In the age of AI, we are inundated every day with new stories of growing emotional attachment to artificial forms of companionship. From the wave of heartbreak that came from OpenAI’s shift to GPT-5.0 causing many to lose the personalities of their virtual companions, to the rise of VTuber influencers leading to Suisei hitting the front cover of Forbes Japan “30 UNDER 30” list, it’s clear that the hyperreality of the digital space has solidified itself as a respite for those who feel disillusioned with the current world.
The Otome of it All
Recently, I attended Animaga 2025, a Melbourne-based convention for fans of anime and Japanese pop culture. While touring the artist alleys and seeing the many fan works on display, my friends and I noticed that many of the mainstay series such as Genshin Impact and Final Fantasy XIV had been supplanted in their ubiquity by a new flirtatious contender. For those unaware, Love and Deepspace is a sci-fi themed Otome game from Chinese studio Papergames, known as much for Love and Deepspace as they are for their other flagship free-to-play offering, Infinity Nikki. Both games are focused on a primarily female audience, a woefully uncommon endeavour in the AAA space, despite women statistically making up close to half of all gamers in countries like the United States.
The “Game” of Love and Deepspace
Whilst the game has RPG elements, fighting mechanics, and the traditional trappings of a mobile gacha game, if you’re looking in from an outside perspective, it’s unlikely that you’ve even caught a glimpse of high-octane gameplay from the community. Rather, the drawcard through and through is the bonds that the player creates with the boys, or LADS as it were, that make up the primary cast. It is this bond that allowed Papergames to earn close to $1 billion in 2024 alone, a monumental feat for a studio in the F2P otome and dress-up game space.
Engagement Over Earnings
While the “fact” of that $1 billion in earnings is a jaw-dropping feat, it speaks to how people interact with gacha games, and how they nestle themselves into the daily routines of players. As free experiences from the outset, gacha games have no real barrier for entry, and their daily tasks and login incentives push players to return to the game frequently as a means of continuing to progress. This is nothing new, with games like Honkai Star Rail and Genshin Impact from Papergames competitor Hoyoverse being very successful recent examples of the business model, and mobile otome games like Shall We Date: My Sweet Prince dating back to 2011. What has changed, however, is the power of phones, and in turn, the potential fidelity of these experiences.
Why The LADS Stand Out
Love and Deepspace stands out as a true 3D otome experience, where the boys can interact with you and weave their way into your life in a way that wasn’t quite possible with the 2D and 2.5D sprites of other series. It’s a serious undertaking, and even if it hadn’t become such a mainstay in fandom culture, it would still be a monumental step forward for what is possible in the genre. However, with all of these elements combined, coupled with a true “female gaze” approach to storytelling and virtual companionship, LADS has achieved a level of emotional connection that most F2P games could only dream of.
The thoughts I’m putting down were actually spurred by coming across a particular Reddit post from around 9 months ago, asking Redditors if they had been helped in overcoming loneliness by the game:
The responses to this post range quite considerably, but from many of the top comments, there is a poignant undercurrent of people feeling that they have been let down by the dating space, or that their attempts at interacting with men have never been able to provide them with the care that they need. This reflects a broader trend away from relationships, due in part to societal shifts like decreased opportunities for in-person interaction and a rise in singlehood, often driven by economic changes, changing social expectations about marriage and relationships, and yes, the impact of technology.
Microtransactions in the Age of Loneliness
The loneliness epidemic has been a part of modern culture for a significant portion of the 21st century, and gacha games like Love and Deepspace aren’t even the first dating games to be tied to growing concerns over relationship rates. Konami’s LovePlus+ from 2009 made headlines at the time when a man, known as Sal9000 “married” his Nintendo DS companion, Nene Anegasaki. The sense of media as a replacement for companionship is more broadly has a long history of being tied to otaku culture, with visual novels like Kanon (the trading card game for which I wrote a bizarre article on which can be found here) and Tokemeki Memorial forming a foundational basis for the types of relationship simulating visual novels that Love and Deepspace evokes.
One only needs to see the tearful memorials for Japanese racehorse, Haru Urara, from fans of the game Umamusume to see how these types of media have a legitimate impact on people’s lives. The “fact” of the gacha industry’s stronghold on the lives of young adults, particularly Gen Z and Millennials, is indisputable. What is in question is the nuances of ethics when it comes to systems financially incentivised to create parasocial virtual relationships with individuals that may be feeling isolated in other areas of their lives.
To quote a small study into the subject, “The Impact of Mobile Gacha Games on Generation Z Users in China“, Shuran Xi writes:
“In terms of emotions and social interactions, 69.64% of players believe that gacha games help alleviate negative emotions such as guilt, anxiety, helplessness, and depression. Besides that, only 37.5% report feeling anxious or lost when they are unable to play. T-test analysis reveals that while gacha games are effective at relieving negative emotions, they do not significantly influence sustained user retention (p=0.9). Notably, a strong correlation (p=0.019) exists between the frequency of game logins and the emergence of anxiety. The research suggests that players who experience anxiety when unable to access the game are more likely to log in daily.”
The relationships users form with gacha games isn’t a simple affair. Players gain a significant amount of comfort and routine from systems incentivising them to return, and there has been more than one instance in my research of Love and Deepspace players specifically showing how the game has allowed them to experience the aspects of a traditional relationship they felt they lacked in their real life experiences. At the same time, however, it is vital that we also understand that there are companies behind these incentives, and the free-to-play model does create a specific incentive to maintain retention at all costs which isn’t exclusive to the F2P gaming space.
The same incentive structure also exists in the subscription economy, wherein services that were once once-off purchases now require monthly payments, often maintained through deliberate tactics that make cancellation difficult, like hidden terms and complex processes, or by exploiting psychological biases, such as the Sunk Cost Fallacy and loss aversion, leading to forgotten services and uncontrolled recurring expenses.
What We Should Take From This
The moral of this story will depend on your perspective and your position, but as a marketing specialist in the digital field, I find that it’s important to remember the complex sociopolitical outcomes that are directly tied to any market actions. Providing the most value possible to an end user does often conflict with the financial incentive to ensure that your business remains viable. At the same time, the same psychological factors that can make an experience enjoyable and desirable to an audience can also have, to give the benefit of the doubt, “unintended” results when it comes to the financial and psychological health of those who become reliant on it.
This is an editorial, and just the opinion of someone who is both invested in media and ethical marketing practices. In other words, rather than making a specific judgement on this space, I hope that I can just get you to think about the role of media and businesses in the current social landscape. After all, with artificial intelligence promising a world of digital companionship on the horizon, these gamified gacha elements of addictive incentive structures may soon make their way into the wider world, and sooner than you might think.
