联 and blend these sandboxes made by different people in a very special way. Eventually, my sandbox and his sandbox could become a complete box-garden level, or even a complete country, a complete region, a complete world. This was how we accomplished it.
👧🏻 Ronghui
Understood. I very much agree, because creativity is something that's hard to achieve through mechanisms, but without mechanisms, creativity is hard to plan.
👨🏻 Eshao
Yes, this point I find quite interesting. Probably not just at miHoYo, but at other companies, and even when talking with experts in other industries, this problem exists in every company, every industry. The more excellent, the more creatively expressive content creators are, the more resistance they feel toward SOPs, toward rules and frameworks. Because at the end of the day, SOPs and all kinds of rules and frameworks are obstacles that limit our creation.
👦🏻 Koji
So actually in many other industries, even film, the director has final say. In music, novels, it's even more the artist's own creation. So games are instead this complex modern content industry where you need a pile of creators — dozens or even hundreds of people — working together in unison. So you actually built some mechanisms to accomplish this.
👨🏻 Eshao
Yes.
👦🏻 Koji
Right at this point, could you expand on introducing the product you're working on now?
👨🏻 Eshao
What we're building is a creation platform centered on the concept of inspiration cards. Through each card, you can crystallize a world view or a character design. On a card, you can crystallize a character profile, or present a character biography. We can crystallize a plot segment, or a sect's setting, or go as granular as a certain accessory on a character's body, a certain pendant, a detail on a piece of clothing, even a texture — it can all be presented through a card. If we're based on this kind of inspiration creation process through inspiration cards, then whether making games, films, TV series, or even comics — and recently we've had some tabletop RPG authors who want to make TRPG scripts — they can all use this approach to create their complete world.
The Entrepreneur's Choice: Now I Want to Be a "Playboy"
I once wanted to be a star producer in the spotlight, but now I want to be a "playboy" — I want to participate in the creation of thousands of excellent games.
👧🏻 Ronghui
I actually want to ask: why didn't you choose to make another game, but instead chose to make tools?
👨🏻 Eshao
A lot of people have asked this.
👦🏻 Koji
Actually this is a Crossing that many people face. I recently re-read Creativity, Inc., the book by Pixar's founder about Pixar's growth. Some passages left a very deep impression. He said when Steve Jobs bought their company, what he valued was that they could produce the most powerful graphics computer at the time. Steve Jobs bought it with a vengeful mindset — he'd just been ousted from Apple and wanted to build a more powerful computer to prove himself. So for Pixar's first three years, they were selling their powerful computer, $50,000 a unit. They sold it for three years and sold, if I recall, either 20 or 80 units. Steve Jobs subsidized it every quarter, until even Steve Jobs couldn't afford to subsidize anymore. Then they took painful stock and in year three said: "Alright, let's stop selling computers. Instead of letting others use our powerful computer to make the next generation of animation, why don't we just make animation ourselves?" And at the time, the team happened to have a genius producer who, through some twists of fate, had been cast out by The Walt Disney Company and joined them, also as a co-founder. So they pivoted to making their first animated film, which exploded globally — Toy Story.
So actually many people have this confusion: I hold technology in my hands, technology that can produce the next big hit. Do I make a tool and serve other content teams? Or do I just turn this technology into my own secret recipe and make a hit myself? I wonder if you also faced a similar choice, which is why you fell silent for so long when Ronghui asked just now.
👨🏻 Eshao
Because I feel this question, for me, might be a transformation of my mindset over the past few decades. Or rather, I can first talk about why I decided I wanted to make games. Actually, my decision to make games was a split-second decision. In my junior year of college, I played a few games. I quite liked playing games in college, but at that time I hadn't decided I wanted to make games in the future. The two games I played then, one was called Dragon Nest, that Korean MMOACT at the time, and the other was called The Elder Scrolls. I was completely absorbed in both of these games — I remember even when I was working for my advisor in the lab, there might be a meeting going on above and I'd be playing games below.
Especially, these two games gave me a huge jolt at the time. Because I was studying from 2008 to 2010, which was probably the lowest point for the entire domestic Chinese games industry from a content ecosystem perspective. Because overseas then, including in Europe, America, Japan, and Korea, their entire games ecosystem was extremely developed. They already had open world games like GTA, like The Witcher 3, like Dragon Nest, like The Elder Scrolls.
