HoYoverse won its AI voice case and $112,000 is still too cheap

HoYoverse — miHoYo, if you're litigating in Shanghai — just won what local press describes as the city's first "unfair competition" case over AI-cloned game voices. A court ordered an unnamed AI voice company to pay ¥750,000, roughly $112,000, for reproducing and selling the voices of Genshin Impact characters without permission.

Good. Correct outcome. Also: $112,000? For Genshin? Let's talk about it.

What the defendants actually did

This wasn't some hobbyist posting Paimon memes. Per Chinese outlet The Paper (via Automaton), the company built a commercial operation on somebody else's cast:

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• 63 characters cloned. The service used generative AI to replicate the voices of sixty-three Genshin Impact characters — that's most of the playable roster — and sold them as voice packs.
• Marketed with stolen visuals. The company advertised its packs using Genshin's own character images and story animations, which the court said

"demonstrated an intent to capitalize on the game's popularity."

• Ordered to stop and pay on June 30. The defendant briefly appealed, then quietly withdrew the appeal sometime in the past few months.

Now, the math

Here's where the award stops looking like a deterrent and starts looking like a licensing fee nobody negotiated. At its peak, Genshin Impact was generating $1 billion roughly every six months on mobile alone — call it five and a half million dollars a day, before you count PC and PlayStation.

At that pace, ¥750,000 is about thirty minutes of Genshin's phone revenue. The first legal price tag for industrial-scale voice cloning in Shanghai: one lunch break.

The precedent matters more than the check — Chinese courts have now signaled that AI-cloning a game's audio and selling it is unfair competition, useful guidance for anyone doing business in the region. But note who's protected here: the corporation's copyright. The human actors whose recorded performances trained the clone don't figure into this ruling at all, and Western voice actors like Victoria Atkin and Tim Friedlander have been describing exactly this kind of unauthorized cloning of their work since 2023 — mostly without a court date, let alone a payout. The Shanghai ruling also explicitly does not touch the larger question of scraping copyrighted material as training data. That fight is still loading.

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