As part of a special operation by the Chinese authorities aimed at combating piracy and cheating, three operators of cheat software for Genshin Impact have just been sentenced to prison.
We can regret it, but cheating and piracy are present in many online games, with the deleterious effects that we imagine for both players and game operators – some suffer degraded playing conditions, others denounce a miss to win. As the economic weight of the gaming industry increases in China, Chinese local authorities initiated a “special operation” in 2020 aimed at combating piracy, hacking and cheating, particularly in online games – led jointly by the national copyright administration and the ministry in charge of information technology, with the assistance of the main Chinese game operators.
In this context, an investigation by the Xuhui district police in Shanghai led to the arrest of three Chinese developers in June 2021: they were suspected of having designed a cheat program intended to Genshin Impactand to have marketed it between October 2020 and May 2021. In total, 40,000 copies of the program would have been sold, for an amount estimated at two million yuan (just over 290,000 euros).
They have just been presented to the district judges and the chinese press reports a verdict stating the conviction of the three defendants, who receive prison sentences for periods of one and a half to four years of detention. The severity of the sentence is obviously intended to be exemplary in order to deter any other operators of similar software.
At the same time, local authorities and game operators are carrying out information campaigns aimed at Chinese players, focusing in particular on the risks represented by the use of cheat software: the risk of being suspended from a game, but also and especially the risk of fraud by communicating personal data or bank details to the operators of this software.
