HoYoVerse has gone after Ubatcha, a notorious leaker of Genshin Impact. Ubatcha’s Discord was the main forum for HoYoVerse’s ire, but as of right now, this may be the last we get spoilers for future banners and other content from him.
Ubatcha was a particularly notable Genshin Impact leaker, so much so that we have also covered his leaks. In September 2021, he was part of a group of leakers confirming that the game would stay in Inazuma for a little longer than expected. In April of this year, he revealed that Itto and Xiao would once again be available to draw in banner reruns.
While fans enjoy getting spoilers and news leaked early, video game leaks do have the potential of ruining the marketing of these same video games. Game companies can find that the potential of getting more attention for their official reveal events and announcements get seriously compromised when fans leak their plans early.
In the case of Genshin Impact, the game has been particularly notorious as vulnerable to being leaked frequently. As you will see below, HoYoVerse has actually been quite lenient for a long time, but they have seemingly had enough.
Ubatcha’s Discord server and his subreddit received DMCA takedown notices in July 2022. However, Ubatcha continued to share leaks for the game in the months leading up to today.
In November 2022, HoYoVerse’s parent company Cognosphere sent a subpoena to Discord to finally put a stop to everything. Discord must now share all identification information they have on Ubatcha, including his name, phone number, and address. Discord also has to remove all copyrighted material that Ubatcha uploaded to their servers.
HoYoVerse was particularly quiet about this issue this whole time, so we don’t really know the full story on this decision. It may be the case that the company has something big planned in the near future that they don’t want spoiled. For example, if the company’s long promised port of Genshin Impact to the Nintendo Switch is finally getting released, that would be worth taking the effort to suppress leakers.
We also don’t know if HoYoVerse has plans to go after other leakers as well. Ubatcha may have been targeted for some particular leak that cost the company dearly. HoYoVerse may have also simply chosen to single him out, to make an example to other leakers.
Whatever the case, this should deter other leakers from acting on any leads for Genshin Impact in the near future.
Source: Siliconera
