Recently, we reported on a major controversy in the Genshin Impact community involving the latest rewards for the game’s Chinese New Year celebration. Fans were receiving three extra wishes to celebrate three years of the game, which many perceived as underwhelming, especially compared to other HoYoverse games like Honkai: Star Rail. Unfortunately, this has caused certain users to stir up misinformation about HoYoverse, including a pointed claim that HoYoverse has been “censoring” content creators.
The Truth of HoYoverse Censoring Genshin Impact Creators
To provide some context, content creator Mujin published a tweet, claiming that HoYoverse is “actively taking down videos of smaller creators talking about the [controversy] on Douyin.” They also went on to claim that a major Chinese content creator was forced to change his in-game name back to “Traveler” as a form of retaliation from HoYoverse. In general, the idea was that HoYoverse was aware of player discontent surrounding the game’s Lantern Rite Festival, and subsequently decided to take down posts and videos expressing this discontent as a form of censorship.
This claim always seemed a bit sketchy, but Reddit user /u/slazesonic released a response to these tweets explaining that many of the sources cited by Mujin are incidents unrelated to the Lantern Rite Festival. For instance, several videos struck down by HoYoverse did not have anything to do with the Lantern Rite Festival but were instead exposing Genshin Impact leaks. Additionally, notable Genshin Impact leaker Ubatcha revealed that the “Traveler” name change occurred in November 2023, not recently.
Mujin responded that “even the slightest risk of censorship deserves suspicion,” evidently standing by his initial claims. Regardless, the whole thing stinks a little bit of stirring up trouble where there isn’t any. No matter how you feel about the Lantern Rite Festival, you really aren’t at risk of having your discontent silenced by HoYoverse.
