One of Genshin Impact’s more popular wiki sites is returning despite game developer Mihoyo allegedly sending the site’s hosting provider an intellectual property complaint. The lead developer of Honey Hunter World took to Twitter on September 10 to inform players that the site would be taken down within a day. Now, though, the developer says the website is returning with a few changes.
The developer, who goes by the name Honey online, explained on September 11 in an updated post on its website that it would be “migrating to DMCA ignored hosting”. A day later (September 12), Honey further added on Twitter that they are removing watermarks alongside “any copyrights” related to Mihoyo. At the time of writing, the Genshin Impact subdomain of Honey Hunter World remains accessible, with the trademark acknowledgement at the bottom changed to something else. The main website, however, remains down.
Honey’s post on the website also includes a copy of the said alleged notice sent from Mihoyo. The message claimed IP infringement, stating that the wiki broke Genshin Impact’s end-user agreement, which prohibits anything that would “copy, reproduce, adapt, reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, or otherwise create derivative works based on any of the Mihoyo services”. The message also noted that Honey Hunter World contained and displayed “openly the confidential statistics and copyrighted works” of its game package as well as “materials that have not even been published” by the developer yet.
The reported message wraps up with a request for the hosting provider to intervene or prevent the infringing conduct, and that it stop hosting the website or invalidate the link to the game’s subdomain. Since the publication of the initial post, it’s been updated to allege that Cloudflare has received a similar notice.
Honey also says that removing the primary domain of Honey Hunter World would “obliterate” all of their “websites and web projects”. The website does host a popular subdomain that focuses on Genshin Impact, but the site on the whole also has content for other games like Monster Hunter and Remnant from the Ashes. What’s likely caught Mihoyo’s eye, though, is the inclusion of leaked item, enemy, and character data for the anime game.
We reached out to Mihoyo for comment and received the following:
“For the past few months, the Genshin Impact team has been committed to stopping individuals and third parties from using our copyright works and materials that we have not officially released. We have been following up on the case and we have further clarified our requests that any undisclosed information of Genshin Impact shall be removed and shall not be published again on honeyhunterworld.com.
“Disclosing unpublished copyright content without our consent is not only an infringement of our intellectual property rights but also harm to our players’ experiences. The Genshin Impact team does not tolerate leaks and we will continue to pay close attention to relevant cases.”
While not in direct response to the statement, Honey has discussed the topic of trademark ownership and leaked content in the website’s Discord group. The developer believes that no one on the team is “subject of NDA”, and that Mihoyo’s enforcement of its trademark ownership strays into a “grey area” in law, “meaning Mihoyo imply they can cancel anyone who is doing game-related content”.
We’ve reached out to Mihoyo and Honey for more information, and will update this story if we receive an update.