Chinese video game developer and publishing company MiHoYo has won a legal case against a “game boosting” studio, setting a new judicial precedent against in-game performance-enhancing hacking techniques that have long operated in a legal gray area in China.

A court in Shanghai ordered the studio, called Yumo, to pay 3 million yuan ($420,000) in damages to MiHoYo and issue a public apology, according to a Thursday statement by the game developer, which hailed the verdict as “China’s first legal case to classify cheat-assisted game boosting as unfair competition.”

All of Yumo’s game boosting service listings online have since been taken down.

“Boosting,” known as dailian in Chinese, is a common phenomenon in the world of video games and refers to players artificially inflating their in-game performance — for example, by hacking or hiring a third party to boost their ranking by playing on their behalf. The practice is not officially illegal in China.

Yumo provided hacking software for MiHoYo’s massively popular game Genshin Impact. The studio made 7 million yuan ($980,000) from more than 7.6 million orders — the largest profit from Genshin Impact-related services made by any game boosting studio in the country, according to the company’s statement. 

In its verdict, the court stated that Yumo disrupted fair play, undermined the Genshin Impact’s ecosystem, and increased risk to users’ account security. The move is part of a recent nationwide shift towards ensuring fair competition in the country’s rapidly expanding online gaming industry. 

Game boosting in China has in recent years grown from a niche offline service into a lucrative online market worth tens of billions of yuan. On the Chinese e-commerce platform Taobao, a search for “dailian” returns tens of thousands of listings, with most shops charging anywhere from a few yuan up to 100 yuan per task or level.

MiHoYo is not the only company fighting the practice. In 2023, the high court in eastern China’s Jiangsu province upheld a judgment in a lawsuit filed by tech giant Tencent against a China-based game boosting studio, ruling that the studio had engaged in unfair competition.

As of the first half of this year, the number of video game players in China totaled approximately 679 million users, generating 168 billion yuan in revenue, a historic high, according to a report by the China Audio-video and Digital Publishing Association (CADPA), China’s domestic video game publishing committee. Fierce competition among users has driven game boosting prices down and led to a proliferation of hacking tools in recent years.

Beyond undermining fair play, hiring game boosters also risks players being frozen out of their accounts. Xu Ruiya, a Genshin Impact player based in Shanghai, told Sixth Tone that her account was suspended by MiHoYo after she hired a booster who used hacking software to inflate her performance. She says that she may lose 3,000 yuan invested in in-game purchases.

Editor: Marianne Gunnarsson.

(Header image: VCG)