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On April 17, Mihayou's new work "Honkai: Star Dome Railway", which is 10 days away from the scheduled launch date, released "< Honkai: Star Dome Railway> Fan Derivative Works Creation Guidelines V1.0" (hereinafter referred to as the Guidelines) on B station, Weibo and other platforms through the official information account "Pam's Favorites".
As always, Mihayou has maintained a more tolerant attitude towards Erchuang, indicating that users are allowed to freely recreate published content of the "Honkai: Star Dome Railway" series, and do not need to obtain authorization.
As a national service with 21.65 million pre-orders on the whole network and more than 10 million overseas pre-orders, the guidelines for the second creation were issued before the launch, which not only shows that Mihayou is confident in the popularity of "Honkai: Star Dome Railway", but also a more scientific and standardized performance of Mihayou's operation of the second creation ecology.
Individuals are still free, and business is more stringent
Of course, the prerequisite for direct use without authorization is that the creator needs to be for non-commercial purposes and uses, or only for small-scale profit, such as a single category of less than 300 pieces. If the creator is not an individual or a non-commercial group, and mass production, sales and other profit-making activities in the name of a company, studio and other legal entities are not allowed online or offline.
Mihayou is not blocking the possibility of large-scale fan art creation. More than 300 pieces, that is, fanworks that are planned to be mass-produced, commercialized, and sold, can apply for authorization from Mihayou by filling in the "Honkai: Star Dome Railway Fandom Peripheral Declaration Authorization Information Form (Mainland) V1.0" provided by Mihayou.
After obtaining authorization, creators will also be subject to some restrictions, such as must mark the word "fandom" clearly visible on the product page, must not use words such as "official cooperation", and must not directly use, change, or depict official materials.
Whether authorized or not, the second creation must also follow the rules that official materials such as models cannot be extracted and sold. Similarly, it is not allowed to directly produce and partially change the production of physical peripherals after extracting official content and making profits, as well as selling under the official name.
On the whole, Mihayou does not prohibit non-commercial personal use, as long as it is based on the purpose of communicating with friends or small-scale profit, Mihayou basically will not interfere with the user's self-entertainment.
However, for the part of commercial profit, although Mihayou gives a certain freedom, it is also limited to the scale of "no more than 300 pieces", and the proportion of the intellectual processing part of Erchuang is more strict - such as non-commercial personal use, you can directly use the official pictures, text, audio and video of "Honkai: Star Dome Railway", and even refer to the official CG as a model, but commercial use requires authorization declaration.
Of course, whether it is commercial or non-commercial use, the extraction model and CG belong to a minefield, which may be related to infringement such as unpacking of model extraction.
The old rules + new rules are essentially to encourage players to create
In fact, Honkai: Star Dome Railway is not Mihayou's first game to release similar guidelines for the second creation. In April 2021, Genshin released the "Genshin Doujin Surrounding Mainland Area Trial Operation Guidelines V1.0", which was supplemented and updated to "Official Operation Guidelines" in September of that year, and updated to version 1.2 in November.
Coincidentally, another product of Mihayou, Honkai 3, also released the "<崩坏3>Fan Derivative Work Creation Guide", which has also been updated to version 2.0 in October 2021.
Looking at the guidelines for the second creation of "Honkai 3", "Genshin" and "Honkai: Star Dome Railway", it is not difficult to find that although they are all far from the original intention of "not prohibiting non-commercial personal use", the more guidelines issued later, the longer they tend to become. Taking Genshin as an example, the number of words in version 1.0 is less than 2,000, and the number of words in version 1.2 is 4,000, doubling the length. By Honkai: Star Dome Railway, the first guide had more than 6,000 words.
It is often said that behind every safety regulation, there are lessons learned in blood. In the same way, the continuous and detailed guidance actually represents Mihayou's continuous exploration process of the second creation ecology, which is constantly supplemented on the basis of the simple "personal freedom and commercial authorization" in the past.
For example, the 1.2 version of the Genshin guidelines added that "the need to authorize all Genshin characters is not accepted", and the guidelines for "Honkai: Star Dome Railway" even added that trademarks containing the name or part of the Mihayou product cannot be registered, cannot provide triage downloads, cannot make plug-ins, cannot use leaked content, and cannot set up private servers, which seem to have little to do with the second creation.
Compared with the almost strict attitude of Japanese factories such as Nintendo, the new generation of game manufacturers represented by Mihayou is more tolerant in their attitude towards the second creation, but the lengthening of the second creation guide also seems to show that the player's whimsy is obviously beyond Mihayou's expectations.
However, we believe that Mihayou's attitude towards Erchuang will not change in the short term, and in the guidance, Mihayou also pointed out that for the healthy development of Erchuang and user creation groups, "Honkai: Star Dome Railway" has always adopted a supportive and encouraging attitude towards enthusiastic users and works.
The speech of Liu Wei, president of Mihayou, at the 2022 annual conference of the game industry, actually better represents Mihayou's true thoughts: "Only when players like the characters first, will they love the house and Wu... For the sake of love power generation, the second creation of the role is to share and promote with his friends. ”
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