Since the game was released back in September 2020, a lot of Genshin Impact players have tried taking shortcuts by using various cheats. These cheats can grant various unfair advantages, from granting God mode to having all the items in the game.
However, cheats in Genshin Impact always seem to fly under the radar even though the game has a very active community. The main reason behind this is probably the fact that there is not a lot of in-game interaction between players as the game is more focused on a single-player experience.
According to a popular Chinese finance website named finance.sina, three people that were arrested back in 2021 for selling Genshin Impact cheats have recently been sentenced to up to four years in prison. According to multiple reports, this is the first time Genshin Impact cheaters were punished by serving jail time. The cheat creators have apparently sold over 40k access keys for their software and made an illegal income of approximately $300,000. A recent thread on Reddit about this matter revealed the person most responsible for the cheating received a four-year prison sentence along with a 50k fine.
His main accomplice apparently got 3 years and 10 months of jail time with the same fine. A third helper received the smallest punishment which includes 1.5 years in prison with a 10k fine. Multiple replies in the comment section claim that this is another reminder that HoYoverse is serious in their battle against cheaters and leakers. A big part of the community is still surprised about how heavy the punishment is considering that the game has no PvP modes.
However, a couple of fans have pointed out that some types of cheating like having an infinite amount of Primogems can be looked at as directly stealing from HoYoverse, especially if the cheat is spread over 40k players. Besides cheating, another big problem for HoYoverse is the fact that Genshin Impact's content keeps getting leaked before their official announcement. Even though HoYoverse seems to be against their content being revealed before their live stream events, it's safe to say that there can be some upsides. Leaks often generate tons of hype for new Genshin Impact characters which makes their official announcement even more popular.
A couple of months ago, a leaker was fined $78.000 for leaking footage of the Genshin Impact Version 2.5 beta phase. Apparently, one of the leaks contained their UID (Unique Identifier) which has allowed HoYoverse to track them down. However, this didn't have a big impact on the leakers and most of them have continued sharing the game's upcoming content.
Genshin Impact is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, and mobile devices. A Switch version is in development.
Source: finance.sina