We sincerely apologize for reaching out once again. Over the past several days, our team has been closely following your conversations and feedback across all platforms. For the issues that have surfaced since the announcement of Version 6.0—and the frustration these have caused our community—we want to clearly state: we are sorry.
As we've expressed before, our vision for Love and Deepspace has always been to build a world that grows alongside you—one that offers a richer, deeper sense of companionship over time.
As various issues have arisen in recent days, we have moved quickly to make the necessary adjustments. After reflecting on recent events, we recognize that we moved forward with the introduction of Valko before we were truly ready. In doing so, we let down the players who have supported us from the start, and we also fell short of delivering the experience that players anticipating Valko deserved. After extensive internal discussions, we have decided to make the following changes:
We have decided to cancel both the launch and any further development of the new love interest. We also commit that no additional love interests will be introduced in future content plans.
All other in-game systems and features originally scheduled for Version 6.0—including Home 2.0 and AR Photobooth—as well as the limited-time Selectable 5-Star Memory Rate-Up Event, will proceed as planned. The outfits, photo poses and scenes, and the Nighthush Box (the second-anniversary 4-Star Memory Selection Crate) originally planned as rewards for the Hunt in Linkon event will instead be sent to all players for free via in-game mail after the version update.
Going forward, the entire team will focus on further developing the stories and long-term companionship experiences of our five existing love interests, while ensuring a stable pace of Main Story production and updates. Rafayel's new Solar-Slot Memories and Companion will be revealed in July. Farspace Colonel Caleb and Onychinus Leader Sylus will also return in their Main Story branches in September and November, respectively. By participating in the relevant events, players will be able to obtain the corresponding 5-Star Main Story Branch Memories for free. We will continue to devote all our care and effort to bringing you richer stories and game experiences.
Beginning today and continuing for 30 days, players who log in each day will receive one Deepspace Wish via in-game mail. Each mail will remain claimable for three days, for a total of 30 Deepspace Wishes. We hope this can offer some compensation for the disappointment and disruption caused by these adjustments.
To our community: once again, we apologize. Because of our actions, the joy you should have found in Linkon City became a source of distress, and the feelings you hold most dear were hurt. We are deeply sorry for the hurt and disappointment we have caused.
Love and Deepspace has always been about sharing love with you and protecting the love we all hold dear. That purpose has never wavered. Every step forward taken by the love interests and Linkon City—from its beginnings to where it stands today—has been shaped by your feedback, your passion, and your trust. It is your presence, care, and companionship that give this world its meaning, and us the strength and direction to move forward.
Over the past two and a half years, we've shared moments of joy and gratitude, as well as challenges and difficult times. Through every late night devoted to making this world better, it has been the moments you've shared in Linkon City—and the love and passion behind them—that have kept us going. We hope to continue walking this road with you, building a world where love can take root, grow, and bloom.
Going forward, we will work harder, listen more carefully, and do our utmost to honor the trust you have placed in us. We will stay focused on delivering the experience you deserve—one filled with love where every moment in Linkon City can once again become a joyful and treasured memory.
Linkon City will always be here for you.
Thank you—for your trust, your honest feedback and encouragement, and for being with us every step of the way. Your companionship has helped light the path ahead, and your faith in us has given meaning to every effort we make. Thank you for your love throughout this journey. It gives us the courage to keep moving forward. We hope to repay that love with even more and even better content in the days to come.
The new Game will have the PS4 reveal moment of pointing at the competion and saying "Hey we won't do what these Guys are doing!" and win by that alone.
nah few months at most. u overestimate infold's ability to produce content LOL that's why players are so angry in the first place. there's BARELY CONTENT
That's pretty wild considering how much they probably already spent in development time and promotional material for the guy. Guess the negative feedback was just that extreme. Im assuming this will push them back quite a bit while they remake everything
Very extreme... the game was tanking in every way possible. Uninstalls, ratings falling, social media numbers falling, irl incidents, trending topic on web portals/news sites etc Heard even government was getting involved??
Truly next-level.
