Why Love and Deepspace Just Permanently Deleted Its Latest Male Lead

Papergames, the developer behind the highly lucrative otome game Love and Deepspace, has just announced the cancellation of its latest male lead, Valko, amid social media controversy. The announcement came as a complete surprise, as it came just a few days after the character reveal, and it is almost unheard of for a game studio to discard months of development and public marketing in this manner.

The announcement stated that all future love interests are canceled, that other in-game systems will be updated as scheduled, and that the development team will focus on the stories and experiences of existing love interests. The announcement also included a lengthy apology to the Love and Deepspace community over the Valko controversy, but it did not go into detail about what the developer was apologizing for, other than hurt feelings and causing disappointment.

This cancellation is quite radical and unexpected, as it means all the development costs for Valko and all the creative effort that went into his character will simply be thrown away with no upside. It is also unexpected in a live-service otome game focused on romance to simply decide that no new leads will ever be added, as the expectation of new characters is implicit in the genre.

To understand this cancellation, one must look at the game’s primary revenue driver: the Chinese market, which accounts for roughly 60% of its income. The reveal of Valko sparked an intense backlash from Chinese players, with social media reports showing players sending cow dung, funeral flowers, curse banners, and other ritual items to the Love and Deepspace development office amid the controversy. The game’s official social media accounts have also reportedly lost 1 million followers across Chinese social media platforms. The backlash centered mainly on complaints about aesthetic choices and the gacha game economy, with a smaller number of complaints about specific cultural controversies.

The Love and Deepspace Valko Controversy: The Aesthetic Clash

The first set of complaints from players focused on the character’s appearance, with users criticizing the main character’s design as clashing with the rest of the characters. The existing 5 male leads are all designed to appeal to traditional East Asian standards of male beauty, with delicate features and elegant presentation. Compared to them, Valko has a more hyper-masculine, Western aesthetic with a rugged physique.

The Paper, a digital Chinese newspaper, reported comments from Chinese players describing the character as “ugly” and “out of place” with the existing cast, and others dubbing Valko the “number one ugliest male lead in domestic otome games.” Guancha Syndicate, a Chinese news aggregator, reported additional complaints from players questioning Valko’s role in the story, as they assume that Valko is associated with the EVER Group (the game’s main antagonist group), is a source of tragedies encountered by the other male leads, and therefore should not become a male lead himself.

Gacha Economy Fuels the Love and Deepspace Valko Controversy

Gacha games, and especially otome gacha games such as Love and Deepspace, rely on a delicate balance as players, and especially high-spending players or whales, invest a lot of financial resources and emotional energy into cultivating parasocial relationships with specific characters.

This means that any modification to the economy underpinning this foundation risks ticking off these players, especially those devoted to a single main character. Sina News reports that with the addition of a new character, single oshi players will see their chance of getting their favorite go down from 1/5 to 1/6.

This comes alongside other complaints: among the five existing male leads, the longest has gone 500 days without a main story update, resulting in a content drought. This erodes the players’ trust in the developer, as they feel that, instead of rewarding their investment in the older characters, the developer used that money to secretly create a sixth character.

Cultural Controversy

As the Chinese players’ community was busy mounting their offensive against the developers of Love and Deepspace and the now-canceled Valko, they also piled on more controversy over the previous aspects when they uncovered details in the game that showed cultural insensitivity. The first one was a detail in an earlier in-game update where a document titled A-0731 detailed trials of human experimentation, which was considered a reference to Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army during WWII and their egregious war crimes, bringing back national trauma for Chinese players.

Another incident was a denunciation by China Women’s News, an influential state-affiliated publication, which published an editorial criticizing a trailer that showed Valko breaking into a single woman’s apartment through a window at night and attempting to present this behavior as romantic. The editorial denounced the game for promoting a dangerous logic that rationalizes trespassing and predatory boundary-crossing as romance. It also denounced treating this as trivial entertainment as a betrayal of the game’s core demographic of female players, promoting behavior that puts their safety at risk.

Final Word

As much as this article has attempted to present the controversies surrounding Valko fairly, it is hard to ignore the root cause: the core Chinese player base simply despised the character’s design. Unfortunately, beneath that aesthetic rejection lies an uncomfortable xenophobic undertone, with Valko condemned not just for being “ugly,” but specifically for his Western features, which clashed with the refined East Asian beauty standards the fandom felt entitled to.

The subsequent outcry over the gacha economy and cultural sensitivities, while raising valid points, largely served as a weaponized justification for a fandom already furious about an intruding “foreign” aesthetic. Had Valko been designed to match the community’s tastes, it is highly likely these secondary controversies would never have erupted, or would have been quietly swept under the rug. Instead, they became the final nail in the coffin, forcing the Love and Deepspace developers into submission.

But in putting out the fire in their own backyard, Papergames has ignited a new firestorm from their global player base. For Western fans, many of whom actually welcomed a different character archetype, the apology and cancellation felt like a massive slap in the face. It sent a stark, frustrating message to the global audience: your voices and your preferences are entirely irrelevant when the Chinese market flexes its muscles. By bowing to extreme harassment and pressure, the developers attempted to save their domestic revenue, but they have permanently fractured the trust of the rest of their player base.

© 2023 Infoldgames