Genshin Impact's creators shut down their AI companion just 29 days after launch — user chat histories will be erased permanently

The app BSide: Olivia Lin lived on Chinese Steam for exactly twenty-nine days. On August 11, miHoYo announced that the service would shut down on the 31st: the app will be pulled from the store, and its servers taken offline the same day.

Technically, this wasn't even a game — it was a free utility, an AI companion you could exchange letters with. And that correspondence is exactly what's about to be lost: all user letters and the MIDI compositions they created were stored on the servers, and will disappear for good once they're shut down. The offline version has to be downloaded before delisting, but it'll only retain music performance and live wallpaper features — the letter-writing won't survive past August 31.

The character is named Lin Li, localized as Olivia Lin in the English version. As envisioned, she's a Shanghai student majoring in piano with a psychology minor, who loves vinyl records, old films, and rainy days — an eternal student never destined to graduate. She played piano, could parse a user-uploaded MIDI file and generate an animated video of her own performance of it, and, most importantly, accepted letters: you'd describe what was on your mind, and get a reply written in the character's voice. Before arriving on Steam, Lin Li existed for almost a year on Bilibili as a series of motion-captured piano performance videos.

The launch itself can't be called a flop: 100,000 downloads in the first 24 hours and over 80% positive reviews. Which makes the speed of the shutdown all the stranger.

miHoYo hasn't given an official reason, but the context speaks for itself. On July 15, China's "Interim Measures for Anthropomorphic AI Services" took effect — a document issued by the Cyberspace Administration of China alongside four other agencies. The regulation covers bots with a "human-like personality" — text, voice, and video alike. Developers were ordered to strip out mechanics that induce emotional dependency, and explicitly banned from letting virtual interaction substitute for real human relationships. The rules also tightened pre-launch review, moderation, and protections for minors, and require services to remind users to take breaks. The government's reasoning centers on protecting mental health and social skills: regulators argue that someone accustomed to an endlessly agreeable digital companion risks losing the ability to empathize and resolve conflict in real life.

For the studio itself, this is already the second retreat in two weeks. On July 29, AnuNeko — an AI cat-girl companion from Anuttacon, the overseas company founded by miHoYo co-founder Cai Haoyu — shut down permanently. The project had run for about eight months, and users weren't left with any offline version at all; the official reason cited was a staffing shortage and resources being redirected elsewhere. The irony is that the company has no plans to abandon AI altogether — there have been reports of plans to pour massive sums into the field, just aimed at internal development tools rather than virtual companions.

There's a separate question of what happens to the people who got attached. This isn't new territory for the games industry: the cancellation of a single virtual character in Love and Deepspace led to thousands of petitions and a boycott. The difference is that character was at least written by actual writers and identical for every player, whereas here, every single user built up their own month's worth of correspondence — the exact thing getting wiped on August 31.

Would you write letters to a virtual companion knowing the server could just get switched off one day? Tell us in the comments.