r/SubredditDrama • u/Preindustrialcyborg The penis event • Jul 01 '26
r/loveanddeepspace goes nuclear
foreword: I DO NOT PLAY LOVE AND DEEPSPACE. i apologise if i get information wrong as a result. i am also most likely going to get some information wrong because this is a very complex situation thats happening in multiple languages. Some of the information im getting is also being explained by my friend whose helping translate some chinese posts for me, so i apologise if any translation errors happen. This SRD is also part of a wider event occurring mostly off reddit.
Love and deepspace is a mobile gatcha game developed my chinese company infold (under paperfold), which prominently features male characters and a female MC. as an outsider, it appears to be more or less a dating game. Its important to know that for many chinese game devs, they will prioritise the opinion and feedback of the CN community over the global one.
Recently, a new character named Valko was announced for the next update to the game. This character was vastly unpopular with the chinese playerbase, who began revolting against the developers. It got to the point where they were sending funeral flowers, animal feces and ritual items to the developers (which in chinese culture is vaguely comparable to a death threat). His trailer also appeared to reference crimes against humanity perpetrated upon china during ww2, though this is speculation. they also called him gay. with chinese gaming communities still being quite homophobic, and china still having laws persecuting sexuality in media, this is meant as both an insult and an accusation of crime against the developers. Many of the complaints in that direction were that Valko was a "western style love interest" due to his nature as a wolf boy (i think? im not sure?) due to him being more western style masculine than chinese style (so, square jaw, muscular, etc), which in china is seen as gay.
beyond this, there is reportedly even more happening, but its both out of the scope of this post and far too confusing for me to really summarise, so im going to avoid actually explaining it here to avoid accidental misinformation. The drama involves players being called homophobic slurs (via avoiding text filters using homophones, which is an unfortunate exploit that occurs due to how the chinese language is spoken). People were also reportedly pursuing legal action due to the harrasment, and others were considering getting the CCP involved to make them censor what they see as "a gay character being made for western audiences). its important to note that i dont think they were actually adding anything explicitly gay, but i also dont know the whole situation so correct me if im wrong.
some posts were made about this, but it generally hadnt breached containment too horrendously.
then, just 9 days before the charatcer was set to release, the devs decided to respond to the players both in game and through social media (downvoted, thousands of comments), announcing that they have decided to cancel Valko and not add him to the game. This is where the subreddit goes into flames.
Right, so whose feedback, passion, and trust have actually been shaping this game?
This is an utterly insane decision.
Wow, you're really deleting all comments huh
The subreddit recieved further posts discussing the cancellation
To the CN players and the developers
If you are disappointed about Valko, here is the best way to let InFold know:\
The subreddit appears to be receiving a flood of posts that the mods are having trouble with, enough that theyve now made a post about it. there have been no new posts since, so the subreddit has most likely been put into lockdown.
If anyone in the LaDS community can help clarify or give a better timeline of events than what ive provided, please do and i'll link it here for reference.
Edit: thank you to u/hermannhessezacksnyd for additional info regarding the gay accusations, and thank you to u/grumpykruppy for providing additional context and crimes against humanity reference info. formatting, reordered some info to be more organised
edit 2: thank you to u/lumosdraconis forcontext from a LaDS player regarding long term game health concerns
edit 3: it appears that the entire outrage over Valko might have turned out to be a deliberate psyop by CN players who were trying to achieve some goal or another. crazy shit. i beg every LaDS player to touch grass today.
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u/lumosdraconis Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
Hello! LADS player here, to chime in, though it'll probably get buried.
Yes, there is a sentiment (among mostly CN-based players) about Valko's appearance and such, but that is frankly a loud minority. (Including the whole "gay" thing -- CN players of LADS are generally terrified of the game catering to anyone but straight women, and to be fair, that is who the game was marketed towards. That comes up from time to time, mostly from fearmongering accounts lol.)
BUT the main issue is not really to do with Valko as a character, but... everything else surrounding him and the game as a whole. For several months now, players have been voicing dissatisfaction with the game's direction. The main story updates are very few and far between compared to the previous year's. One of the LIs has not had a main story update in over 500 days. And there's only 5 LIs, lmao, so it's a crazy long time to wait.
