In June, Love and Deepspace took about $38m across the App Store and Google Play. In July it took just over $10m, mobilegamer.biz reported this week, citing Sensor Tower. The game slid to 16th in the monthly gacha rankings, having never before dropped out of the top five.
Put that against its own history and it looks worse. The game had never previously taken less than $30m in a month since launch. July came in at roughly a third of that floor, and about a sixth of what it made in July last year.
Between those two months the publisher did everything its angriest players asked. It cancelled a character eight days after announcing him. It promised never to add another love interest, apologised twice, and withdrew from China’s largest games convention. The concession is the story. So is the fact that it did not work.
Eight days from reveal to deletion
Love and Deepspace is a 3D otome game from the Shanghai studio Papergames. Abroad it runs under Infold, the overseas brand the studio set up in 2022. Otome games are romance games written for women. This one has passed 80 million downloads and topped the App Store grossing chart in more than 40 countries.
It is also not the China-only product some coverage assumed. AppMagic estimates it took about $933.7m across its first two years. Roughly 60% came from China, 13% from the United States and 9% from Japan. More than 40% of the money came from outside China, a figure that matters later.
On 22 June the studio revealed Valko, a werewolf and the sixth romanceable character. The reception split immediately and it was measurable. On the Chinese platform carrying all three character films, his took 51,800 likes against 306,700 comments. Caleb’s, the previous addition, had 202,800 likes and 16,300 comments. Comments outnumbering likes six to one is not enthusiasm.
The English marketing leaned into the predator framing rather than away from it. One trailer asked “Who’s the prey?” A second opened on the observation that in every fairy tale, hunters are wolves’ worst nightmare. Both carried giveaways, $50 each to five people for a follow and a repost.
What deleting a character looks like
By 30 June he was gone, and so was any prospect of a seventh. Caleb is now the last love interest the game will ever have. Infold set both of Valko’s trailers to unlisted on its official YouTube channel, Anime Corner reported. Version 6.0 shipped on schedule without him, and the menu slot that had read “coming soon” since launch is simply empty.
The official site tells the same story. Its character section runs the cast one at a time, each with a full profile: Sylus, Caleb, Zayne, Rafayel, Xavier. Five live characters, five entries. There is no sixth.
The objections were not what the West heard
In English this was largely reported as Chinese players rejecting a character for looking too foreign. Some of that was real. It was also the smallest part of it.
Three pieces of marketing landed in the same week. A kitchen feature was promoted with the line “absolutely do not bathe in the pot” over an image of a boiling pot. Players read it against a 2024 femicide in Shaanxi, in which a man killed his wife by forcing her head into scalding broth. That case had already become shorthand in a long-running national argument about domestic violence.
Valko’s trailer used the idiom 引狼入室, to invite the wolf in, which means bringing disaster on yourself by letting an enemy through your door. His character concept has him climbing through the protagonist’s window at night and getting into her bed.
The third was a file number. An archive code, A-0731, sat on a document in a storyline about human experimentation. Unit 731 was the Imperial Japanese Army unit that ran lethal experiments on Chinese civilians in occupied Harbin. It is taught in secondary school and has a national museum. The code had been live in the game since an update on 21 April.
The fix is what ended the argument
Infold said the number meant nothing and swapped it out. That is where the company lost the room. It replaced 0731 with 0611.
0611 is also a wartime atrocity date. Players identified it as the Daojiao massacre, in which Japanese forces killed more than 260 civilians with poison gas in Dongguan in 1941. Chinese outlets including Sina were covering the replacement within days. The Chinese client got the patch. The Japanese client kept the original number.
That is the whole problem in a single edit. One unlucky number is an accident. Picking a second atrocity date as the fix, after the first had already caused a national argument, is not.
What the company said in its own defence
Infold’s formal answer came on 29 June, stamped with the company chop. It is worth reading, because it is the last thing the company said before it surrendered.
The number was a fictional date and meaningless placeholder text, it said, and would be changed that day. It conceded the episode exposed “insufficient sensitivity” among some staff and promised more training and tighter internal review. The kitchen line, it argued, was horror-styled copy for an upcoming feature, and it deleted the material anyway.
Then it went further. It denied that Valko was customised for foreign markets. It called the claim that the game was going all-orientation absurd. His name, it explained, comes from a Slavic root meaning wolf. It alleged that accounts were fabricating chat screenshots and running organised disinformation against it, and said it would pursue the matter to the end.
That was a company preparing to fight. Valko was cancelled the following day.
