Genshin Impact developer miHoYo subpoenas Twitter in hunt for leakers

With any big game, leaks are bound to happen. It’s nigh on impossible to keep things from slipping through the cracks, especially when the number of developers working on a particular game is in the hundreds. As such, things like release dates, screenshots, and sometimes entire demos of games find their way onto the internet despite publishers’ best efforts. The massively successful Genshin Impact is no stranger to this, being a live-service game that pushes out big content updates every couple of months. Now, it seems to be looking at how to legally push back on the practice.

Genshin’s parent company miHoYo is doing its best to put leakers on the back foot, according to reporting from Axios. The Chinese company recently pushed to subpoena Twitter, in the hopes of discovering the identities of three accounts that regularly leak information about the game. The subpoenas request personal information including names and IP addresses of Twitter accounts @merlin_impact, @GenshlnWorld, and @Xwides, all of which tweet Genshin leaks. While Merlin Impact remains live at the time of writing — the most recent message thanks followers for their support and assures them that the owner is “not in any legal danger,” promising to simply move to a different platform if the account is shut down — XWides has locked down their account and Genshin World appears to have been deleted altogether. Whether the latter was a formal takedown or merely a precautionary measure is unknown at present.

Related: Genshin Impact leakers are revealing old kits of popular characters

This is far from the first time that miHoYo has clamped down on unruly leaks. Toward the end of last year, the company issued more subpoenas to Discord in order to find the identity of another prominent leaker, and before that, it did the same to Reddit in an effort to stymie the works of the Genshin Impact Leaks subreddit. The results of miHoYo’s legal actions have yet to be seen, but Genshin leakers should watch their backs going forward, as the company clearly means business.