BEIJING, June 30 — Papergames’ hit otome game Love and Deepspace is engulfed in what appears to be its most severe crisis since release, following the unveiling of its sixth romanceable male character, Ao Yin, and a series of contentious in-game content that has sparked widespread player outrage.
The controversy erupted on June 22 when the developer introduced Ao Yin during a surprise livestream. The character—a 26-year-old werewolf clan leader and technology conglomerate chairman—is scheduled to debut alongside Version 6.0 on July 9. But instead of excitement, the announcement triggered a torrent of criticism that has only intensified over the past week.
Player anger has coalesced around three core issues.
The first concerns Ao Yin’s visual design. His red-haired, wolf-eared appearance diverges sharply from the more realistic, East Asian-inspired aesthetic of the game’s five existing male leads. Many players have lambasted the design as inconsistent with the game’s established art style, with some deriding him as the “ugliest male lead in Chinese otome games”.
The second issue involves the timing of his introduction. The main storyline has gone more than 500 days without a major update, and several existing love interests have yet to receive new character chapters. Against this backdrop of what players call “insufficient production capacity,” many fear that a new character will further dilute resources and delay content for the five original male leads.
The third and most explosive controversy involves a piece of in-game text. In the “World Depths” storyline updated on April 21, players discovered a “human drug trial experiment file” labeled with the number “A-0731”. The number “731” immediately evoked the infamous Imperial Japanese Army Unit 731, which conducted lethal biological and chemical weapons experiments on human subjects during World War II.
Compounding the outrage, players noted that a character in the same storyline—a registrar named “Yan Song”—has a name that phonetically resembles “Iwao Matsui,” a Japanese army general classified as a major war criminal after the war. Critics accused the game of trivializing historical trauma and crossing a red line of national sensitivity.
The backlash was further fueled by promotional material showing Ao Yin breaking into the protagonist’s home, forcibly picking her up and throwing her onto a bed while she struggles, with dialogue including “Let me take a look inside”. A scene described as “gene anchoring, forced execution” left many female players feeling disgusted.
For a game that had built its reputation on respecting female players—even featuring features like menstrual cycle tracking—many saw this as a direct betrayal of its core values. “This isn’t romantic,” one player commented. “It feels like a workplace or real-life security threat”.
Papergames issued an open letter in the early hours of June 28, apologising for “shortcomings in how Ao Yin was presented and how information was communicated”. The developer promised that existing love interests’ storylines would not be affected and distributed compensation equivalent to 20 free character pulls to all players.
A second statement on June 29 offered further clarifications, insisting that “A-0731” was a randomly generated placeholder date with no intended meaning, and that “leading the wolf into the house” promotional text was merely thematic packaging for the werewolf character. The company also denied rumours of “region-specific characters” and “all-audience game” positioning.
Neither statement calmed the storm. The initial apology letter alone accumulated nearly 300,000 comments on Weibo, with the most upvoted responses rejecting the new character, demanding his removal, or calling for refunds. One popular comment summarised the sentiment: “Translation: We heard your feedback, we’re not changing anything. Here are some free pulls to brush you off”.
The game’s app store ratings have plummeted. Its Apple Store rating dropped to 2.0, Android app store rating fell to 2.6, and TapTap score declined to 2.8. Player reviews have been flooded with negative feedback.
Beyond the numbers, industry observers note a deeper crisis: the erosion of trust between the developer and its female player base. Papergames had built its reputation over more than a decade on being a company that “understands women, respects women, and values female players’ emotional investment”. That trust, many now say, is collapsing.
As one analysis put it: “What players want to know is why a company that has grown on the emotional investment of female players would show such insensitivity toward women’s safety, historical trauma, and the boundaries of intimate relationships”.
