Final ruling in Genshin Impact defamation case orders 500,000 yuan in damages

According to miHoYo's legal affairs department, the second-instance court has upheld the original verdict in a defamation case tied to Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, and Zenless Zone Zero. Blogger Li, who operated under the screen name "Fanshu Jianshangjia," lost the case and must pay 500,000 yuan in full and issue public apologies on Bilibili, Douyin, Kuaishou, and Xiaohongshu. The core point matters more than the headline: the court found this was not ordinary player criticism or standard reviewing, but content made with a clear commercial profit motive.

I'd give this a 7/10, because it redraws a line that needed to be redrawn. Criticizing games is fine. Making money through insults, distortion, and rage-bait is not. Anyone who has been around long enough has seen forum wars stretching from the PS1 era to now, and people arguing online is nothing new. What makes this news is that the court has now said, plainly, that this was not a normal player venting frustration and not legitimate public oversight.

miHoYo's own disclosure says Li long operated accounts across multiple platforms and carried out a series of infringing acts to chase what the company described as "black traffic." According to the statement, Li used extremely insulting language against miHoYo and the players of Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, and Zenless Zone Zero. The company also said Li published one-sided, non-objective game reviews, misled player judgment, stirred up division in the community, and encouraged players to quit. On top of that, miHoYo said Li accepted third-party commercial orders, using disparagement to attract attention and profit from it.

That distinction is the whole case. miHoYo, however successful its games are, is not above criticism. You can complain about Genshin Impact's dead patches. You can attack the numbers or live-service pacing in Honkai: Star Rail. You can pick apart Zenless Zone Zero's launch issues too. But criticism has to start from facts. If someone swings wildly with unreasonable standards and then steers players toward quitting, that is no longer a clean exchange of arguments. It is closer to turning on cheats and then bragging about your skill.

More importantly, this had already gone beyond a simple publisher-versus-creator spat. miHoYo said it had previously defended its rights through complaints, reports, lawsuits, and police filings. After the case was reported to public security authorities, police determined that Li had engaged in illegal acts including distorting facts, spreading rumors, and disrupting social order, and they imposed an administrative public-order penalty according to law. That makes it much harder to wave this away as another "thin-skinned company" story.

The first-instance court found that Li's videos were not ordinary player guides or public-opinion supervision, but had an obvious commercial profit-making nature. It also held that Li's use of insulting language, rejection of miHoYo's games through unreasonable standards, and attempts to guide players into quitting had exceeded the reasonable limits of game commentary and therefore constituted an infringement of miHoYo's reputation rights. After weighing miHoYo and its games' market reputation, the scope of the infringement's impact, and Li's degree of fault, the court supported all of miHoYo's claims. The second-instance court then upheld that judgment in full.

The wider takeaway is less triumphalist than it may look. A lot of content creators now know exactly how to turn reviews into an arena fight and discussion into faction warfare. Attack the publisher, attack the players, ride the outrage, and the numbers go up while the actual substance disappears. You could already see traces of that back in 2008 forum culture; the difference now is that the monetization is much more direct, and the ugliness shows.

For ordinary players, the test for whether a creator is worth trusting is still pretty simple. First, do they provide concrete evidence and full context? Second, are they doing analysis, or just pushing emotional buttons? Third, do they force every problem into a conspiracy? The criticism worth reading is the kind old-school console outlets used to write: sharp, specific, and aimed somewhere real. miHoYo winning this case does not mean its games are now beyond criticism. It does mean one thing clearly enough: if the content business keeps treating rumor and insult as a shortcut, sooner or later it will run into the real end-of-match results screen.