A Chinese court has ordered two people who leaked unreleased Honkai: Star Rail content from test builds to pay miHoYo 1 million yuan, the developer’s legal department announced on 28 October 2026. The court treated the test builds as miHoYo’s trade secrets, and the first-instance judgment has already taken effect, IT Home reports.
The defendants are identified only by surname. Yang ran a channel called Coffee Forest on Tencent’s QQ platform, where for a long period they posted test packages of unreleased versions along with instructions that let members set up and play the unreleased content. Guo repeatedly obtained test builds through improper means, unpacked them and posted large amounts of unreleased characters, skills and gameplay footage online. According to The Paper, the court found that obtaining test packages improperly, unpacking and disclosing them, and running a platform to spread them all amount to trade-secret infringement.
The judgment orders the pair to stop immediately, to post statements for 30 consecutive days on the home pages of their Bilibili account and of the Coffee Forest channel, and to pay the 1 million yuan jointly, covering economic losses and reasonable enforcement costs, according to Sina Tech. miHoYo had also asked for an injunction while the case was under way. The court issued it one day before a Honkai: Star Rail version update, ordering the two to stop disclosing or using the confidential test content as soon as the ruling was served. None of the reports names the court or says when the leaks took place. “Protecting creative work and safeguarding a healthy game ecosystem is the fundamental reason miHoYo insists on pursuing liability under the law,” the legal department said in its notice, as quoted by IT Home (our translation).
Trade-secret law instead of copyright
The Chinese case reaches much further than miHoYo’s best-known Western action. In December 2025 a US federal court in California awarded the company $16,500 in damages and fees against a Discord user who had live-streamed footage of the then-unreleased character Castorice; miHoYo had sought $156,600 under copyright law, and the judgment came by default because the defendant never responded, Game File reported. The new ruling is several times that amount, and it targets the source of leaks: the people who obtain and unpack test builds and the communities that hand them out, rather than people who repost the results.
Japanese readers got the story on 30 October through AUTOMATON, which put the award at about 23.7 million yen. For players outside China, leaked Star Rail characters usually arrive through Discord servers, X accounts and YouTube channels that sit downstream of exactly the kind of test-build sharing this judgment punished.