I checked some CN comments and they even wanted the game servers shutdown 💀
Her outfit fits a submarine more than a battleship, they clearly created her for another ship altogether and somehow reused her for a fricking battleship class filled with mommy milkers for some reason
I was quit disappointed back in the days for Ansons Design as a vivid KGV-Class enjoyer (Georgie and Howe my beloved) but it's sad because Anson had a funny design, just not suited for a Battleship.
Looking at the picture I 100% see what you mean by not fitting so I understand it's 100% valid.
But I was very tickled when I read this at first because I was thinking "wait, what sort of anime girl is the correct "fit" for a 45,000 ton battleship?"
The design didnt match the character, from what i heard the original design wasnt ready on time so they used another they had on hand and that didnt work out.
Azur lane announced a character that was later canceled because the design was so different from the other designs in the ship classes family. Basically they made a loli character while the siblings are all curvy with big assets and there was no lore reason to change the design (like eugen and hipper having different breast sizes because their irl sister ships had different build bows yes that's actually true)
If they did it like Maya, like reverse color scheme, petite(not loli) body type, and uniformed(like school uniform) maybe it wouldn’t have been that bad.
This isn't a character, it's a whole new main story arc, several cards and romance chapters that would be available at launch... Home features, 2 new battling skill sets on launch and a lot more I'm probably forgetting about.
This is literally like the HSR remaking a whole land to remove the Japanese stuff from it, except this time it's a complete removal, not just releasing it with a new coat of painting on top of it like Star Rail did.
In a way, you could say this is like removing an entire playable path from HSR. Like the remembrance meta in Amphoreus + Amphoreus' story. Or the current Planarcadia story with Elation
Snowbreak had some drama (shocking, I know) that resulted in them cancelling a character release and replacing her with a different future release. It also caused an entire rewrite of that chapter's story. I don't remember the name of the girl but IIRC the CN player base did not like her attitude/disposition combined with some... interesting writing decisions in the chapter she was introduced in.
A new Love Interest getting cancelled is just insane for this game. This would be like a Hoyo game cancelled an entire region RIGHT after its announcement.
Idk if Infold has a competent PR team or advisors or what, because it seems like they could have gone the Hoyo route and delay their content as they rework it to comply with the impending government investigation, rather than giving up months if not years of hard work. But cancelling outright feels like an immediate white flag and it ends up angering the global server as well.
I honestly think they didn’t think far ahead. There was already symptoms of them not providing in-game content, not giving proper attention to their current characters or giving freebies, which I think festered in the player base.
Valko was the final straw that broke the camel’s back, as CN used his appearance as the catalyst to highlight the bigger problems that papergames caused. And the fact that they cancelled Valko instead of continuing to release him showed that they had no other content or planned development to appease their players, and trying to profit off their players through short term gains instead of prioritising long term growth, in a way you can say that they’re milking their player base by putting in minimal effort instead of actually developing content and finding ways to keep players happy to retain and grow their player base.
I agree, from the Infinity Nikki drama last year it was already a sign that Infold has no idea what they're doing and they're more reactionary than proactive.
I guess I'm more upset about the lack of creative integrity lmao, like have more faith in your own product ffs. Many people worked on this to make it happen. But at the same time I guess they also deserve something of this magnitude to happen when all of their lack of care and their quick cash grab efforts finally blow up in their faces. Just not at the expense of other players' enjoyment and dividing the playerbase this deeply.
>I agree, from the Infinity Nikki drama last year it was already a sign that Infold has no idea what they're doing and they're more reactionary than proactive.
You summed it up real well. Most of the best gacha game developers do not have such problems. Hoyo, Kuro, Hypergraph, Cygames, Shift-Up. Even companies like Nexon, Manjuu, and even Tencent have way to generate content and keep their players happy. Even Mica, Bluepoch and Yostar is better than them in this regards.
Papergames is the only company I have seen fuck up this badly.