At that time, because I also liked playing games, I would make MODs for these games. I was making MODs while thinking, when will our own domestic industry be able to make a game like this? But back then I only dared to think about it. Then I examined myself and found I had another trait: I especially hoped that what I made could be used by everyone, that what I made would be loved by many users, and that it could become something they felt spiritually or emotionally attached to. Their feedback would give me tremendous energy. This trait drove me — well, why don't I just make games myself? I'll make action games, I'll make 3D games, I'll make open world games.
This was the biggest turning point that drove me to join the games industry at the time. But something unexpected about this was, I had thought that our domestic industry being able to make its own open world game was probably a goal that wouldn't be reached until I was in my forties or fifties, because I felt the road would be extremely long. But I didn't expect that within less than ten years after graduating, I accomplished the goal I had in college. This feeling gave me something like the Chinese national soccer team qualifying for the World Cup level of transformation.
But instead, throughout my entire career in games, I actually underwent another major transformation, which also connects to what I mentioned earlier about my experience on Genshin Impact. That is, at the beginning, I hoped to be that creator in the spotlight, hoped that what I made could be loved by others. But later, I found that these colleagues around me, or some very talented designers I knew, their ideas were incredibly interesting. I found that this world was actually far more colorful than I had imagined — it wasn't that only what I wanted to make was the most interesting, but what others made was also extremely interesting to me. I even felt that the very act of being able to consume what others made gave me tremendous passion and drive.
And then my thinking underwent a transformation. I no longer fixated on making content myself, but rather on helping these colleagues, classmates, or friends express the content they wanted to make, to make their things real. And I would just provide something like a tool or creation platform to help them. This form could satisfy both my "after making something, others love using it" and my "being able to let others express their ideas" original intentions. So I found that under this transformation, making content no longer seemed to be my own impulse.
👦🏻 Koji
Understood, this becomes both self-serving and altruistic — you discovered that making a content tool can achieve the joy of both.
👧🏻 Ronghui
But was this transformation easy? I feel like this is quite different, you could even say it's a kind of personal metamorphosis.
👨🏻 Eshao
I found that in that kind of environment, I'm actually quite grateful for my work experience. In that kind of environment, this transformation wasn't as hard as imagined.
👧🏻 Ronghui
Or rather, the tool you're making now is your content.
👨🏻 Eshao
Yes.
👦🏻 Koji
Actually, Justin was also on our podcast — Justin, co-founder of Moonton. He talked about how he's still in the middle of another entrepreneurial journey, having started a new company called Pilot, and he's continuing to make games. I think the act of making games, or making content in general, gives a lot of people that "the journey is the reward" feeling. So whether it's Eshao, or Justin, or our other friends in the gaming industry, I've noticed that everyone really does feel this way about creation — whether you're creating a game or a tool, it feels like a necessary condition. You have to derive enormous joy from it, or there's no way you'll make something different from everyone else, something better, something more people will love.
👨🏻 Eshao
For me, there's another big driver. Looking back at my creative history, I realize I actually prefer what I'd call "semi-commissioned" content. It's hard to describe. A lot of the time, for example, I was making anime-style games at miHoYo, but I probably wasn't that much of an anime person to begin with. Or rather, I didn't start out with anime as a life goal.
👦🏻 Koji
So you got a semi-commissioned project, started learning about anime, and discovered there was a lot of fun in it.
👨🏻 Eshao
Rather, it was under someone else's creative drive that I myself came into contact with that genre.
👦🏻 Koji
What's the difference between semi-commissioned and fully commissioned?
👨🏻 Eshao
Fully commissioned — it comes entirely from my own impulse to create content. Semi-commissioned, it's more like I discover "oh, what someone else is doing seems pretty interesting, I want to try that too," and I get to participate in their creative process. I don't know if other content creators feel this way, but sometimes today I'll watch an amazing film or play an incredible game, and I'll feel a little jealous, a little disappointed.
👧🏻 Ronghui
Why?
👨🏻 Eshao
Like, "why am I not on that team." Maybe that does sound a bit scummy, but I genuinely feel that way about all excellent content — I want to get involved, I want to participate.