The promise that lasted three days
The English account had already made a different kind of statement. On 27 June the studio wrote to players that Valko and his content were part of the long-term content plan for the game. It acknowledged that the announcement had left people worried about everything else.
Then it went further than it needed to. The stories, companionship and future of every love interest would always remain an essential part of those plans. “This will not change for any reason.”
It changed on 30 June. The letter that cancelled him scrapped the launch and all further development, and committed the studio to never adding another love interest. The team had moved forward with Valko before it was ready, it said. It began paying compensation the same day, a free pull daily for 30 days.
Readers on X attached a note to that letter quoting the earlier promise back at it. The note was rated helpful on 24 July.
Eight minutes after the letter, a second notice went up. The studio’s Anime Expo 2026 plans would now centre on the five remaining love interests, and it listed them: Xavier, Zayne, Rafayel, Sylus, Caleb. Players who had booked a session with Valko kept their place. New arrangements would follow by email.
The money argument almost nobody translated
Underneath the culture war sat a colder grievance that predates Valko entirely. The main story advances one character at a time, and some wait a long while for their turn. Players complained that one had gone more than 500 days without an update, TechNode reported, while others were still waiting on chapters. Card banners kept arriving anyway.
The game sells randomised character cards. Writing the day after the reveal, NetEase reported what players cared about most. Would a sixth man further dilute the storylines, card art, events and pull resources going to the existing five? Players warned the cost of drawing any specific character would rise, and asked for a ban option or a fragment exchange to protect single-character players.
They got neither. Infold’s first move was to buy its way out instead, apologising for the presentation and handing every player the equivalent of 20 free pulls while keeping the release date. Europe is closing in on this business model from a different direction, with the EU expected to restrict loot boxes outright.
What the ministry actually argued
On 8 July an outlet run by China’s Ministry of Public Security published a piece arguing that romanticising intrusion is not acceptable in an online game either. It described a game aimed at women in which the male lead breaks a window at night and enters the home of a woman living alone. It never named Love and Deepspace.
The argument was narrower than the controversy around it. It set the historical material aside completely and stayed on the break-in. Chinese law protects the right of residence, the piece noted, and illegal intrusion carries up to three years.
It also leaned on a claim most Western researchers abandoned years ago, citing a 2018 case in which a 15-year-old killed his 23-year-old neighbour after immersing himself in a violent game. The causal link is contested. The regulatory intent behind reaching for it is not.
The timing settles the bigger question
Valko was cancelled on 30 June. The ministry piece ran on 8 July, and it states that the character and the plot had already been taken offline, calling that a response to public concern. It was written about a decision somebody else had already made.
State media including China Women’s News and Beijing News had run critical pieces earlier, and more than 60,000 complaints reached consumer regulators. Chinese financial press reported at the start of July that no formal investigation had been opened. Shanghai’s market regulator reviewed one complaint and found no breach of content rules.
When Chinese regulators do formally move against a consumer platform, it looks like the $765m antitrust penalty handed to Trip.com in July. Nothing of that sort happened here.
And the state is not speaking with one voice
A week after the ministry piece, a very different argument appeared in Chinese state-adjacent media. On 15 July an article carried by Sina Games and the National Development and Reform Commission’s reform news outlet asked how Chinese games should convert global feedback into content.
It counted the petitions rather than dismissing them, noting more than 240,000 signatures and 80,000 comments on the main page, plus three further campaigns on another platform. It set out the AppMagic revenue split. Then it made the point Infold had not.
Companies have more tools than launching immediately or cancelling permanently, it argued, including delay, rewriting text, adding narrative build-up and targeted testing. Whether Valko returns should be Papergames’ judgement, based on content quality and market data. Shutting down a content direction with proven demand, it warned, can cost a company not just a character but the users already gathered around one.
The other revolt, and what it did instead
The second campaign is the strangest thing here, and almost nobody outside the fandom has looked at it properly. Players signed a petition that has passed 252,000 signatures. They also stopped playing, and the boycott was explicit.
The campaign knew exactly which lever it was holding. One organising account spelled the logic out to its followers. Infold is a company rather than a person, it argued, and the only language it reads is revenue. Unfollow, do not log in, do not spend. “It took 8 days to bring down Valko,” it wrote. “We’ll need at least that to bring him back.”
Then it became a fundraising operation
The Wolf Conservation Center in New York took more than $29,800 from Love and Deepspace players, arriving as 384 donations from 54 countries and 339 symbolic wolf adoptions. Players raised over $20,000 more for other wolf charities. Chief executive Leila Wetmore called it “a global act of generosity for wildlife conservation”.
