What Is HoYoverse and How Is It Different From miHoYo?
HoYoverse is the global publishing brand of miHoYo, the Shanghai studio behind Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, Zenless Zone Zero, Honkai Impact 3rd, and Tears of Themis. The naming split trips up a lot of people, so here's the short version. miHoYo develops the games and publishes them in mainland China, while HoYoverse handles everywhere else through Cognosphere Pte. Ltd., a company based in Singapore. The logo on the splash screen in North America or Europe says HoYoverse, but the teams building those games are miHoYo.
miHoYo announced the HoYoverse brand in February 2022 as an umbrella for its games and the animation and entertainment built around them. Today HoYoverse runs offices in Singapore, Montreal, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Seoul, and it shows up at gamescom, HoYo FEST, and its own concert events every year. I think the rebrand made sense. "miHoYo" was a name Western players only half recognized, and HoYoverse gave the company one banner to hang every world under.
miHoYo History: How Three Shanghai Students Built HoYoverse
miHoYo's founders, Cai Haoyu, Liu Wei, and Luo Yuhao, met as students at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and started making games together as indie developers in 2011, releasing Fly Me 2 the Moon on iOS that same year. They formally incorporated miHoYo in 2012. The company motto, "Tech Otakus Save the World," tells the whole story of who they were making games for. Next came the Houkai Gakuen games that introduced the Honkai name. Guns GirlZ, the second Houkai Gakuen game, arrived in 2014 and gave the series its first real foothold with characters like Kiana Kaslana.
Those early side-scrollers look nothing like Genshin Impact, but the DNA is there. miHoYo was obsessed with anime presentation and cel-shaded art long before it had the budget to put that style in a full open world, and it kept reusing and reinventing its own characters across games. That habit is still the backbone of HoYoverse today.
Honkai Impact 3rd and the Start of the Honkai Series
Honkai Impact 3rd launched in China in 2016 and reached Western players in 2018. It moved the Honkai series into full 3D action with Kiana Kaslana, Raiden Mei, and Bronya Zaychik fighting the Honkai, a force that corrupts people and reshapes the world around them. The combat was fast, the animated cutscenes were slick, and the gacha model that would later fund Genshin Impact was already fully in place. Honkai Impact 3rd Part 2 launched on February 29, 2024 with Version 7.3, sending players to Mars alongside Senadina, Helia, and Coralie, so the game is still running after nearly a decade.
The Honkai name now covers several separate universes rather than one continuous timeline. Honkai: Star Rail borrows names and faces from Honkai Impact 3rd but tells its own story, and Honkai: Nexus Anima is doing the same thing again with a creature-collecting twist. Treating Honkai like a multiverse brand gives miHoYo a lot of freedom, and it explains why the same character can show up in three games with three different backstories.
Genshin Impact: The Game That Turned HoYoverse Into a Global Publisher
Genshin Impact launched on September 28, 2020 for PC, iOS, Android, and PlayStation 4, with a PlayStation 5 version following in 2021. It was a free-to-play open world RPG on a scale nobody expected from a mobile-first studio, and it turned miHoYo from a niche anime game company into a household name almost overnight. The story follows the Traveler searching for a lost twin across Teyvat, a world split into seven nations, each tied to one of the Seven Archons.
The Breath of the Wild comparisons at launch were fair, especially for climbing, gliding, and cooking. What separated Genshin Impact over time was the update cadence. Mondstadt, Liyue, Inazuma, Sumeru, Fontaine, and Natlan all arrived as free regional updates, and Snezhnaya, home of the Fatui and the Tsaritsa, headlined HoYoverse's Genshin Impact booth at gamescom 2026. Players spend Primogems on Wishes to pull new characters and weapons, and that gacha loop is what pays for all of it.
Honkai: Star Rail and HoYoverse's Turn-Based RPG
Honkai: Star Rail launched on April 26, 2023 for PC, iOS, and Android, then came to PlayStation 5 in October 2023. Following up a massive open world action game with a turn-based RPG was a gutsy call, and it paid off. Players take on the role of the Trailblazer, riding the Astral Express between worlds alongside March 7th, Dan Heng, and Pom-Pom, the small conductor who has become something of a mascot for the whole game.
Honkai: Star Rail leans harder into comedy than Genshin Impact does, and the writing is willing to get weird in ways the other games usually avoid. Version 4.4 launched on July 15, 2026, and the Planarcadia setting from that update got its own themed area at gamescom 2026, complete with a giant Phantasmoon hanging over the booth.
