r/gachagaming • u/ferinsy 🍎 夜幕之下 🐺 • Apr 18 '26

General Small drama afternoon: people are just now discovering that NTE's dating system only allows you to date women (making it probably the first Chinese yuri gacha)

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It's been known in China for a while, since the last beta (in February), but just today a video by iYatoOfficial is getting viral on Twitter and lots of posts gathering over 100k likes in total have brought it to the general public's attention that in NTE you can't date men, but you can date women as female MC.

It's actually a bit of a flirty friendship, but very clearly intended to be seen as dating since the interactions are a bit too intimate. You can set up to 5 girls to date.

While it flew over my head in February (even thought I often browse xhs and bilibili) due to its neutral reception, the negative reception today is really hard to ignore bc it's everywhere if you follow any gacha fanpage, with several reposts and retweets bashing it (and a couple praising it as well).

This is making some people a bit bitter, specially because the info comes to the public attention a week after Mongil's announcement that they won't release more male characters after releasing the game with a small amount of them (https://www.reddit.com/r/gachagaming/s/Fkub1W2Yyh).

Well, at least they aren't baiting their players into playing a game that only caters to male players (and bi/lesbian women, even if by accident and it ends up being patched in the future).

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Source: https://x.com/i/status/2045495647311433984

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484

u/[deleted] Apr 18 '26

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189

u/Davidsda Apr 18 '26

"Hoyo does thing and Hoyo makes lots of money, therefore we should do thing" - Some exec

Of course the they never copy Hoyo's production budget, because that costs money.

56

u/Choowkee Apr 19 '26

???

Despite the ration favoring females, HSR and Genshin both have steady additions of male characters.

WuWa has a worse male:female ratio than Genshin.

11

u/kidanokun Apr 19 '26

and then there's ZZZ

1

u/AdAcrobatic371 Apr 19 '26

How is ZZZ now? I heard it had better ratio and well written males a year ago. 

13

u/Ok-Will-168 Apr 19 '26

zzz treat male character good in term of marketing, however none of them have really impact in story or leader of faction, and there power feel clunky if you compared to Void hunter (what a concidence all female for now). Can said it not bad treatment, but never a priority unit.

3

u/Kir-chan HSR | Arknights beginner Apr 19 '26

A bunch of them are faceless robots, furries or actual animals too. Don't get me wrong, the characters are cool as design diversity reps, but they're clearly not designed for the same straight female audience Luuk, Flins and Dan Heng are. I think the last one they tried marketing to women was Hugo.

4

u/kidanokun Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 19 '26

There's already a 7th female after the last male... But i dunno much either, i haven't touched the game since when there was just 2 yet

3

u/UwUSamaSanChan Apr 19 '26

From who??? We had to wait 7 banners for 2 guys (one of which was free) and it's only gotten worse. The last dude has the worst kit and investment among the 5 stars and the shortest banner in the game.

121

u/EtadanikM Apr 18 '26 edited Apr 19 '26

It has nothing to do with budget. It has everything to do with history, genre, and reputation.

Unlike most AAA gacha developers, Mihoyo has a large female audience. This is due to a number of factors - from their history as a yuri company (GGZ & Honkai Impact 3rd), to their deliberate choice to go with a gender neutral aesthetic & "fairy tale fantasy" vibe in Genshin, to their commitment to supporting both male & female banners through hell & high water, to their continued commitment to female-targeting "cozy" games (e.g. Petite Planet, Honkai Nexus Anima), they have earned the reputation of being a female friendly company and so are able to effectively deploy the duo genders strategy.

By contrast, their main competitors - Hotta, Kuro, and Hypergryph - have always been more male-focused. For Hotta and Kuro that was obvious just from the banners release ratio (~10% for both). With Hypergryph, it might seem at first that Ark Knights classic released a lot of male characters, but in actuality from a sample of Tik Tok followers their male-to-female ratio was also something like 75-25. So when it came time for End Field, where the stakes were higher & characters took more resources to make, they too went with the "1 out of 9 limited characters is male" strategy, not surprisingly.

Among big budget gacha developers, Mihoyo should be seen as an exception to the rule. Cultivating a mostly balanced gender ratio is not easy and is rarely what happens naturally with action-oriented games, which intrinsically have a higher male to female ratio.

You can't just "copy" Mihoyo's production quality here. To have a true 50/50 gender audience, the game needs to be designed in a certain way from the start.