Well he got the downpayment but didn't he still lose a guaranteed source of long-term work? I feel bad for him. Imagine you get a role that makes you think you're set for the next five years and then it's gone lol
this is the most embarrassingly incompetent big gacha company i know, they fucked up infinity nikki like 6 times in a single year and managed to cultivate the worst possible community in both lads and nikki
INikki is also having its own controversy bc CN players are mad over some slightly risque, but still completely sfw outfits in the game; and Infold again folded like a wet blanket to them and changed an already released SSR banner's dress's neckline to be higher, and significantly changed the bodice in the process. Fuck this dog shit company
It is 100% deliberate lol. why else they outright cancel Valko when they are aware that the main issue is just lack of content ? they want CN and global to fight as distractions basically (it is already happening)
I am a gamer for 20 years and have never seen such a massive uproar in the media. Multiple news sites are reporting this and the fanbase is trying to dig up some materials that are in game and try to get the game cancelled.
for example I just saw someone linking materials in game to Unit 731 and said the game support genocide. The crazy thing is new sites are reporting this. I guess many players are reporters and are using their influence.
The 731 one was likely the final nail in the coffin. Apparently it made news headlights headlines in China, and China does not look upon kindly about WWII affairs.
I'm guessing the devs thought a readable in game about human medical experiments having the numerical entry of 731 was a stroke of genius, but it was probably too on the nose...
Edit: HEADLINES. Not headlights, my goddamn autocorrect
Saying they support genocide is a stretch, but a Chinese game using the number 731 in a story about human experimentation is REALLY the kind of thing someone should have caught.
What's funny was that the CN side going 'out of 0-9999 you really picked THAT number for a story w human experimentation?' so then the dev change the number to something else and apparently even the changed number ALSO is connected to another tragic event so they just decide to get rid of the number all together LMAO
This is plausible cause they were under fire for referencing(?) a sensitive historical political issue in their in game text. That went trending the night BEFORE this.
I'm in China and this scandal has gained insane news coverage in the past two days, on mainstream media. I do believe most of them can be bought, and then some of the others picked up the story after it blew up.
This proves that LADS' players (who in large part overlap with idol followers) will not only stop spending (not yet executed), but they will also actively spend money to work the system and put enormous pressure on you (the company).
Many have said that their death threats and complaining have worked, but I think it's mainly how they are being reported to state media and government offices (for anti-consumer business practices) that made them nervous. Their game is walking a thin line and can get in trouble if they are not careful. Additionally the "731" incident is a crazy fumble that can go very bad for them.
So the media reports I saw were mainly on social media. Not sure if it's made on TV yet. People who work in marketing and PR would know that you can pay to have content posted on media's social accounts, e.g. WeChat, Weibo, etc. (and the website but nobody goes on their websites any more). This is fairly common in PR. Even many of them are state owned, they do need to try to make a profit, and as in everywhere in the world, traditional media is dying.
They of course would vet your content, so not anything can be bought nilly willy. But as this is a legimit news story, they were successfully published at a lot of places in a short window. I suspect most of them that came out initially were paid because 1) as you know it's a gacha about dating hot men, I don't think news sites would be too interested otherwise; 2) a post someone shared was obviously not written by a journalist. Then more serious reporting followed because the story is getting huge attention and clicks.
I don't play the game but I saw it in the news lol. Apprently they have a storyline where a file referencing human experiment is numbered #0731. If you are not familiar with Unit 731, you can read up on Wikipedia (with caution). It's a highly sensitive historic topic and it's crazy that INFOLD would refererence it in a hot guy dating game...
EDIT: I realized regarding 1) how I worded it may sound nefarious. I promise it's not. It's a common PR practice across the world. You can see it like an ad space or a byline.
Unit 731 was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II, which was condicted in China.
A huge part behind the CN petition is the sensationalization of the human experimentation projects, but strangely, people don’t discuss them here and stick to “they say he looks too Western”.
I read on another comment that the 731 reference existed before Valko was a thing. He’s just taking the blame for it. Like basically every controversy about him felt like this. He's being blamed for Infold's general level of bullshit.
It doesn’t. It just makes the other people excited for him pissed too. I’m quitting the game; this is ridiculously embarrassing for them. A massive fumble.
TF. LaDS never learning from idol games like Shiny Colors on how they balance character spotlight especially when they add something new to the mix like ComeTIK
Imagine making a business decision so bad it threw years of work into the drain. Honestly, I feel bad for the employees who spent so much time and effort on it, only to see the sheer vitriol thrown at them
Also as an outsider, but seems like there were two main compenents: his aesthetic clashed with previous characters (more western and rugged compared to all the typical feminine asian boys that look like k-pop stars), so he did not appeal to the Chinese players (main playerbase), and a lot of them were already mad that their favourite characters did not get new content for a long time, so they were jelous and extra mad.