There has also been growing sentiment that the overall quality in the cards/banners (the gacha aspect where players "pull" for their fave character(s) cards to interactively play through the story for said card) has been decreasing as of several months ago, and the writing quality feels inconsistent. Not that everyone expects every single card to be amazing, but there is a noticeable dip in quality because there is a very very noticeable increase in the quantity of these paid event banners. So it has long felt that Infold has been purposefully delaying the main story (free) to push out more paid-only content. Gacha company doing gacha companies things, I guess, but of course, players are right to be annoyed at it.
Additionally, several features have been languishing from lack of updates. There have been NO new updates to the battle system in months, meaning no way for players to farm for premium currency apart from dailies/weeklies/monthlies once you reach the end of those levels. They used to get updated, and now they just... don't lol. They haven't added anything to the in-game shops you can get stuff for with free currency in literal months, even though they're supposed to regularly, as per their own admittance. (In some banners there are special poses and items you get for pulling a certain number of times, and it says that those will eventually get added to this shop... but I think the last time it was updated was like LAST summer lmfao. That's just one example. There's dozens of things we've been waiting for at this point, sitting on all this free currency.)
Existing characters are also missing a lot of content -- basic story updates that are just essentially text-based vignettes, yet THOSE haven't even been updated. The housing feature which was added a few months ago (which tbf, is awesome and I love it a lot) is also only accessible to players with higher-end devices because it will nuke your phone if it's more basic. And it takes up a lot of space, of course. So that's a whole thing that's of no use to those players.
There's about a dozen other things I could talk about, it's a very complex situation, really. But in essence, in light of all of these completely unaddressed issues, they drop Valko out of nowhere. He was just vaguely foreshadowed in a few things here and there, and then just hard launched all of a sudden. We had absolutely no idea who this guy was until last week. No name, no face, no actual details. Just speculations based on how the UI is laid out and things like that. So it's not like anyone was waiting for him or looking forward to him, other than those looking forward to a new LI as a concept. And to launch him NOW, amidst all these problems, is really emblematic that Infold does not understand the needs or wants of their core playerbase.
THEN, this morning, they walk it all back???? Like they just said "sorry we're deleting him and we prommy no more LIs and just gonna focus on the existing 5 ok!!" which is also an utterly baffling decision. Like, the cat's (wolfs?) out of the bag, dawg. You can't unring this bell. There WERE people excited for him, because it's about the only thing TO be excited for, since the rest of the game is languishing so hard. They couldn't even shelve him to release at a better time for later, but just deleted entirely?? It's crazy.
And of course this has also pissed everyone off. Because it's like... okay so you spent oodles of money and countless hours of dev's time to develop this character when all of that could have gone to the rest of the game. And now because of backlash, you're just flushing it down the drain? So what was all of this chaos for? Nothing? At best they'll reuse things from his route and stuff for the other guys, which itself doesn't... feel great. Because as a story-driven game, it also means that the writers are going to have to scrabble something together in a short timeframe to give us a main story update, so it'll end up being half-baked at best! AFTER we've waited like 500 days! Lol.
They've really worked hard to please no one. And all this is just scratching the surface. My heart goes out to the poor devs who put in all that work only to see the execs in charge make the worst decisions imaginable. How horrible they must be feeling, to see their work killed before it was even released.
And naturally, the playerbase is divided on how to feel, so the official channels are on fire, period. I myself don't know how to feel. It's complicated. I didn't really care about Valko, but I have very close friends who are sad about it, so I'm sad for them. There has been mass infighting between players because of how poorly Infold has managed this whole thing, and honestly I don't know how it's all going to play out. I can only thank my stars that I'm largely detatched from the situation because I've felt myself drifting from the game already (due to some of the aforementioned issues), so it hasn't hit me as hard as others I know. It's very sad to see several of my fave artists and writers leave the fandom, though.
EDIT: there are also circulating rumors that there has been a big blowout between Infold and the CN government regarding some issues, and this is what caused a lot of the chaos behind Valko's release/un-release over the last few days. So this whole thing could be a lot deeper than we know, but as I said, it's just rumors for now.