It must be admitted that in 2023, we have not yet seen the limits of miHoYo.
Not long ago, miHoYo’s “Collapse: Star Dome Railway” (hereinafter referred to as “Collapse”) quietly won the Google Play 2023 Best Game and App Store 2023 iPhone Game of the Year awards. At the same time, it also won the TGA 2023 Best Mobile Game award with a six-month debut.


To everyone’s surprise, just half a year later, the accumulated halo of ‘Broken Iron’ has reached a point where it is truly awe inspiring.
For example, looking back at the six months since the launch of “Broken Iron”, not only has this game never fallen out of the top of Sensor Tower’s Chinese mobile game revenue list, but it has also been a frequent guest on the global popular mobile game list released in the same month, and has a good reputation in many regions such as the United States, Japan, and South Korea.
Even before the game was launched, “Broken Iron” had already topped the free charts in over 113 countries and regions with its “pre download” feature, becoming the all-time high in the mobile gaming market. This impressive performance report not only surprised the industry at one point, but also laid the groundwork for the phenomenon level explosion of “Broken Iron” later on.
(Prior to the public beta, 10 million reservations were made across all platforms, and on the first day of the public beta, the download volume exceeded 20 million across the entire network.)
But in fact, the light turn based game “Bengtie” is also responsible for “opening up the track” for miHoYo. For them, the continuous expansion of their product categories also means that miHoYo can reach areas where their brand has never been before.
As early as April this year, David, the producer of “Breaking Iron,” publicly stated, “We don’t want to be confined to a single game category, but rather provide players with more different game categories, richer game experiences, and options, so that more people can try HoYoverse’s products
So on the occasion of “Breaking Iron” winning the TGA 2023 Best Mobile Game award, we also take this very rare opportunity to revisit what kind of “success story” “Breaking Iron” is for miHoYo, or the entire gaming industry.
1、 Behind the grand slam of TGA, Google, and App Store, let’s talk about the “quality” and “quantity” of miHoYo
Looking back now, if we only talk about the global popularity of the product, I still find it hard to believe that “Broken Iron” is a game that has only been online for half a year.
After all, after anime track became recognized as a gold digger a few years ago, the stock of the second tour market was shrinking rapidly. But in such a fiercely competitive environment, ‘Breaking Iron’ still swept the world with super high popularity within six months, and this ability to ‘explore new markets’ undoubtedly refreshed the cognition of many practitioners.
However, even so, the speed at which “Breaking Iron” won TGA, Google, and App Store awards is too fast, which makes people curious about the reasons why “Breaking Iron” can rise steadily.
Coincidentally, the unanimous “well deserved” comments under the TGA winning video of “Breaking Iron” gave me inspiration. Perhaps as they said, behind the consecutive wins of several awards in “Breaking Iron”, the “quality” (technological strength) and “quantity” (industrialization) that this product continues to lead the industry are the key to their six-month top TGA ranking.
Specifically, in terms of the “quality” that represents the technological strength of the product, we tend to view “Broken Iron” as a product that emphasizes performance over gameplay, but often overlook its gaming technology. Instead, it is the “key breakthrough player” that miHoYo has devoted a lot of effort to.
For example, in terms of character rendering, in order to present high-quality materials such as metal, fabric, and stockings on the entire platform, “Broken Iron” will try to restore the hand drawn style of transparent bangs or optimize the texture of stockings as much as possible to ensure the player’s visual experience.
As for the scene level that shapes the atmosphere. Breaking Iron not only supports a large number of real-time light sources on the same screen, but also reproduces the Chinese style atmosphere of thousands of lights and Linlang night markets in multiple scenes of the game; At the same time, they also prepared a low-energy and highly realistic rendering scheme in advance, real-time rendering of pixel level units such as fog and water bodies in the game, in order to simulate the feeling of real fog and water vapor flow in “Broken Iron”, creating an epic feeling of “fog drifting, like a fairyland”.
In addition, on top of these magnificent scenes, there is a large amount of game content available for players to explore, which is a breakthrough in “quantity” made by “Broken Iron”. Thanks to miHoYo’s highly mature industrial pipeline, “Bengtie” has taken the “content output capability” that has plagued the industry for many years to a whole new level.
For example, during the first six months of the game’s launch, “Broken Iron” has always been able to quickly introduce various large-scale resident gameplay. Whether it’s the early new simulation universe “Universal Locust Disaster” or the “Golden Old Lane Market Noise” in the Xianzhou version, which is rich in various gameplay, both reflect the extremely efficient productivity of miHoYo.
Moreover, the increasingly mature industrialization capability is further reflected in the 1.5 version of ‘Breaking Iron’. For example, in the latest “Huzhai Zhiyi” event, we can not only see a large number of novel and interesting news and miscellaneous talks, but also the “Suiyuan” map launched simultaneously with the event, as well as high-quality animated CG related to “Suiyang”, which miHoYo has already prepared.
Overall, with the continuous stacking of a large amount of high-quality content, “Broken Iron” can be regarded as a delicate dessert that is easy to enter: even if players have not formally experienced the game core of “Broken Iron”, this product has already won the sustained praise of many players for “Broken Iron” TGA awards with its overly exquisite “appearance”.