👧🏻 Ronghui
Then you really are suited to making tools, so you can be involved in everything.
👨🏻 Eshao
With this kind of maybe "scummy" personality, if I want to satisfy this nature of mine, the most likely path is providing a more common tool or platform for everyone to create with — that becomes my creative mode. You'll find that someday in the future, all that best content will have my DNA in it, some imprint that we've left on it.
👦🏻 Koji
All "made with Krene." Wow, that's powerful. I think this "player" metaphor is really interesting — once you start making tools, you can participate in hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of games like a player. Could you tell everyone about Krene, this product? What are you planning to do with it? How far along are you? How many users do you have? Give us an introduction.
👨🏻 Eshao
Our product is actually in an early closed beta stage right now. At this stage, we're working with a lot of game developers and creators in a co-creation model — on one hand we're helping them build their products, and on the other hand their feedback gives us a lot of input on our product. Especially, I've noticed something very interesting about content creators: not only are they using our product to tell their stories, but in the process of communicating and collaborating with them, we discover that they themselves are very interesting stories — their own life experiences are fascinating stories.
So in this co-creation process, we're quickly iterating based on everyone's ideas and philosophies. And along the way, we're also discovering many interesting sub-genres or themes that we ourselves had no awareness of before. I might never have heard of them, but because some creator told me about them, I learned that this niche but genuinely interesting genre exists. So our product will iterate these features very rapidly going forward.
👦🏻 Koji
So you're still in closed beta now, and as users have been using Krene, they've given you a lot of feedback that exceeded your initial expectations.
👨🏻 Eshao
So our product is also in a period of rapid iteration. If anyone is interested in our product, wants to use it, or wants to join our team, welcome to reach out.
👦🏻 Koji
Great. I think participating in a product's closed beta is the most interesting thing. Welcome everyone who wants to beta test Krene to contact Eshao — we'll put their team's contact info in the show notes and comments. I actually tried Krene out a bit myself, but since I'm not a game creator, nor a creator in anime, ACG, or anything like that, my experience using it is definitely very different from a real creator's. I only had one feeling: I gave a random prompt, and Krene gave me thousands of images, maybe even two or three thousand, with the infinite canvas spreading incredibly far. What's the design philosophy there? Why, for a simple prompt, do you throw so much back at me?
👨🏻 Eshao
Okay, this question is a little tricky because we've actually made a major pivot with our product — we've removed that feature. Not completely removed, but it's definitely changed significantly from its previous form.
👦🏻 Koji
So you actually still had a lot of iteration happening when you first launched, and the version I used was one of your experiments.
👨🏻 Eshao
Yes.
👦🏻 Koji
Your product — you just mentioned serving the future miHoYos, the future Hypergryphs. Since launch, what have you observed about how these future creators are using your product?
👨🏻 Eshao
Even though we're in closed beta, our user profile is already very interesting. Among our users today, there are a large number of art creators, fanfiction writers, and pattern designers. Their usage habits are subtly different from what we initially imagined. For example, we've found that many users, when making a setting, are very particular about a concept called "ensemble cast." They want, say, when creating a sect or a faction, for different characters within that sect or faction to share the same uniform, patterns, or decorative motifs — to have this common visual identity. But they also want even characters from the same sect or faction to have subtle differences in clothing and appearance, creating differentiated memory points. This is what we call "ensemble cast" design.
👦🏻 Koji
So is your product for game makers? Because I understood that was the initial focus, but it sounds like you're not excluding other creators either.
👨🏻 Eshao
Yes, actually we've had many users recently who aren't from the game industry at all — they might be animation creators, even film industry creators, and lately we've had a lot of short drama users very interested in our product too.
👦🏻 Koji
What are you thinking going forward? Will you serve all these creators? Or will you still stay vertically focused on game creators?
👨🏻 Eshao
This is an interesting question. I have a pretty bold prediction: at some point in the future, the industry probably won't distinguish between so-called film and games anymore. And that mode where users can personally immerse themselves in a world and interact with it — that might be the ultimate form of our entire content field. Today we say we can make films, shoot movies, make games, but likely someday in the future, film and games will be indistinguishable. So eventually our users will all become the same group of people — what we call "interactive content."
