HoYoverse Brags About 40% Female Workforce — NGA Community Erupts: "Here Comes the Duoyi Disaster 2.0"

A gaming company flexing not its revenue, not its player count, but its 40% female employee ratio — what could go wrong? If you know NGA, you already know: everything.

It all started when a promotional screenshot from HoYoverse (miHoYo's overseas arm) was shared on NGA's gossip board. The image showed that HoYoverse's workforce is 40% female, up 15% year-over-year — and the company was clearly proud of this metric.

The NGA community's reaction was anything but celebratory. The thread quickly devolved into a firestorm. One of the top replies fired off a broadside: "It's not about refusing to hire women — it's that every female employee we've seen from Shanghai's gacha studios seems to be an unhinged 'xxn' (小仙女, a derogatory Chinese internet term for entitled, self-absorbed women)." They doubled down: "Look at what Shanghai's mobile game companies have been pumping out lately."

Another commenter tried to be more measured: "Biological sex doesn't really matter — plenty of guys are mentally 'xxn' too. What matters is that employees know their role. You're here to make games, which is a service industry. Save the artsy-fartsy aspirations for somewhere else." Sounds reasonable on the surface, but it's really a critique of the growing trend of game studios prioritizing artistic pretensions over player satisfaction.

One particularly witty reply cracked: "Is this ratio even noteworthy? A normal three-person family is already at least 33.33% female." Translation: 40% is hardly groundbreaking, so why the self-congratulation?

What really set the thread on fire was how many commenters immediately drew parallels to the infamous Duoyi Network (多益网络) debacle — a Chinese gaming company that infamously imploded after internal gender politics and management chaos led to mass firings and a PR catastrophe. "Can we get a Duoyi 2.0 remake so I can watch the fireworks?" one commenter quipped. Another piled on with dripping sarcasm: "Only 40%? Surely with that 15% annual growth rate, you should be aiming for at least 60%."

The real escalation came when commenters started worrying about what comes next: "This isn't even the real DEI push yet — the LGBTQ stuff hasn't even started." Another joked: "When can we celebrate our 'LGBTQIAPKDXUC employees hitting 20%' as a success? Wait, that meta is over. The current patch is about other things." — using absurd acronyms to mock what they see as an endless treadmill of identity-based corporate virtue signaling.

One dissenting voice tried to push back: "Everyone here fully supports miHoYo hiring women. We'd welcome 100% female staff, no problem." But read in context, this reads less like genuine support and more like a deflection — "We don't hate women, we hate this particular attitude of gender-ratio chest-thumping."

Zooming out, the core of NGA's outrage isn't about women working in gaming — it's about a gaming company treating its gender demographics as a marketing talking point. To these players, what matters is whether the game is fun, whether the new patch delivers quality content, not whether the office has the right gender mix. The whole debate is really a proxy war over a deeper frustration: game companies seem increasingly preoccupied with corporate image and social signaling rather than the actual games they're supposed to be making.