Popular Genshin Impact wiki taken down following alleged legal notice from MiHoYo

Genshin Impact wiki Honey Hunter is being taken offline following alleged legal notice from game developer MiHoYo.

The site's lead developer, known as HoneyDodogama on Twitter, announced the takedown this morning. "I am taking down the website within 24 hours," they said at 8:43am ET Friday, September 10. "Stay tuned for further notice."

In a post to Honey Hunter itself, the developer shared the notice reportedly sent by MiHoYo to Honey's internet hosting provider. We've reached out to MiHoYo to confirm the notice, but its verbiage lines up with previously reported takedowns.

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The notice alleges that Honey Hunter, which publishes leaked item, enemy, and character data shared by Genshin Impact beta testers and dataminers, breaks Genshin Impact's end use agreement. This agreement specifically prohibits anything that would "copy, reproduce, adapt, reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise create derivative works based on any of the MiHoYo services." The published notice also points to the disclaimer in Honey Hunter's footer, which acknowledges that all image and data rights belong to MiHoYo.

Genshin Impact update 2.2 — (Image credit: MiHoYo)

Honey Hunter's developer claims that, if successful, this takedown would "obliterate all of my websites and web projects" beyond the Genshin branch of Honey. The main version of Honey Hunters, for instance, is dedicated to Monster Hunter World guides and updates.

It's also worth noting that the Genshin version of Honey Hunter is more than a dedicated leak hub, though that's how many users likely think of it. It's also used as a wiki for Genshin Impact as a whole since it collects a range of data from the live, official version of the game. However, it seems that the comparatively few posts dedicated to leaked information were enough to prompt this takedown. For comparison, the Genshin Impact wiki hosted by Fandom, which contains little to no leaked information, has seemingly weathered all of this just fine.

Honey Hunter's pending takedown follows an exodus of leakers among the Genshin Impact community. Several well-known social media users (many of whom have deleted their accounts) recently bowed out of sharing leaked beta information, purportedly due to increased litigious activity from MiHoYo, which has been battling leakers since the game's launch. The studio's gone as far as revealing upcoming characters months in advance seemingly to get ahead of beta testers who inevitably leak new characters. Upcoming character Sangonomiya Kokomi, for instance, has been heavily showcased in leaks for several weeks now, and the newly announced character Thoma is already making the rounds.