👦🏻 Koji
I actually believe this too — I think film and games will merge in some sense, that they'll all be some form of immersive, interactive, high-quality multimodal content, you could define it that way. But no one knows when this future will arrive. And I'm thinking of another problem: we're making creator tools after all, but because this content hasn't been produced yet, the creators for this content don't exist yet either, so their usage habits and needs don't exist yet either. So when you're making products for them, isn't this very abstract? How do you approach this?
👨🏻 Eshao
I don't think this is actually that abstract or disconnected from reality. The reason is, although that kind of interactive form I just mentioned may not fully materialize in film or the video industry that quickly, what we can see today in so-called interactive short dramas or interactive films — they're actually closer to today's games in terms of interaction model. So often you'll find that as long as we approach this content in the way we make games today, then when these creators make the kind of works I just described in the future, they'll also work in this way, with these workflows and habits.
👧🏻 Ronghui
What role do you think AI plays in this? Beyond the cost reduction and efficiency gains that people are already somewhat familiar with, what role can generative AI play?
👨🏻 Eshao
I think cost reduction and efficiency gains, or AI's impact on that front, may be the smallest factor in the entire field. Because the challenges or barriers in game development actually come from three dimensions. One is what we call professional technical difficulty — like knowing how to draw, model, or code, which is a common challenge.
The second challenge might be team scale. Like, if I want to make a game today, I might need a team of 1000 or even several thousand people — that's a scale challenge. And the third challenge, which I think is most easily overlooked, is what we call "cross-domain collaboration." Only in the game industry do you have this requirement that you must have art, programming, and design to make a game. But programmers tend to come from engineering or science backgrounds, while artists come from more art-oriented, humanities backgrounds — you'll find these people often "don't click," their creative backgrounds or experiences have very little overlap.
So what I've observed is that often, when a game team wants to create their content, the biggest challenge isn't funding or manpower constraints per se — it's bringing together two very different groups like artists and programmers. That coordination is the real hurdle. And I think the biggest turning point AI offers is that I may not need to assemble a complete team with art, programming, and design from day one. I can start with my own creative expression — as we discussed earlier, many game creators come from fanfiction writers, fan artists, or modders.
In the past, these founders working on their creative projects had to recruit. Say I started as a fan artist; I'd need to find programmers to realize my vision. Today, if I'm a fan artist or just a fanfiction writer wanting to bring my game or my world to life, I probably don't need to find artists or programmers on day one. I can use AI to fill those gaps. Even if that capability isn't at a fully shippable, release-ready quality in the first phase, it's a start.
Generational Insight: Why Does Gen Z Prefer "Single-Player"?
👧🏻 Ronghui
I'm actually quite curious — when you provide tools for these interactive content creators, it's based on user demand. For these young people who've grown up alongside AI, what different expectations might they have for games or other content going forward? For example, today when we watch a movie, a movie is just a movie. I remember there was that Black Mirror episode, or maybe a film, where you could choose the ending. Have you observed any major shifts in content based on changing user expectations?
👨🏻 Eshao
We actually looked at this question before, and I think there's a change that's very subtle but simultaneously very impactful for the entire content industry. And this change likely aligns with a technological trend that's been playing out over 20 or even 30 years. Because what we find is — I'm a post-90s kid, and I experienced a period where there was no such thing as a personal computer when I was young. I only encountered computers after starting elementary school. And on day one, we didn't have such developed internet either. It wasn't until maybe middle school or even high school that we got broadband and an online environment.
So our cohort encountered the world by first having our own small world around us, then accessing a broader, larger world. So people like me, or those even older, share this trait of particularly loving so-called MMOs — "brothers, come chop with me," I want to be a city lord, I want to be a guild leader, leading a massive guild to fight another guild. The more people, the livelier, the better.
But I've found that for post-95s, even post-00s and post-10s, their way of encountering the world is completely reversed. Because they accessed the internet, even mobile internet, at a very young age. So for post-00s and post-10s, in their growth process, they first encountered a massive virtual world. They could see every corner of this world — what's happening in the United States today, what's happening in Japan, even what's happening on another planet, they can all see it.
But precisely this density of information灌输 actually creates what we call "information panic" for post-00s and post-10s users. Because they're exposed to too much information, you find that these users instead focus more intensely on very vertical, very niche tracks.
