The encyclopedia · People & Management · Financial decision · 2025–2026
An intermediary pocketed miHoYo's creator payments until 100+ owed over ¥1m
Paid in full by miHoYo, intermediary Yunnan Haoxi left 100+ anime creators owed over ¥1m — miHoYo cut ties and blacklisted it.
云南昊曦文化传媒有限公司 · 2026-08-02
What it means today
Any brand that routes creator payments through an intermediary should treat the intermediary's solvency and honesty as part of its own risk — the creators it is trying to support are exposed the moment that intermediary defaults.
What happened
Yunnan Haoxi Culture Media, an intermediary in China's anime-content ecosystem, contracted dozens of 二次元 creators — illustrators and bloggers — to produce promotional content for the games of miHoYo, the studio behind Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. miHoYo paid Haoxi for the work under its contract.
From around October 2025 the promised royalties stopped arriving. Creators told 红星新闻 that more than 100 of them had formed a rights-protection group, with a preliminary tally of over ¥1 million outstanding; individual creators were owed from a few thousand to several tens of thousands of yuan each.
On August 2, 2026 miHoYo issued an official statement: it had set up a dedicated channel and reached more than 100 affected creators, had already settled with Haoxi in full per its contract, and had sent Haoxi a lawyer's letter demanding it resolve the creator arrears — to which Haoxi gave neither a solution nor even a response.
miHoYo therefore terminated cooperation with Haoxi and added the company to its permanent blacklist of partners, while saying it would keep supporting creators' legal rights and would cooperate with judicial authorities, providing needed materials and assistance.
Why it happened
- Haoxi sat between the brand paying for content and the creators making it, so the money flowed to it and stopped there — the party doing the work was never the party being paid.
- miHoYo's own settlement with Haoxi was complete, which meant the arrears were Haoxi's alone to pass on; the intermediary had absorbed the payments and withheld them from the creators.
- A lawyer's letter changed nothing because Haoxi's response was to go silent — no proposal, no communication — leaving creators with no counterparty except the principal that had already paid.
The lesson
When a brand pays an intermediary rather than the people who make its content, the intermediary's books stand between the creator and the money — and a silent default is the bill for that gap.
Aftermath
miHoYo's August 2, 2026 statement said it would keep helping affected creators pursue their rights and would cooperate with the judicial authorities, and urged any creator not yet in touch to contact official support for a dedicated caseworker within five working days. The company's games rely on a large 二次元 creator community, so the handling of the intermediary's default was watched closely by the ecosystem it contracts through.
Sources
- 红星新闻：二次元创作者被拖欠报酬 米哈游拉黑供应商 — 中国经济网
- 列入黑名单永不合作！米哈游回应合作方拖欠百余位画师、博主酬劳 — 大河报（荆楚网）
- 百余位创作者遭拖欠合作款，米哈游永久拉黑代理商云南昊曦 — 中原新闻网（鳌头财经）
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