87

u/TetraNeuron Apr 19 '26

You can also see in the dev livestreams Hoyo actually employs women whereas the other studios are sausage-fests

2

u/draconic_tongue Apr 19 '26

pretty sure women work at kuro and they have an insane amount of fanart done by women. the quality delta compared to genshin fanart is pretty big, even though they got like 1/5th the amount. btw quality delta in this case refers to artists that put a lot of effort into their work (which tends to be women, usually) and don't just spam 1girl white_background which is what you'd expect from games like wuthering waves if you looked at the sentiment of this sub

Also devs you would think would be the biggest sausage fests like azur lane/azur promilia not only have women employees but the ceo is one as well.

does that make them pickme employees

14

u/Augustus3000 Apr 19 '26

It’s also worth noting that Hoyo has only been doubling down on this approach. For Honkai: Star Rail, they gave male characters like Ashveil and Dan Heng: Permansor Terrae ASMR videos (Phainon also got to narrate a date like video). For Genshin, they emphasized Flins’s gentlemanly side to the point that it became an essential part of his character. Hoyo also does a good job of having these male characters interact extensively over numerous quests and events in ways that are popular with female audiences as well (same goes for many pairings of women within the games of course). And in ZZZ with its often date-like Trust Events and Quality Time, interactions are often similar regardless of whether you pick the male or female MC.

4

u/Kir-chan HSR | Arknights beginner Apr 19 '26

For Honkai: Star Rail, they gave male characters like Ashveil and Dan Heng: Permansor Terrae ASMR videos (Phainon also got to narrate a date like video).

Small correction in that several characters get this, not just male characters. The only unusual thing is that they only translate the male character ones to the EN youtube channel, god knows why.

3

u/MaleficentEcho2669 GI / AG / PtN / LC / AK Apr 19 '26

Nowadays genshin's female to male ratio is more like 66-33.

3

u/planetarial P5X(KR)/IN/Prosekai(JP) Future: Petit Planet/Silent Whispers Apr 19 '26

Hoyo also has their own otome game although it definitely feels like the middle child

9

u/JudgmentAlarming977 Apr 19 '26

Major delusion going on. GGZ and hi3 both have like 80% male playerbase these are not why hoyo got a more balanced playerbase. They launched during covid, was the first 3d open world gacha, and had more balanced ratio.

-5

u/Davidsda Apr 19 '26 edited Apr 19 '26

You cant claim it has nothing to do with budget.

Hoyo has the best models, the best animations, the best art, and the best music. Even people who don't like their games as a whole will admit that.

And they have those things because they're willing to invest lots of money.

Hoyo has an easier time getting a more balanced gender ratio because their production value allows them to pull from the general gaming audience rather than just people that play weird JPG collectors.

27

u/Bobson567 Apr 19 '26

Hoyo has the best models, the best animations

Many will strongly disagree

15

u/rzrmaster FGO / Nikke Apr 19 '26

I fully disagree, I dont know where you got everybody thought hoyo is the best at everything lols, if everyone thought that then everyone would play their games haha.

Get a grip with reality mate.

2

u/Davidsda Apr 19 '26

I didn't say everything or everyone. And there's a difference between something matching a personal preference and being technically high quality...

I would personally describe genshin as a slog with annoying characters, tedious gameplay, and awful writing.

But that doesn't prevent me from acknowledging they make high quality art.

-4

u/WhyHowForWhat Apr 19 '26

Best model but all they can make nowadays are variation of humanoid character not straying away from female children, medium female, medium male, tall female, and tall male without any variance in looks like how someone when pass a certain age will look old. All of them always looks skinny and never stray too further from that. Varessa is just tweaked from the base medium model. Varka is just a tweaked high model. No variance, no creativity, only repetitive bs. Also ffs more than 5 years and still no child male model. Wtf.

Best model? More like recycled model.

1

u/Cintax Apr 19 '26

Not that Hoyo deserves defending or anything, but literally the banners running right now are both guys, one of which is a new character.

-26

u/Atzumo Apr 18 '26

I sure fucking hope they don't copy hoyo budget, their games look cheap as shit, and play even worse. Cut to HSR ONE HOUR scene with a static background, not even live2D, just a static image. Lets not even get into the black screen white text stuff.

11

u/HakaYonder Apr 19 '26

I don't think it has anything to do with budget tbh. HI3 which is older has (partially) stopped doing story in its old VN format, having characters in the world instead with more modern text boxes, and they have more animation variety than HSR despite earning much less.

They even make animations that are used a single time, like this one, that are just never seen again.

I really think the HSR team is just fine with the story presentation as it is.

12

u/LmaoXD98 Apr 19 '26

Lol, at least its playable in all the medium its available in, and not run 15 FPS in literaly high end phone ON MENU UI and constant FPS drop from 60 to 20 in high end PC.

Performance optimization>>>>Presentation.