There are a few very typical side examples of this. For instance, we find that people our age might prefer MMOs or multiplayer online competitive games — those with main cities, the livelier the better. But post-00s and post-10s actually prefer single-player games more. This trend actually runs counter to gaming's overall development. Many game companies in the past were dominated by MMO formats. But after 2010, after mobile internet emerged, you find many second-gen game companies, especially those in Caohejing, presenting their games with single-player as the core modality. Technically this makes no sense — why, with increasingly developed networks, are the games we play becoming more single-player?
Another interesting signal: platforms like Douyin and Xiaohongshu are more about information distribution, or information convergence. And this product format is actually more popular with users today. Because most users find that they don't actually want to see the world's flashy, colorful side — they just want to find their small topic of interest, find their kindred spirits, find fellow enthusiasts who share the same resonance. I think a major shift based on this format is that the IPs users consume today will likely become increasingly niche.
For example, in 2008 and 2009 — this left a deep impression on me because I was in university then, studying computer science, basically among the earliest in my peer group to encounter the concept of ACG culture. But I wasn't that much of an otaku myself. There was an interesting phenomenon in the dorm next to mine — it was an extremely ACG-concentrated room. All four guys had美少女 printed on their blankets,美少女 on their pillows,美少女 calendars hanging on their walls.
👦🏻 Koji
Peking University computer science dorm rooms filled with beautiful anime girls. What are they doing now?
👨🏻 Eshao
Many of them are also in games now. What's most interesting is that I later learned the dakimakura they hugged back then was a character from something called the Touhou Project universe. Of course now we're devoted Touhou Project fans, but at the time I simply couldn't understand why guys would like this kind of thing. And in 2009, even around 2010, ACG was extremely niche. We had a term for it then: "subculture." From 2008, 2009, even into the 2010s, we treated ACG as subculture.
For example, when I worked in Hangzhou, because of Baima Lake, students would often wear cosplay to comic conventions. I found that many people felt shame going to these events — they wouldn't dare wear wigs and cosplay outfits on the subway, walking around the streets. But today, ACG games have become a major gaming category, and the entire ACG anime or ACG-based content format has become mainstream culture. When I say ACG today, people can no longer equate it with subculture — it's become mainstream. And today, you instead find that things like Cthulhu, the SCP Foundation, even Backrooms — these even more niche cultural symbols are slowly rising. ACG isn't niche enough anymore; we're pursuing even more niche cultural symbols, entering a new phase.
👦🏻 Koji
Actually, what shocked me most in our last conversation was when you told me that story about being at miHoYo and telling Brother Wei you were very disappointed because Genshin Impact had been out for nearly five years, yet you felt China's game industry was a stagnant pool. Could you talk about why you felt it was stagnant?
👨🏻 Eshao
I look back at the moment we released Genshin Impact's first PV. That year was special — that year's Spring Festival happened to be when The Wandering Earth's first film released. I was working on Genshin Impact while going to see that movie, and afterward I was incredibly moved. First, I felt China's film industry was about to take off, that there would definitely be many more films like The Wandering Earth. And at that time, I was also full of expectations for Genshin Impact — I felt I was doing something equally great, that after our game launched, China's game industry would also have countless great teams and products like ours.
But after Genshin Impact launched — actually, if we count from project initiation to today it's been 8 years, and 5 full years since launch — when I looked at other teams in the industry after finishing Genshin Impact, I found that most game teams had instead fallen into a strange loop, or been dragged into a trap. They thought: because Genshin Impact has so many people, our team needs that many people too; because Genshin Impact uses this engine, these tools, this editor, we need to use the same engine, build the same kind of editor.
👦🏻 Koji
You feel they were imitating without learning the essence. What was the essence?
👨🏻 Eshao
Our team's work back then wasn't truly what you'd call an industrial pipeline or editor. When we did this, the metric wasn't about making something with amazing interactivity or flashy interfaces. On the contrary, our requirement for this system was that every team member could settle in, enter flow state, and nurture what might start as just a tiny spark in their heart into a towering tree. But I found everyone was doing the opposite — when people talked about industrialization, pipelines, editors, tools, they were more concerned with how to erode every creator's expressive nature.
