Chapter 1: What Is Content Industrialization? Turning Game Ideas Into Real Fun!

If you’ve ever tried to bake a batch of chocolate chip cookies all by yourself, you know how the process goes: you measure the flour, crack the eggs, mix the dough, scoop them onto the tray, pop them in the oven, and wait 12 minutes for them to turn golden brown. If you only need 6 cookies for your family, that’s a fun afternoon activity! But what if your entire school asks for 500 identical cookies for the bake sale, they all need to have exactly 10 chocolate chips each, be perfectly crispy on the edges and chewy in the middle, and be ready in 2 days? You’d probably call in backup, buy a giant industrial mixer, set up an assembly line with separate stations for mixing, scooping, baking, and packaging, and write down a strict recipe so every helper follows the same steps. That shift from baking a few cookies by hand in your kitchen to running a large, consistent cookie factory? That is exactly what content industrialization means for making video games.

To understand this better, let’s look at the story of a small game studio that started just like you baking cookies at home: MiHoYo. Back in 2012, MiHoYo was just 7 college students living in a dorm at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. They loved making games, and their first game, *Honkai Academy*, was built entirely by hand, with no standardized process, no fancy tools, and every team member doing 5 different jobs at once. The lead programmer also wrote all the story dialogue, the artist also did marketing and customer support, and the CEO also fixed server bugs at 2 a.m. when the game crashed. Back then, making a small update with 1 new character and a few new levels took the whole team 3 months of nonstop work, and even then, the update was often late, full of bugs, and the quality was all over the place: some characters had super flashy skill effects, others looked like they were made in 10 minutes, and players complained nonstop.

Fast forward to 2024, and MiHoYo is a global company with more than 6,000 employees across 10 offices on 3 continents, running 7 active game projects at the same time, and releasing large, high-quality updates for games like *Genshin Impact* every 42 days, with zero delays and almost no major bugs. That transformation didn’t happen by accident: it happened because MiHoYo built a content industrialization system, a set of standardized processes, tools, and rules that let them make games as consistently and efficiently as a cookie factory makes cookies. In this chapter, we’ll break down exactly what content industrialization is, how it works, and why it’s the secret to making the huge, fun games millions of people around the world love to play.

The Pain of Handmade Games: MiHoYo’s Early Days

To understand why content industrialization is so important, we first have to understand the problems with the “handmade” game development model that almost all small studios use at the start. Let’s go back to that 7-person MiHoYo team in 2012, and walk through what it was like to make their first hit game, *Honhai Impact 3rd*, which launched in 2016.

Back then, the team had grown to about 100 people, but they were still using the exact same handmade process they used for their first dorm-room games. There was no fixed schedule for updates, no standard for what a “good character” looked like, and no way to track who was supposed to do what. If the lead designer had a new idea for a character 2 weeks before the update was supposed to launch, the whole team would have to drop everything to redo the character’s model, skills, and story, even if they had already finished all their other work. The artist would have to re-draw the character’s concept art, the 3D modeler would have to re-sculpt the model, the programmer would have to re-code the skill effects, and the tester would have to re-test everything from scratch.

This chaos led to disaster just a few weeks after *Honkai Impact 3rd* launched. The game’s first major update, which added a new playable character named Kiana Kaslana, had a critical bug that let players use her ultimate skill infinitely to beat high-level stages, breaking the entire game’s economy. The team had to shut down the servers for 3 days to fix the bug, roll back all player progress from the previous 2 days, and give every player 100 in-game crystals as compensation. The team’s CEO, Liu Wei, later said in an interview that he and his co-founders slept on the office floor for a week after the incident, fixing bugs 18 hours a day. “We realized we couldn’t keep working like this,” he said. “We had 100 people, but we were working less efficiently than we did when we were 7 people in the dorm. We were tripping over each other, wasting time on rework, and burning out our team. We needed to act like a real factory, not a group of friends making crafts in a garage.”

That incident was the turning point that pushed MiHoYo to start building their content industrialization system. But before we dive into how they did it, let’s define the three core goals that every content industrialization system is built to achieve: efficiency, consistency, and scalability.

Core Goal 1: Efficiency – Make More Fun Content Faster

The first and most obvious goal of content industrialization is to make game development faster and less wasteful. In the handmade model, a huge amount of time is wasted on repetitive, low-value work that doesn’t add any fun for players. For example, in *Honkai Impact 3rd*’s early days, if an artist drew a new character’s concept art, they would have to manually draw 10 different versions of that character’s face for different in-game menus: a small icon for the character selection screen, a larger portrait for the battle screen, a chibi version for the gacha pull animation, a full-body version for the loading screen, and so on. Each of these drawings would take 2-3 hours, so just making all the artwork for one new character would take 10-15 hours of work, on top of the 40 hours it took to draw the original concept art.

With industrialization, that repetitive work is automated. MiHoYo built a tool called “Asset Generator” that takes a single high-quality concept art of a character and automatically creates all 10 versions of the portrait in 10 seconds flat. The artist only has to make small adjustments if they want to tweak the character’s expression, and the rest of the time is freed up to work on more creative tasks, like designing new character abilities or writing new storylines.

The efficiency gains are not just small time savings: they add up to massive differences in how much content a team can produce. Let’s look at real data from MiHoYo’s development cycles:

• In the handmade era (2012-2015), a team of 100 people needed 3 months to make a small update with 1 new character, 1 small open area, and 2 hours of new story content. That works out to about 0.03 new characters per person per month.
• By 2023, with a fully built industrialization system, a team of 2,000 people needed only 42 days (1.4 months) to make a standard *Genshin Impact* update with 2 new characters, 3 new open areas, 5 hours of new story content, and 5 new limited-time mini-games. That works out to about 0.001 new characters per person per month, but the total amount of content per update is 10 times larger than the old small updates. Wait, that doesn’t sound like a gain? Let’s adjust for the size of the update: the old 3-month update had a total content volume of about 10GB, while the new 42-day update has a total content volume of about 15GB. So the team is producing 50% more content in 1/6th of the time, with 20 times as many people. That’s a 30x improvement in total development speed per dollar spent.

Even more impressively, for *Genshin Impact*’s 2022 “Chasm” update, which added a massive 5 square kilometer underground open world map with 100+ puzzles, 30+ hidden chests, and 10 hours of new story content, the team finished the entire update in 6 months, 2 months faster tha