miHoYo is pulling out the big guns — the company just secured a court injunction against a Honkai: Star Rail beta tester for allegedly leaking unreleased character designs, and the court issued it in a blazing 48 hours. But over on NGA, China's largest gaming forum, the community is having none of it. The comment section is a wall of players calling the whole thing a staged marketing stunt.
According to reports, miHoYo's monitoring team caught a player surnamed Chen secretly recording gameplay footage and saving unreleased design materials during an internal beta test for Honkai: Star Rail. miHoYo argued that the content could be leaked at any moment, and that such a leak would cause 'irreparable damage' to the company.
The Shanghai Pudong New Area People's Court responded at lightning speed. After assembling a panel, the court determined that miHoYo's unpublished character designs constitute trade secrets under China's Anti-Unfair Competition Law — specifically, commercially valuable business information that isn't publicly known and is protected by confidentiality measures. The court further stated that the respondent had a 'high probability' of having illegally recorded content, and failure to act would 'undermine game balance and fairness, reduce the game's popularity, disrupt business plans, and damage the company's reputation.'
What's particularly notable is the court's reasoning on public interest. It argued that failing to crack down on beta leaks would create a 'negative cascading effect' — dampening creators' enthusiasm, reducing the supply of quality games, and even harming the broader gaming industry's development. The court emphasized that it acted without hearing the defendant's side first, framing this as a demonstration of the 'fast protection' principle in IP enforcement.
The court described this as a landmark case — the first in China to treat unpublished game character designs as protected trade secrets in a pre-litigation injunction context. It was also the first IP pre-litigation injunction issued by a Shanghai court since the Supreme People's Court's new guidelines on pre-litigation preservation took effect on March 1, 2024.
But this milestone ruling got absolutely roasted in NGA's comment section. The top-voted comments were almost unanimously skeptical —
One user flatly declared 'Self-directed, self-acted. Diagnosis: making something out of nothing' — implying the whole thing is theater. Another was even more cutting: 'Official leaks have already spoiled an entire year's worth of upcoming characters, and now you pull THIS? I'm dying.' The term 'official leaks' (奉旨爆料) refers to miHoYo's long-standing practice of strategically pre-revealing future content through semi-official channels — a well-known open secret in the gacha community.
Another sharp observation went: 'Mobile games make so much money, why not just hire a few hundred testers instead of worrying about leaks?' — questioning why miHoYo doesn't simply expand its beta testing pool to prevent leaks at the source, rather than resorting to heavy-handed legal tactics. One player took it further: 'Maybe the unofficial leakers leaked too much stuff they weren't supposed to, so this is just a warning shot' — suggesting the real issue isn't leaks per se, but leaks outside miHoYo's controlled narrative.
Whether miHoYo's move is genuine IP protection or calculated marketing theater, one thing is clear: when the court can issue an injunction within 48 hours without even hearing the defendant's side, and the company itself is notorious for 'official leaks,' the line between protecting trade secrets and controlling the narrative has never been blurrier. At the end of the day, only miHoYo knows who's really leaking what — and that's exactly the problem.
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