The Chinese developer behind the hugely popular Genshin Impact mobile game has twice tried to evade Apple’s 30% cut on in-app purchases, according to a new report.
This is despite a close relationship between gaming giant miHoYo and Apple, including multiple awards, a personal visit by CEO Tim Cook, and two of the company’s games being featured during the iPhone 15 launch …
Genshin Impact
Back in 2020, Genshin Impact was awarded iPhone Game of the Year by Apple, and a year later also picked up Best Visuals & Graphics in Games in the Apple Design Awards. The company said that its “heart-pounding battle scenes and far-reaching landscapes push the visual frontier for mobile gaming.”
It was one of the first games to take advantage of the 120fps mode made possible by the ProMotion display in the iPhone 13 Pro and iPad Pro the same year, and a year later was named as the most downloaded action game.
Earlier this year, Apple CEO Tim Cook visited the company and met with the team behind the game, and just last month two more miHoYo games featured in the iPhone 15 keynote, as Apple used them to demo the AAA gaming capabilities of the A17 chip in the Pro models.
Developer miHoYo twice tried to evade Apple’s cut
But despite this symbiotic relationship, The China Project said that the developer tried to avoid paying Apple’s 30% cut of in-app purchases – not just once, but twice.
miHoYo’s own recent attempts to get around Apple’s rules started in August via its official community forum app Mǐyóushè 米游社, where fans of its flagship games — such as Genshin Impact and its latest release, Honkai: Star Rail — are given exclusive access to promotions and all things related to their favorite titles.
The move was low-key and discreet: Rather than launching and advertising a brand-new payment channel publicly, miHoYo reportedly instructed customer service staff to direct users to make in-game purchases via miHoYo’s website, where they could directly buy digital goods without Apple taking a cut in sales.
Apple responded by kicking the forum app off the App Store, but miHoYo wasn’t done trying.
On August 30, miHoYo unveiled a new mini-program in Alipay. Like its short-lived predecessor, the new payment method went live without much fanfare — except for brief postings about it on social media platform Weibo. Nonetheless, Apple disabled the feature for iPhone users on September 11.
That seems to be it for now, but gaming research company Niko Partners thinks that others will also try.
With its attempts to do payments itself, miHoYo has joined a growing cohort of global companies that “have been making a concerted effort to drive in-game purchases outside of traditional app stores to increase gross margins,” Ahmad told The China Project […]
[He added] “We do expect to see further challenges in the China market, too, not just from the games industry.”
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