Nodusfall and Elden Ring: The Real Invoice Behind the 'Rip-Off' Accusation

Within 48 hours of the Nodusfall trailer going live, gaming forums in Seoul, Shanghai and Los Angeles filled with side-by-side images. On one side, a winged character from Nodusfall; on the other, Malenia from Elden Ring. On one side, a white-haired woman; on the other, Melina. The word appearing most often in comments was "rip-off."

On 25 February 2026, Bandai Namco announced that Elden Ring had passed 25 million copies sold since its 25 February 2026 release, after taking Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2026. That is the ceiling of the soulslike genre. Anyone entering the same aesthetic territory gets measured against that ruler.

I have spent most of my career reading football club balance sheets, where a sponsorship is booked at nominal value while the real cash flow sits in an appendix. This controversy has exactly that structure: an asset priced by emotion, while the contract goes unread.

HoYoverse, formerly miHoYo, was founded in 2026 in Shanghai. Its entire empire is built on one model: gacha plus anime style. Genshin Impact, released on 28 September 2026, is the flagship — according to Sensor Tower estimates, its mobile revenue passed the 5 billion USD mark in 2026. Honkai: Star Rail extended the same formula.

Three features of that formula are worth recording. Marginal cost is low: anime characters share rigs, shaders and animation pipelines, so each new character costs a fraction of the first. Revenue cycles depend not on units sold but on monthly conversion rates. And the target audience is the Asian mobile market.

Nodusfall breaks all three. Realistic graphics, a dark fantasy setting, no anime. Its core mechanic is co-op boss hunting for up to four players — a structure closer to Monster Hunter than to single-player soulslike design.

The industry picture is clear. Elden Ring reset expectations for open-world action RPGs. Since 2026, wave after wave of new projects have chosen the same combat style, the same world design, the same atmosphere. That is the genre meta, owned by everyone and by no one.

Regional context matters too. HoYoverse is China's most valuable game company; FromSoftware is the Japanese studio that defined the genre. The global gaming community is long accustomed to labelling Chinese developers as copycats, and this controversy fits that template. What is notable is that HoYoverse's advantage lies elsewhere: capital. A company with gacha cash flow can afford to hire talent, polish products and extend development timelines — something most independent studios cannot.

Start with the financials, because that is the most overlooked part.

Producing a realistic character costs three to five times more than producing an anime character, depending on model detail, materials and lighting systems. It sounds like a technical footnote. It is actually a change in business model. When marginal cost rises, a company cannot offset it through character volume; it must offset it through price or through the scale of one-time paying players. HoYoverse is leaving the economic zone it mastered.

Second, reusable assets. HoYoverse's entire library of characters, animation, effects and tooling was built for anime style. A realistic project inherits almost nothing. On the balance sheet, that is a wholly new investment, not an extension of an existing asset.

Third, revenue structure. Gacha lives on monthly top-ups. Buy-to-play titles live on week-one sales. Elden Ring sold 25 million copies but generates no meaningful recurring revenue. If Nodusfall follows a buy-to-play model, HoYoverse trades steady cash flow for a single revenue spike, and concentrates all failure risk into launch day.

On mechanics, the distinction must be drawn. Four players hunting a boss together is not soulslike. Soulslike is a solitary journey in which death teaches you to read attack patterns. Group boss hunting is a problem of role coordination, damage splitting and positioning — closer to an MMORPG raid. Still-image comparisons ignore that entire layer.

Historically, every PvE genre has found its own route into esports: speedrunning, score attack, or seasonal competition. Monster Hunter never became a head-to-head discipline, but its speedrunning community is large enough to sustain its own tournaments. Esports is not football's rival. It is the mirror that exposes the entire spending habit of this industry. If Nodusfall goes the ranked PvE route, it will not compete with League of Legends or Valorant; it will compete in an entirely different segment.

The counterintuitive angle: the "rip-off" accusation is weak on evidence but expensive on brand — and the most expensive part has not happened yet.

Weak on evidence, because every comparison rests on still images from a single trailer. Not one second of real gameplay has been published. Copyright law protects specific expression, not genres. Soulslike combat mechanics, dark fantasy settings, even the winged-character motif are archetypes, not exclusive assets. A winged character recalling Malenia is an aesthetic matter; directly copying a model file is a legal one. No lawsuit has been filed, and the original analysis itself notes this is the opinion of part of the community, not an official conclusion.

Expensive on brand, because HoYoverse sells polish. A studio whose reputation rests on quality, once tagged as an idea thief, loses more than one title. The loss sits in trust for every other product in the same ecosystem.

The biggest risk is the second wave, arriving on launch day. If the game still feels borrowed then — in visuals and in play feel alike — the community will treat its initial judgement as confirmed. A wrong label attached early can be erased. A wrong label that gets confirmed stays forever.

This brings back the 2026 laboratory. When stadiums closed, Incheon United projected a 12 billion won gate loss. My six-person group tested four revenue models; two died. Virtual advertising on broadcast brought in 1.5 billion won within three months, and Seoul E-Land copied it afterwards. The asset already existed — only the report had never been written. A club does not need a full stadium to make money. It needs to know what an empty stadium is saying. Nodusfall is the same: if the differentiator is the four-player mechanic, that value has been inside the product all along, just never placed on the table.

Three things to watch over the next six months. First, the next gameplay reveal: if co-op play is demonstrated at length, the narrative shifts from "clone" to "Elden Ring meets Monster Hunter." Second, the response from FromSoftware and Bandai Namco: silence is the default, a legal statement is a signal of a completely different class. Third, pre-order data in Western markets, where the Elden Ring community is largest and most committed.

Every valuation model is wrong. The question is who it is wrong in favour of. For Nodusfall, being wrong on the optimistic side means the industry gains another variant of soulslike — a branch, not a copy. Being wrong on the pessimistic side means 25 million Elden Ring players have just taught the whole industry a lesson: copying the shell is easy, copying the design discipline is not.

If you are waiting for a definitive conclusion from me, you are waiting on the wrong person. I once built three versions of a valuation model for a single player, and all three were wrong in different places. The only way to learn what Nodusfall is, is to wait for release — and to read the real gameplay data instead of the image comparisons.