The geography of the rest is the interesting part. Players bought billboards in Taiwan, Thailand, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, and ran billboard trucks around a Times Square meetup, Kotaku reported. One group raised money for Shan Shui, a Chinese conservation NGO, explicitly to show Chinese players goodwill, and cleared its target in 25 hours.
Another funded Extinción Cero, a Mexican NGO working on the grey wolf, of which roughly 102 remain in the country. The sanctuary let them name a rescued wolf Valko, and posted its own thanks, saying it was glad to see how “a story can inspire empathy beyond the screen”.
That group then spent weeks trying to actually hand the money over. Chinese rules on foreign donations to domestic NGOs got in the way, then a typhoon hit the recipient’s region. They kept going. It is a lot of administrative effort to express goodwill towards people who had just deleted your favourite character.
The campaign that ran inside China
The most striking one ran inside China. Fans raised 300,000 yuan for flood relief in Guangxi in the character’s name, buying drinking water, bedding and food for a region hit by sustained rain. Sina reported it as goodwill that reached beyond fandom, and noted the organisers published every line of the accounts.
That coverage ran on 8 July. So did the Ministry of Public Security piece. Chinese media spent the same day writing warmly about the people campaigning for the character and coldly about the marketing built around him.
One loud faction, and one quieter one
Chinese players who wanted Valko built something different. They set up a site where they uploaded their own spending receipts, some showing six-figure sums in yuan, as evidence of what the company was writing off. Opponents mass-reported the organisers into account restrictions.
The campaign against Infold also turned physical. Aftermath reported that players sent animal waste and funeral wreaths to the Shanghai office, and that the company posted security guards and cordoned off part of the pavement. China’s internet regulator published draft cyberbullying rules on 29 July, aimed at platforms rather than games.
That breaks the tidy version of events. This was never China against everybody else. It was one loud faction against a quieter one inside the same country, plus an international playerbase that got no vote at all.
The contradiction is worth holding rather than resolving. Tens of thousands of dollars went to conservation, some of it aimed squarely at China, in the name of a character whose marketing a state security outlet said romanticised breaking into a woman’s home. Both of those things are true about the same campaign.
Where it stands now
Infold came back on 3 August with a gacha banner, a limited Caleb card running from 5 to 14 August. It has stayed on routine content since, announcing fan art contest winners on 6 August and a light character feature two days later. None of it mentions any of this.
The banner post drew 6,900 replies against 6,200 likes, on 1.2 million views. Replies outnumbering likes on a promotional post is the same inversion that showed up on Valko’s concept film in June. They are hostile in Chinese, Japanese, Korean and English simultaneously. The cancellation letter has been seen 30 million times.
The game’s own news page tells the same story more quietly. Valko never appeared on it at all, not at his reveal and not at his cancellation. The post it published on 30 June, the day he was deleted, announced a banner. Nothing has gone up there since 8 July.
The precedent is the product
The lesson the industry will take from this is that a loud enough campaign wins total capitulation. That reading is dangerous precisely because it is incomplete. The faction that won did not win on volume alone. It won by attaching a product complaint to subjects the Chinese state cannot be seen to ignore, in a market where content review is a state function.
The more useful lesson concerns what these games actually sell. Papergames spent six years engineering intimacy, down to a period tracker and a sleep companion mode. Its producer told a GDC audience the goal was for the characters to do what real partners cannot. A company whose product is trust has no cheap way to spend it.
China demonstrated the same thing this year from the regulatory side, switching off millions of AI companions and giving users three months to screenshot what was left. Nobody experiences a roadmap decision about a synthetic partner as a roadmap decision.
Nobody has actually answered the question
Reasonable people are still arguing about what happened here, and the honest position is that it is unsettled. One side says a company with a broken review process romanticised a crime in a game sold to women, and got the response it earned. The other says a character with years of work behind him was killed by an organised campaign, over a placeholder number and a piece of copy.
Both accounts fit most of the evidence. Infold’s own conduct supports the first. The state’s own economic press has since made a version of the second. One detail sits awkwardly with either. The archive code that did the most damage had been in the game since April, two months before Valko existed, and deleting him did nothing about it.
Two things will settle the rest, and neither has happened yet. Whether the five-love-interest pledge survives contact with the revenue line, and whether August recovers. The cancellation letter did put dates on the rest of the year, and those are checkable. Caleb’s main story branch in September. Sylus’s in November.
There is a third question players keep asking that nobody has answered. Every love interest so far has carried part of the main plot, and Valko arrived attached to a corporation already tangled in it. Does the story now get rewritten around the gap? Does his company get quietly scrubbed with him?
Infold has not said.
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