Cognosphere has announced that they will start enforcing age verification on Genshin Impact.
They shared this message on the official Genshin Impact website:
Dear Travelers，
We are required by law to age verify US player accounts. The age verification process will be rolled out to all US players by May 20th while login (if already have one) or account registration.
Please ensure to provide your age information by July 18th, 2025. Failure to verify will result in:
– Account suspension
– In-game friends and chat records will be deleted
– No further notifications post-suspension due to inaccessible account information as required by law
If the verification is not completed by July 20th, 2026, the personal information of your HoYoverse account will be deleted permanently.
Curiously, Cognosphere doesn’t give a complete explanation of why they are changing course. The US laws they are referring to were not recently passed or revised. As we reported at the start of this year, FTC successfully beat Cognosphere in court because they violated COPPA, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. This law was effective as far back as 2000, possibly older than when the developers who made Genshin Impact were even born.
FTC successfully proved several violations of COPPA, primarily because many of their players were underage. This included allegations that they were collecting data without notifying their parents, that they were selling to those children, and that they were selling loot boxes in the form of banner events.
These new rules apply to all platforms that have Genshin Impact, including PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on top of PC and mobile platforms. PlayStation and Xbox have their own parental control systems, so Cognosphere may opt to just use the systems on those platforms. But since Cognosphere also have their own account systems, we can’t guarantee that that will be the case. They may give users the option to choose between these systems.
In any case, this change may or may not seriously affect Genshin Impact’s profitability in the US. We don’t know how many of their paying customers are underage, and at least in theory, it would make more sense that they had more reliable whales in adult players.
A potential upside to this is that Cognosphere now has good reason to seek out a new audience among Nintendo fans. While they never got around to making that long promised Genshin Impact port to the Nintendo Switch, development may be easier enough that they could now pursue this idea on the Switch 2. And their new focus on meeting child safety standards means Nintendo is more likely to incorporate them to their platform.
