Game publisher laments spoilers, sues man for $150,000 over stream of leaked game character

HoYoverse intensifies its legal war against leakers. PLUS: Valve accused of skipping a $21 million bill.

Honkai: Star Rail character Castorice. Image: HoYoverse/ Cognosphere

Few companies commit more legal firepower against game leakers than HoYoverse. Over the last few years, the gaming giant behind live service games such as Genshin Impact has subpoenaed Twitter, now called X, to find the identities of people behind three accounts that posted Genshin Impact leaks, has subpoenaed Discord, looking to identify four different accounts, and gone to GitHub for the same reason.

HoYoverse runs popular live-service games and regularly adds new characters to them, hoping players will pay to obtain the latest fighter.

Genshin Impact has nearly 100 unlockable characters, beloved for their anime-style designs, fighting styles, and narratives. Its Honkai: Star Rail science-fantasy adventure has just over 70 characters to unlock via the game’s gacha system.

And now it has sued a Honkai: Star Rail player it says live streamed an early look at one of those characters, the dragon-summoning Castorice, just under a month ahead of its release.

That player, who HoYoverse identified as Alfredo Lopez, broadcast the game in a Discord channel with roughly 12,000 members. HoYoverse filed the lawsuit on June 6 in the United States District Court’s Central District of California, in a complaint that has not been previously reported.

HoYoverse is trying to find Lopez liable via a copyright claim, a strategy that has less to do with how a leaker obtains gaming info than what they do with it. (Nintendo has done this recently, too.)

Core to HoYoverse’s complaint is its assertion that a gaming leak “dampens the excitement and anticipation that many players feel when they obtain the update legitimately upon its official release.”