Love and Deepspace gave its angriest players everything and lost 74% of its revenue anyway

Love and Deepspace grossed about $38m across the App Store and Google Play in June and just over $10m in July, mobilegamer.biz reported this week citing Sensor Tower ^[1][2]. In between, publisher Infold granted every demand its loudest critics made, which makes July an unusually clean test of what concessions actually buy ^[5].

The context makes it worse. The game had never taken less than $30m in a month since launch, so July came in at roughly a third of its own floor and about a sixth of July last year ^[4]. It fell to 16th in the monthly gacha rankings after never previously dropping out of the top five ^[3]. Month on month that is a decline of about $28m, or roughly 74% ^[25][26].

The sequence is short. On 22 June, Papergames revealed Valko, a werewolf and the sixth romanceable character in the otome title ^[9][6]. The reaction was measurable rather than anecdotal: on the Chinese platform hosting all three character films, Valko's drew 51,800 likes against 306,700 comments, where the previous addition, Caleb, had 202,800 likes and 16,300 comments ^[10]. Comments outran likes by about six to one on the new character and ran the other way by about twelve to one on the old one ^[11][12]. By 30 June he was gone, both English trailers were set to unlisted on Infold's YouTube channel according to Anime Corner, and Caleb was confirmed as the last love interest the game will ever have ^[14]. Version 6.0 shipped on schedule without him and the menu slot that had read "coming soon" since launch is now empty ^[15]. The official site still lists five characters and no sixth ^[16].

The concession solved the complaint that was cheapest to concede. English-language coverage largely framed this as Chinese players rejecting a character for looking too foreign, and the source reporting says that was real but the smallest part of it ^[17]. The larger objections were to the company's own copy and its own files: a kitchen feature promoted with the line "absolutely do not bathe in the pot" over an image of a boiling pot, read against a 2024 femicide in Shaanxi in which a man killed his wife by forcing her head into scalding broth ^[18]; a trailer built on the idiom for inviting the wolf in, attached to a character written to climb through the protagonist's window at night ^[19]; and an archive code, A-0731, sitting on a document in a human-experimentation storyline, live since an update on 21 April ^[20][21]. Unit 731 has a national museum and is taught in Chinese secondary school ^[20].

Then Infold said the number meant nothing and replaced 0731 with 0611, which players identified as the date of the Daojiao massacre, in which Japanese forces killed more than 260 civilians with poison gas in Dongguan in 1941 ^[22][23]. The Chinese client got the patch. The Japanese client kept the original number ^[24].

Deleting a character does not touch any of that, and it subtracts from the more than 40% of the game's first-two-year revenue that AppMagic estimates came from outside China ^[8]. Two apologies and a withdrawal from China's largest games convention did not restore the ranking either ^[5][3]. The July figure cannot separate the causes, but it does rule out the theory that the concessions were sufficient.

Watch the August numbers against the old $30m floor ^[4], whether the Japanese client's file number is ever changed ^[24], and how long a game with an empty character slot and a public promise never to fill it can hold its spending base ^[15][14].