BSide: Olivia Lin (miHoYo)
BSide: Olivia Lin (miHoYo), miHoYo's AI virtual-girlfriend desktop app — music and letters, Steam Early Access, died 2026-08-31 (announced 2026-08-11). Users got 20 days' notice. Cause of death: 'In accordance with our product roadmap and future plans' — the entire explanation. Twenty-nine days into Early Access.
- Born
- 2026-07-13
- Died
- 2026-08-31 (announced 2026-08-11) · 49 days
- Cause of death
- 'In accordance with our product roadmap and future plans' — the entire explanation. Twenty-nine days into Early Access.
- Notice given
- 20 days industry standard
“The Genshin studio built a girlfriend, shipped her free, and gave her seven weeks.”
The obituary
BSide: Olivia Lin was miHoYo's first AI companion product — from the studio behind Genshin Impact and Honkai, which is why anyone noticed. It launched in Early Access on Steam on July 13, 2026, free, as a desktop app: a near-photorealistic character named Olivia Lin (林离), a Shanghai piano major with a psychology minor, who lived on your desktop, performed music, answered letters you wrote her, and took MIDI uploads to play. Generative AI ran the conversation; the presentation was pure miHoYo. Players liked it — more than 1,500 Steam reviews at 'Overwhelmingly Positive' within weeks, by AUTOMATON's count.
On August 11, 2026 — day 29 of Early Access — miHoYo posted the end-of-service notice: 'In accordance with our product roadmap and future plans, BSide: Olivia Lin will officially cease operations.' That is the whole reason given. An offline build shipped August 27 at 15:00 Shanghai time, keeping the performances and the desktop wallpaper but disabling everything that touched a server — letter-writing and MIDI upload. On August 31 at 15:00 the game came off the Steam store and the servers went dark; letters and MIDI files not backed up by then were not carried into the offline build. Forty-nine days from launch to burial; twenty days' notice, which in this industry counts as decent.
Nobody at miHoYo said why, and we don't claim to know. We note the calendar: China's Interim Measures on anthropomorphic AI interaction services took effect on July 15, 2026 — two days after BSide launched — and within a week ByteDance, Alibaba, Tencent and NetEase had switched off their companion features (see the Great Uncoupling). A Shanghai studio shipping an emotional-attachment product with letters and a psychology-minor heroine into that month, then pulling it 'in accordance with our product roadmap' four weeks later, is a timeline, not a cause of death. The grave records the timeline.
The listing kept its word. By October 2, Steam's store data for the game (it was only ever offered in mainland China) listed nothing to download or buy, so whoever installed the offline build before August 31 has the last copies. They are still using them: reviews kept arriving after the shutdown, one on October 1, and the count stood at 2,220, 86% positive.
What it leaves behind: an offline shell, which is more than most of this graveyard got, and a data point for the tracker — the biggest game studio to enter the companion category so far lasted seven weeks in it.
Sources
- miHoYo: end-of-service notice on Steam (2026-08-11, Chinese)
- Inven Global — miHoYo's 'BSide' to End Service Just One Month After Early Access Launch (2026-08-11)
- AUTOMATON WEST — MiHoYo to shut down BSide: Olivia Lin less than two months after launch
Deaths, lobotomies, and vanishings are recorded as part of our tracking methodology — the newsletter carries the obituaries as they happen.