A writer has arrived in the Chinese entertainment industry.

On that day, the homepages of Bilibili and AcFun crashed almost simultaneously.

A video titled "Genshin Impact: Gameplay Demo" unexpectedly entered the players' field of vision.

There's no lengthy intro, no fancy concept art; the opening is a catchy, energetic tune with a dense drumbeat.

The character illustrations are accompanied by fast-paced, exaggerated visuals, interspersed with cool combat scenes. The game features actions like launching enemies into the air, aerial pursuits, and powerful landing strikes, showcasing an unprecedented level of smoothness in 2D action mobile games.

When the ultimate skill is activated, the close-up shot zooms in, and the scene transitions into CG, giving the viewer a strong visual impact.

Of course, the most important thing is the Japanese dubbing, as the current anime and manga community only recognizes Japanese dubbing. Therefore, when the project started, Yao Men had already sent people to Japan to reserve the schedules of a group of voice actors, including Kana Hanazawa, Rina Sato, and Haruka Tomatsu.

The comments section exploded instantly!

Qinzhou Road, Shanghai Science and Technology Innovation Center.

In a simple office, the founders of Mihalyu were staring intently at their computer screens.

None of the three spoke; only the rousing tune from the video echoed in the air.

The two-minute video quickly came to an end, and one of the people in it finally spoke up, looking bewildered.

"What...what is this?"

"Doesn't it say so on the label? It's a live demonstration," another person said.

"Brother Wei, I mean... which company made this?"

Currently, anime-style games are still a niche market in China. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's investors have earnestly advised them to create more mainstream games and stop struggling in this dead end.

Who would have thought that a muscular man would suddenly appear out of nowhere in such a narrow track?

"It's a company called Yusei."

"Yusei? Never heard of him."

"It's a company founded by our junior from Jiaotong University, a member of the Yao family."

"Him?" Cai Haoyu's hand, which was fiddling with the mouse wheel, suddenly stopped, his face full of doubt. "Their company has only been established for a little over a month, right?"

The man known as Brother Wei said, "I made some inquiries, and they've now assembled a team of about fifty people."

"Brother Wei, we all know that having more people doesn't guarantee a good product. In over a month, others might still be finalizing their core gameplay, art style, and conducting market research. Who's their producer? Yao Men?"

He immediately followed up with, "How does a startup with over fifty employees achieve perfect collaboration across all departments?"

Judging from the sheer intensity of the work revealed in the gameplay demo videos, Yusei clearly adopted an extremely parallel and modular strategy. The art pipeline was broken down into concept art design, skeletal skinning, motion effects, and level assembly. A large amount of work was carried out simultaneously.

However, this requires investing in 2-3 top-tier tool programmers at the beginning of the project to develop automated resource import tools and eliminate the intermediate steps of importing art assets into the engine.

Cai Haoyu racked his brains but still couldn't figure out how they did it.

"Simple, just throw money at it." Liu Wei shrugged. "Do you remember President An who came to see us before?"

Cai Haoyu's mind conjured up the image of that dashing, sophisticated urban woman. "I remember, so what?"

"At the time, she wanted to acquire the company outright, but we didn't agree. Later, I introduced Yao Men to her."

"Did she vote for Yusei? How much did she vote for?"

"I don't know about that, but most of their employees' salaries are 20-30% higher than the market rate, and some core positions even have double the salary. I calculated that their monthly labor costs alone are over one million."

"What...what are they doing!" Cai Haoyu's expression was priceless. "Does that CEO An have a grudge against money? Wouldn't it be better to use that money to do some profitable projects for the masses? Why does she have to venture into such a narrow market! Is she...?"

He swallowed the rest of his sentence, but what he was thinking was, "Is she sick?"

Their monthly salary already covers the entire development cost of their team.

How do we fight this?

"Haoyu, when will Honkai Impact 2 be released?"

Cai Haoyu fidgeted with his hair in frustration. "It'll probably take another two months."

"Yuhao, what do you think?"

"They're so rich," said Luo Yuhao, who had been quietly watching the video the whole time. "And the gameplay and logic of their game are incredibly sophisticated. Look at these scenes..."

He scrolled the video to the last third, "Character development, equipment upgrades, skill unlocking. Although there are only a few shots, you can see that their system is very mature."

Cai Haoyu scratched his head, "Who exactly is their producer? It can't be Yao Men. They skipped the early preparation process in just one month, directly finalized the gameplay and art, and came up with such a mature plan. He couldn't do that."

"Could it be that General Manager An?"

"That's even more impossible. I noticed last time she came that she knew absolutely nothing about game development."

"What do we do now?" Luo Yuhao asked. "Should Honkai Impact 2 proceed according to the original plan?"

A long silence fell over the office. These passionate young men, who shouted that tech geeks would change the world, found it hard to muster the courage to face such a devastating blow head-on.

Liu Wei frowned and said, "At this rate of development, they'll probably run right into us. And they're loaded with money; they've even hired all Japanese voice actors. I doubt they'll skimp on marketing."

"We can't go head-to-head with them," Cai Haoyu said helplessly. "All of our combined income isn't even enough to pay them a month's salary."

"So you mean... avoid it?"

"What else can we do?"

At this moment, Liu Wei's eyes suddenly lit up, and he became radiant.

"I just realized something, maybe we don't need to worry about this at all."

"What is it?"

"We were completely terrified by this gameplay video!" Liu Wei said, getting more and more carried away, tapping his fingers on the table. "A game license! They don't have one! Their company has only been established for a little over a month. Even if they start applying for a license now, it would take at least two or three months to get it approved. Besides, at their current pace, they haven't even reached the threshold for applying for a license."

These words dispelled the gloom hanging over the three of them.

"That's right!" Cai Haoyu took a deep breath and said, "They need at least another month or two of development time before they can apply for a game license. It will be at least four or five months before the game is released."

"Don't be too optimistic." Luo Yuhao's expression remained unchanged as he poured cold water on the other two, "The industrial standards of their game are indeed very high."

"Yes! We can't be completely careless either," Cai Haoyu said. "They've poured money into achieving the highest level of industrial sophistication, but we understand the players better. After all, anime-style games cater to otaku, so we can be a bit more adventurous with the art and voice acting."

"What's wrong?"

Cai Haoyu's eyes blazed with fury, his voice deep yet powerful: "The soul of the anime world resides in underwear!"