And considering that their players are extremely mentally unwell even by gacha standards, it went ugly real fast.
Chinese players complained Valko looks too westernized and acted too pushy.
Main story only updates 2 per year and is very disconnected from the rest of the game, despite being the selling point originally.
The newest love interest before Valko has only appeared on main story once on his release over 510 days ago.
The two latest love interest don’t have all of the same base concent as the original love interests.
Almost everything is behind paywall. They have insane release schedule and barely any ways to farm diamonds (this is a HUGE issue). You are basically forced to spend money
No new battle content in the new update, but they’ll keep releasing new expensive battle companions
There was political drama because the game referenced unit 731
I don't think I could find a better characterisation without resorting to insults, or bringing examples, and I would very much prefer not to do either.
At the end of the day it's subjective, there are players who aren't into him sure but there are also those who into that archetype. They don't all need filling the same base.
But the real issue from friend talk is actually event and story management. Since more LIs = more fighting for the spotlight. They also promise some story for certain LI but never really deliver.
There's some nasty people that had nasty problems with him (thought he looked gay and hated him for that) but actually I think what resonated the most with absolutely every single Lads player was the fact that story release was already glacially slow and the existing LI's weren't getting development for a long, long time. One of them even left off on a huge cliffhanger in the main story, basically angstily abandoning the MC, and his fans have been waiting for any new crumbs for a while. Two newer ones are lagging hard behind the OG's in almost all content.
Throwing yet ANOTHER guy into the mix seemed like a big resource drain when things were already bad as they were and it seemed like the devs were struggling to keep up with even the existing LI's.
Yeah I don’t see it going down well. At this point people who hated him are already pissed but those who liked him will now also get pissed. They just pissed everyone at the same time.
im part of both categories lol (pissed at him not because of himself but because it showed the company had their priorities at the totally wrong place) then willing to give him a chance after his 2nd trailer
Lmao, now they're going to make the people who did want Valko even more angry. They really missed the point of why people were frustrated in the first place, omg.
It's by design - if you keep logging in to claim the rewards, then they can claim the backlash isn't that bad because they've retained X% of players.
If (hypothetically) 20% uninstalled and never came back, then they'd have to scramble to explain it. They could absolutely give out 30 wishes at once and are choosing not to.
There's an ongoing petition on the global side to bring him back, but... seriously, Infold had ONE job and failed. Horribly so. Worst company I've ever seen.
I know a lot of folks came back and started buying gems in order to save up for Valko as well - I'm not a lawyer by any stretch but there's a possibility of a false advertising claim by Infold backtracking on his addition to the game.
this is an annoyingly easy fraud claim. im not sure how cn works with laws regarding that, but at least i'd expect global servers being put down if this goes anywhere (whilst taking lads horrible decision making into consideration).
A friend of mine was making a crochet plushie of his claw machine wolfie and gave up on it hahah. I dropped the game already and she's thinking about it, apparently.
idk your wife or her friends, but could you pass on that if any of them plan to uninstall, they should fill out the cinema survey (if they hadn't yet) and say they're uninstalling because of Valko's removal?
A LOT of the global fans are really upset and don't have the same poop-sending power as the Chinese fans, lmao, so.
Infold repeating history... on a bigger scale this time.
Shaw was demoted to "special encounter" status and treated like an unwanted child.
Valko is completely yeeted out of existence.
Genuinely have no idea what kind of planning went into this, because as it looks currently they have none.
CN fans are still mad (for reasons that now include political Sino-Japanese stuff...)
and the new Valko fans are also mad.
Bruh. What level of incompetence is this?
I just imagined Infold making their third otome game and repeating the same drama the third time...
Instead of cancelling the new LI they should have just delayed him for another 6 months. Because leaving the 5th LI without a main story update for 500+ days, while the other 4 had their last year and 6 months ago respectively, was such a massive fumble.
I'm of the belief that if the game had the content, Qol and optimization it's fans have been asking for for over a year, the backlash wouldn't have been nearly as bad.