Zenless Zone Zero: HoYoverse's Urban Fantasy ARPG
Zenless Zone Zero launched on July 4, 2024 for PC, PlayStation 5, iOS, and Android. It swaps fantasy kingdoms for New Eridu, a city built around dangerous dimensional zones called Hollows. Players control Wise and Belle, sibling Proxies who guide agents through those Hollows, usually with help from the Bangboo, the small rabbit-eared robots that run around the city.
The combat is the closest HoYoverse has come to a character action game, built on fast swapping between agents and well-timed dodges and parries. Zenless Zone Zero has the strongest sense of style in the HoYoverse lineup to me, from the music to the menus. The game celebrated its second anniversary in July 2026.
Tears of Themis and HoYoverse's Smaller Games
Tears of Themis is the odd one out in the HoYoverse catalog. It's a detective visual novel with romance elements, released in China in 2020 and worldwide in 2021, where the player takes on the role of a lawyer in the city of Stellis solving cases alongside four male leads. There's no open world and no combat, just investigation, courtroom debates, and a lot of character writing. It never reached Genshin Impact's numbers, but it proved miHoYo could step outside action games, and it set the stage for something like Petit Planet years later.
Is HoYoverse on Xbox? HoYoverse Games by Platform
For years, HoYoverse games were a PlayStation and PC story on console. Genshin Impact launched on PS4, Honkai: Star Rail added a PS5 version within six months, and Zenless Zone Zero launched on PS5 day one. Xbox players were left out, which always struck me as strange given that the PC versions already ran on Windows.
That changed when Genshin Impact arrived on Xbox Series X|S on November 20, 2024, four years after its original launch. Zenless Zone Zero followed in June 2025 alongside its Version 2.0 update, with 4K at 60 frames per second on Xbox Series X, ray tracing, HDR, and cross-save support. On PC, HoYoverse sells through its own launcher and the Epic Games Store, and its upcoming games are all targeting PC and mobile first.
The HoYoverse FTC Settlement Over Genshin Impact Loot Boxes
In January 2025, the Federal Trade Commission announced a $20 million settlement with Cognosphere over Genshin Impact. The FTC alleged that HoYoverse marketed loot boxes to children, collected data from players under 13 in violation of COPPA, and obscured the real cost and odds of pulling five-star characters behind a confusing multi-currency system. As part of the settlement, HoYoverse agreed to block players under 16 from buying loot boxes without parental consent, disclose odds and currency exchange rates, offer a way to buy pulls directly with real money, and delete data collected from children under 13.
HoYoverse said it believed many of the FTC's allegations were inaccurate but agreed to the settlement anyway. The case matters well beyond Genshin Impact, since Honkai: Star Rail and Zenless Zone Zero run on the same gacha structure. Anyone who has watched a pity counter climb toward 90 in Genshin Impact knows how easy it is to lose track of what a single character actually costs, and that's exactly what the FTC went after.
Upcoming HoYoverse Games: Petit Planet, Honkai: Nexus Anima, and Varsapura
HoYoverse has three new games in the pipeline, and they head in very different directions.
Petit Planet Release Date and Details
Petit Planet is HoYoverse's first cozy life sim, and it's the closest the company has come to Animal Crossing. Players become a Planet Tender, building up a small world of their own, farming, exploring the Starsea, and hanging out with fuzzy Neighbors like Elsasani. HoYoverse announced at gamescom Opening Night Live on August 26, 2026 that Petit Planet launches worldwide in Winter 2026 on PC, iOS, and Android with cross-platform support, and pre-registration is open now. HoYoverse has also said more platforms are in development.
Honkai: Nexus Anima Release Date and Details
Honkai: Nexus Anima is a creature-collecting strategy game in the Honkai series, built around collecting Anima and using them in auto-battler style Nexus Battles. It first surfaced as an easter egg at a Honkai: Star Rail concert in 2025 before HoYoverse formally announced it in August 2025. The Evolution Test beta started on July 9, 2026 on PC and mobile, and the game made its gamescom debut that August with a playable demo. HoYoverse has not announced a release date yet.
Varsapura Release Date and Details
Varsapura is the one nobody saw coming. HoYoverse revealed it on November 20, 2025 with a 31-minute gameplay demo, and it looks nothing like Genshin Impact. Built in Unreal Engine 5 rather than the Unity engine behind HoYoverse's current hits, Varsapura follows SEAL, a shadowy organization fighting a reality-warping corruption called Mindrot. The demo showed stealth takedowns, driving through a realistic city, and Zenless Zone Zero style character switching, all wrapped in a darker tone that drew a lot of comparisons to Remedy's Control. There's no release date or platform list yet, and the recruitment push at the end of the demo suggests it's still a long way off.