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)

[u/ferinsy]

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).

---

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

[u/Davidsda → u/[deleted]]

"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.

[u/EtadanikM → u/Davidsda]

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.

[u/TetraNeuron → u/EtadanikM]

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

[u/draconic_tongue → u/TetraNeuron]

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