👦🏻 Koji
Extinguishing those little sparks of inspiration.
👨🏻 Eshao
Exactly. So this imitation process ended up doing the exact opposite of our original essence and intent.
👦🏻 Koji
Does observing this phenomenon relate to your current entrepreneurship with Krene? Did it inspire or influence what product you're building now, or how you're building it?
👨🏻 Eshao
This was my biggest motivation for starting a company. I realized that if a large team or a massive organization approaches this in exactly the wrong way, more likely extinguishing creators' inspiration, then I might as well go find those very small creators today — they might just be a small team, even just one person, maybe still in school, but they might have that same thought I had in university: "I think Chinese games are amazing today, I think Genshin Impact is amazing, I think ACG games are amazing." But then they'll wonder: can I make a future game like Genshin Impact? Can I realize my ideas, my world, to that degree? I'd rather find these users and help them achieve their goals — because they might become the future miHoYo, or the future Hypergryph.
Sticker Pack Management and the ISTP's Self-Cultivation
👦🏻 Koji
What's the most valuable thing you took away from miHoYo?
👨🏻 Eshao
Probably sticker packs. When I was at miHoYo, I loved making stickers. The ones I made fell into two categories. The first was during game development — I'd record bugs or classic moments we encountered, add captions, and turn them into stickers. For example, when I was working on Honkai Impact 3rd, there's one I still remember vividly. There was a character called Mei who got stuck between two spike traps in a level, getting jostled back and forth, completely trapped. I found it so hilarious that I recorded the scene and made it into a sticker. Somehow it spread through the player community and became a really popular meme among Honkai Impact 3rd fans at the time.
The other type was me taking photos of colleagues — their expressions or iconic moments — editing text onto them, and making stickers. One time my computer hard drive died for no apparent reason, and everything on it became inaccessible. There were only two things on that drive: our game project directory, and my sticker folder.
I asked IT if they could recover it, telling them the drive was full of game project assets and hoping they could help. The IT person said, "Your drive is an SSD. Once an SSD fails, it's unrecoverable. You should probably just replace it and pull the game assets from the repository."
I said, "But there are also some stickers in there, and it'd be a shame to lose those." After hearing that, their immediate reaction was, "Well if that's the case, let me try harder — I have to recover this for you." Surprisingly, they actually managed to restore the drive later, so all my precious stickers were saved.
👦🏻 Koji
You said stickers are the most valuable thing you took away. Is it because they remind you of good times, or do you think a team that loves using stickers represents a culture that nurtures creative sparks? Or something else?
👨🏻 Eshao
I think it's actually both. On one hand, a sticker is a highly condensed meme. Just looking at one brings back memories of when I made it — whether it was during game development or interactions with colleagues. On the other hand, I realized that making stickers itself is a uniquely creative act. I have to take something I find funny or some spark of inspiration and compress it into a 128x128 image, while also conveying that emotion to whoever sees it. That creative mode, I discovered, is actually the essence of content creation.
👧🏻 Ronghui
What about work experiences or methods that later proved especially helpful or inspiring for other things you did?
👨🏻 Eshao
I love studying the history of whatever industry I'm in. I'll research how different game companies and creative teams got their start. I also like tracing the development of different games and products. And I have a somewhat bad habit — I really enjoy "finding the father" of different games.
👧🏻 Ronghui
Finding the father?
👨🏻 Eshao
When I'm analyzing a game's design, I'll trace where that design originally came from. After organizing extensive research on game design origins, I once had a hot take: I believe all content creation in the gaming industry traces back to two IPs — one is Dune, the other is The Lord of the Rings.
👦🏻 Koji
So one is the father, one is the mother.
👨🏻 Eshao
One father, one mother. Dune was actually the earliest sci-fi film, and things like energy shields are a very common classic design in games. For example, Zhongli and Noelle in Genshin Impact, and Yamabuki in Honkai Impact 3rd — they all have shield designs. Tracing that back, shields come from Dune. And there was an RTS game based on the Dune IP called Dune: Command & Conquer, a very old game. That RTS then gave rise to two other classics: Age of Empires, and Blizzard's StarCraft and Warcraft. Both were influenced by the Dune RTS.
