Honkai: Star Rail publishers sue player for $150,000 over streaming a character before release
Genshin Impact and Zenless Zone Zero publishers HoYoverse are suing a player for $150,000 over a pre-release stream of a new Honkai: Star Rail character.
As reported by Nicole Carpenter over on the Gamefile newsletter (paywall), the Singapore-based publishers are taking one Alfredo Lopez to court after he broadcast an early look at Castorice, a melancholy floral dragon summoner, to a Discord channel with around 12,000 members. The lawsuit was filed on June 6th in the United States District Court’s Central District of California.
According to HoYoverse’s copyright claim, Lopez has “unfairly or unlawfully obtained a game update before its release date”, but the suit appears more vexed by Lopez sharing footage of the character, than how he obtained the game build in question.
They argue that a leak such as this “dampens the excitement and anticipation that many players feel when they obtain the update legitimately upon its official release.” It’s worth noting that Castorice had already been revealed as an upcoming addition to the game – during last December’s Game Awards, no less.
Honkai: Star Rail is a live service gacha game, with around 70 characters at the time of writing. Jason Coles thought it was good fun back in April 2023. I can see how the publisher of a game which thrives on the lure of randomly served or microtransacted anime fancy-dans might be extra prickly about having the goods screened ahead of schedule. On the other hand, I’m not particularly keen on billion-dollar publishers suing Discord streamers into the scorched earth over footage of a character we already know about.
As Carpenter comments in the newsletter, HoYoverse have proven pretty militant about going after leakers in the past, though they’re hardly alone in this.
