HoYoverse turns to the courts to bring down hackers
Anti Cheat Exploit – Popular Game Gives Hackers Access!
Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail publisher HoYoverse is suing a group of Genshin Impact hackers in Canadian court. HoYoverse (and its parent company Cognosphere) filed on November 28th in Canada's federal court, suing Joaquin Soriano and several other individuals, identified only by their online handles, for copyright infringement related to hacking tools.
The group created, sold and distributed Genshin Impact cheats called Akebi GC, Acrepi and Genshin XYZ, which give players in-game benefits such as attack modification, no attack cooldowns, unlimited stamina, teleportation and invincibility, according to HoYoverse. The Akebi GC tool is sold through a subscription: seven days for $7.99 and 30 days for $19.99, according to the lawsuit first reported by Torrent Freak and obtained by Polygon. (Acrepi is a free version of the same tool.) HoYoverse said it sent a cease-and-desist letter to Soriano, to which he responded, saying he would remove the copyrighted material. HoYoverse claims that the group actually didn't – and told their community that they are developing a new tool for Honkai: Star Rail.
HoYoverse said the cheat tools not only hurt the company's reputation, but also hurt it financially:
