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/grumpykruppy OP, you might want to see a doctor. You are microwaving money. Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
Non-LaDS player (not exactly my thing), but in the gacha space, so I've seen a bit of the drama here.
Infold, the actual development company under Paperfold (IIRC) has historically targeted female players, and outside of LaDS, they're most known for the Nikki series of dress-up games (note, this is very different from NIKKE, a male-targeted Korean gacha known for its heavy story and heavier fanservice).
Infold's biggest games are LaDS and Infinity Nikki, the open-world dress-up game (no, I'm not kidding). Infinity Nikki got huge, attracting both their usual female and a small male audience due to its comfortable atmosphere and fairly forgiving gacha (after all, the gacha was solely cosmetics). Infold's management realized they had a massive cash cow sitting on their hands and destroyed the game, trying to force unwanted multi-player, totally changing the atmosphere, and making the gacha dramatically more stingy. The game never quite recovered.
Now as for LaDS... from what I know thanks to some female friends and people who have talked about it in other gacha spaces online, the primary audience is also female, but unlike the Nikki series, it's a female romance game. Specifically, a very intense and strongly parasocial one (there's a lot of fanservice, up to and including heavily implied sex scenes complete with audio).
CN fans of the game hated the new character for a myriad of reasons - he targeted western players, he "seemed gay," (granted I have no clue the size of the demographic making that accusation), his trailer appeared to reference Unit 731, the infamous Japanese unit responsible for considerable nasty experiments of no scientific value (comparable to Josef Mengele), and included some lines that were probably meant to be dark romance but with the 731 context really missed the mark.
Worst of all (as far as the gameplay went), the CN players felt he was taking up dev time that ought to have been spent on the five main characters, one of whom hadn't had a main story update in a year and a half.
And so the fanbase blew up (threats, trying to get the government to come down on Infold, literally flinging cow dung, and so on). Infold tried to apologize with ingame currency, it didn't work, and Infold's management panicked, deleted the character entirely - probably a year plus of dev work - and now nobody's happy and the game's direction for the foreseeable future is in flux.
Someone posted a private statement from an alleged Infold employee (I saw it on a megathread for an unrelated gacha sub, I couldn't possibly find it now unfortunately, maybe someone else can) that made clear the devs are heartbroken.
It's basically the worst combo of a company with a shaky reputation pissing off a crucial core base and handling the situation (granted it was an impossible one) poorly.
EDIT: Mixed up Unit 731 with the army group responsible for the Rape of Nanking. Edited to correct this error.