Development and release
MICA Team originally started as a dōjin club consisting of three people, however during the development of Girls' Frontline, gradually expanded into a company of 117 employees. At the time when Sunborn (what would become the parent company of MICA Team) was established, owing to the favourable social environment following Chinese premier Li Keqiang's proposal to support domestic entrepreneurship in 2015, the company secured government support and preferential policies such as tax exemptions.[12] The game's premise was inspired by Kantai Collection, but with anthropomorphized warships replaced with that of firearms, based on the team's anticipations that similar moe anthropomorphism games would become popular in China.[13] The difference from Kantai Collection is that rather than having combat sorties fully automated and only having the player take control over resource management and base raising, Girls' Frontline gives players greater control over the outcome of combat.[14]
During the initial stages of the game's development, game producer Huang Chong, more commonly known by the pseudonym Yuzhong , worked in partnership with his former university-era confidant Yao Meng who was tasked with operations management while Yuzhong handled development. The game was originally planned to be published under Yao Meng's company, Array Network Technology. However, due to personal conflicts, the two parted ways, and Yao Meng would eventually start a new company, Yostar, which would later publish Azur Lane as its first major game.[15][16][17] One major cause of the conflict arose as a result of network issues during the game's testing phase, with both parties insisting that the other side was responsible for resolving the outage; while reflecting on this era of development, Yuzhong later explained in a 2016 interview that his team only had prior experience developing dōjin games, and had limited understanding of online games and backend development.[18] Artist Zhong Qixiang, more commonly known by the pseudonym Haimao , served as the game's original art director, but later left MICA Team in 2016 to form his own game development company Hypergryph, which would eventually release Arknights as its first game.[19][16]
2015 saw a large influx of animesque games in the Chinese videogame industry, with many developers and publishers becoming involved in the genre, leading to a wave of investors hoping to profit from the trend; in October 2015, investment firm Yuanqi Capital reached out to Sunborn and began taking an active role in the development project, hiring senior programmers to assist MICA Team and introducing Yuzhong to Chengdu Digital Sky Technology, a limited partner of the investment firm that aimed to obtain operating rights for the game.[18] In a 2016 interview, Yao Meng explained that he was strongly critical of the collaboration with Yuanqi Capital; meanwhile, Yuzhong claimed that Array Network Technology had attempted to licence the game to Hoolai Games for its Android distribution, an allegation that Yao Meng denies.[18] The two sides would eventually part over disagreement regarding whether to work with Digital Sky, formally terminating their contractual agreement on March 9, 2016.[18] The game was originally planned to be released in Japan under the title Shōjo Zensen (少女前線) in Q3 2016;[1] however, due to the disputes over distribution rights, wasn't able to release there until 2018 under the new name Dolls Frontline (ドールズフロントライン).[6]
On March 21, 2018, following the official announcement of K7 as a new playable T-Doll for the game, South Korean players accused the character's illustrator of being a radical feminist, due to her earlier tweets discussing the novel Kim Ji-young, Born 1982.[20] After Sunborn initially responded with a statement explaining that "there has been no evidence that any K7 illustrator belongs to a certain extreme feminist organisation", South Korean players responded negatively to the announcement, and K7's character was subsequently removed from the game by the developers.[21][22][23]
In an August 2020 interview, Yuzhong remarked that during the 2014-2015 era of games, many players felt spending 10 to 20 minutes on daily tasks was a chore. Thus, he aims to make game time more fragmented when designing his own games. In the same interview, he also notes that each successful Chinese animesque game developer creates their own specialisation (for instance, MiHoYo focusing on action games while Papergames focuses on games directed at female audiences), and that this "niche partitioning" minimises the effect of larger game companies muscling out smaller studios that have firmly-established niches, with Sunborn's specialisation focusing on animesque strategy games.
The Chinese server shut down on December 31, 2024, due to contractual disputes with the operator Chengdu Digital Sky Technology.[24] The other servers remain unaffected.[25] In January 2025, MICA Team announced a new PC version of Girls' Frontline,[26][25] which released on Steam on 20 May 2025,[27] and allowed players on the Chinese server to transfer game progress from the mobile version to the Steam version.[28] On September 4, 2025, a Steam release for the Japanese version of the game was announced,[29] which later released on September 26, 2025.[30]
