Players are pissed at Love and Deepspace and have made their dissatisfaction known through their wallets. According to the website Gacharevenue (I’ll give you three guesses what it monitors), Love and Deepspace‘s revenue has fallen off a cliff, going from $38 million in revenue for June to just $10 million in July. It’s the game’s worst performance in the last 12 months by several orders of magnitude, a drop-off so unheard of that it’s starting to actually make me concerned about the overall health and longevity of the game.
The first and easiest culprit to point to, the werewolf in the room, is the ongoing Valko controversy. Some players, including some of the most active participants in the game’s English-speaking Discord, have initiated a boycott, vowing not to spend any money until the developers release Valko from whatever hole they’ve dropped him in. There’s a genre of post in which players share screenshots of bank accounts with four and five figures, claiming this is the fun money they’ve held onto and will continue to hold onto until Valko is released, like some sort of gacha hostage exchange.
But players withholding their cash because they’re upset at Papergames for neutering the werewolf boy is only one part of a larger, more complex issue plaguing Love and Deepspace‘s pocketbook right now. The seeming antagonization of queer audiences is another part of it. Though you cannot have a gay relationship in Love and Deepspace, a game focused on big, beefy, emotionally sensitive men appealed to queer audiences that were eager to pay for content. They are less likely to do so, though, in light of recent reporting on Love and Deepspace events in North America.
Also at issue is the fact that Papergames is failing their larger player-base from a content standpoint. Simply put, a big reason players aren’t spending any money is that there’s not been much to spend money on. The game’s last big event, one that put the boys in remixed versions of classic movies, ended at the beginning of July. Since then, there’s been a rerun of previous content, then nothing. Papergames has attempted to mollify fans by giving away hella freebies, but that period is over, and the next new content event is focused on only one of the boys, giving fans of the other four nothing to do. (Congrats, happy for you Caleb girlies.) The main story hasn’t been updated in months and a new story for one of the love interests, Rafayel, that was promised for July failed to materialize. I know the Valko widows would love to claim responsibility for this incredible drop-off, and they certainly can claim a big part of it, but the real reason is that Love and Deepspace‘s developers seemingly cannot get it together and have left all of its fans, even me, wondering if the game is worth it anymore.