👦🏻 Koji
So knowing an industry's history well gives you more clues and inspiration.
👨🏻 Eshao
I also really love watching game company promotional videos, or 10th and 20th anniversary documentaries. I collect all these videos into a playlist.
👦🏻 Koji
Can you expand on that? What do these things bring you?
👨🏻 Eshao
My two favorite documentaries are Blizzard 20 Years. It came out when I was in college, for Blizzard's 20th anniversary. They covered their earliest games, Rock n' Roll Racing and The Lost Vikings — games many people have never heard of, but I actually played on computers at a computer training class when I was young. So in college I learned those were also Blizzard games.
Watching that documentary in college, I was overwhelmed with emotion. My god, this great game company started from The Lost Vikings and Rock n' Roll Racing, and slowly grew into StarCraft, Warcraft, Diablo, and World of Warcraft. I saved that documentary to my playlist, and it's been there ever since. I pull it out from time to time. Whenever life feels hard, I watch it, and it's a huge motivation — like a shot of adrenaline.
👧🏻 Ronghui
What about during low points?
👨🏻 Eshao
Here's the thing — I'm an ISTP, and I've always had this habit: whenever I feel any emotion, positive or negative, I start to soul-leave-my-body and observe myself from above. Because on my first day in the games industry, at NetEase, our VP taught us a lesson. He said when we game designers experience other games, we need to analyze why we're having certain experiences and feelings. Only by reviewing our own feelings can we distill that content into designs we can use in our own games later. That was training from when I was a designer.
Also, being an ISTP my whole life, I've always been someone who likes fixing problems. So when I feel any emotion, I branch out. If it's positive, I think: what caused this positive emotion? Can I replicate this positive pattern in the future to generate more positive emotions? When I feel a negative emotion, I rarely get stuck in internal friction. Instead I think: why did I feel this negative emotion? I find that negative emotions always expose some underlying problem.
👧🏻 Ronghui
They must reflect some problem, and then we solve that problem.
👨🏻 Eshao
This became even more valuable when I started my own company. Before, when I was just working, I only needed to focus on my own emotions. But now that I'm founding a company, I find I need to focus not just on my own emotions, but on my entire team's emotions.
When I sense anxiety, confusion, disappointment, or other negative emotions spreading through the team, that means something is wrong somewhere. It might be something I hadn't seen before — small, trivial even — but I should do something to fix it.
And I've found that by examining our team's state through this emotional lens, many trivial problems get exposed very early. Through this approach, I've been able to solve and avoid many risks ahead of time that, in hindsight, could have caused irreparable damage.
The Final Question: If I Had $3 Million to Invest, How Would I Invest It?
👦🏻 Koji
Then let's ask the final question, one we've been asking on several recent Crossing podcasts. If you had $3 million to make three angel investments — $1 million each — whether they're already founding companies or not even thinking about it yet, but you believe they'd succeed if they did, who are three people you'd think of?
👨🏻 Eshao
Honestly three is a bit hard, but if I had to name just one, the first person who jumps to mind is a college classmate of mine. He's working on a really interesting direction right now — artificial hair follicles.
👦🏻 Koji
Not that classmate from the next dorm with the anime girl body pillow?
👨🏻 Eshao
No. Artificial hair follicles — because a lot of people go bald, and honestly my hairline is already pretty high now.
👦🏻 Koji
Now that you mention it, I instantly get it.
👨🏻 Eshao
Currently treating baldness requires harvesting follicles from your own head and transplanting them. But my classmate is thinking: can we implant artificial follicles instead, solving a problem that's plagued humanity for thousands of years?
👦🏻 Koji
That feels like boundless merit. It would make the whole world a better place — both men's and women's moods.
👨🏻 Eshao
Can I just name one?
👦🏻 Koji
Yes, of course. Then you'd all-in on him, give him all $3 million.
👨🏻 Eshao
Yes.
👦🏻 Koji
Great, it was wonderful having Eshao on Crossing today. And we hope for Krene — I know it just launched, still in closed beta, still exploring extensively — we hope when Krene achieves more interesting results or has more stories to tell, you'll come back to Crossing and share with everyone. Thank you.
👨🏻 Eshao
Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.
🚥
References
[1] Krene: https://www.krene.com/