I agree. There'd still be people complaining about his looks, his behavior and whatnot, but at least I'm sure there'd be people defending the game if the company really was doing a good job, which wouldn't have snowballed into this.
But it's all what-ifs now. Because Infold had time and time again decided to be a disappointment. And NOW they finally spat out the estimated time for Caleb and Sylus' story branches. Lord I hope they didn't just start writing it a few days ago...
Here's hoping the financial success of LADS encourages other gacha companies to invest in high quality otome games. I don't expect much because I swear all female oriented gacha games are kinda ass in one way or another, but I'll happily be proven wrong.
One of the craziest things I’ve ever seen a company do. Also managed to get both the CN and global players mad without addressing or fixing any of the issues BOTH sides were complaining about.
Content is still going to be slow, even slower now that they have to completely remove all of Valko’s content they had lined up. They certainly aren’t going to up the rewards either.
As a player for almost a year, I am uninstalling and hope their revenue crashes next month. Even if they repeal the decision, what a horrible way to treat the people who were actually excited for Valko.
Edit: People clearly aren’t paying attention to the Twitter, Reddit and even Tumblr outcry on this. I’m not saying MY uninstallation and lack of spending will drop the revenue. I’m talking about them taking a significant hit from all the people who have already said they’ve uninstalled and quit this morning alone. That will at the very least knock LADS down a pretty significant amount. They will lose a good portion of their global fanbase over this.
I'm geniunely sad (and mad). 😭 I'm not touching this game again. I have a main that I like a lot, but when his 2nd myth released with problems and Infold was just too slow to respond and half the playerbase didn't give a fuck as long as their mains weren't touched, I was already feeling the burnout and falling out of love.
Imagine starting to feel interested again and this happens lol.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but not even Infinity Nikki had an actual response (action) this fast as LADS devs did (same company btw) and the former game actually had issues that almost everyone can agree with.
The devs had a previous game -(EOS in the west now) called Mr Love Queen's Choice /Love and Producer where something similar happened when they introduced a 5th LI.
This resulted in a lawsuit, major boycott and massive blacklash and they demoted the 5th LI to slightly upgraded side character to keep the Chinese server happy.
Infold risk team probably guessed with LaDS it would end up uglier so acted quickly.
Infold keeps repeating the same scummy "mistakes" and expecting different outcomes. Didn't the whole dye controversy, which was a major part of the Infinity Nikki 1.4 blowup, also happen years back in Shining Nikki?
I've been around since Love Nikki/Nikki Up2U lol and there's been a consistent pattern of huge controversy, fans boycotting, devs backtracking to keep CN server happy. Infold/papergames likely knows this and factors in backslash but this time with LaDS it likely was too risky to think it'll blow over.
The funnier thing is that this is not Infolds first Otome game, their last one (Love and Producer / Mr Love Queens Choice) also had such insane drama when a new LI (Shaw) got introduced late into the game, to the point that he is only half around for the game after his introduction.
Someone today replied to that saying this:
Sadly, it's because all 4 male lead fans work together to file a lawsuit to go against Shaw's existence and his story background (Gavin fans not liking that Shaw is the younger brother) and they won the lawsuit. So PG made Shaw a pseudo LI and retcon his story that they are not brothers all along by removing any mentions of Gav's younger brother in his later cards and Shaw's story getting retconned by S2 main story by resetting the world to prevent the comet destroying Earth
But there had been protests from some players demanding Shaw to now become a full LI after Valko's release because it just became unfair PG was able to give so much energy defending Valko but then Shaw, Sylus and Caleb did not receive those same energy
I guess the Shaw energy of it all really did end up going somewhere in the end. lmao
Yeah, I commented something similar on one of the initial threads, so I'm just sighing seeing this.
There were people in my tl talking about how this will set a bad precedent for future content updates for this game...but the precedent has already been set at this point.
Soo, Valko is basically lost media now or something. It'll be crazy to look back at his trailer in a few years, knowing that because of him, LADS will never get another new character.
I just quit Lads a few weeks ago, but from what I know:
1. Fanbase is already very frustrated at the game because barely any content (last main story update is way too long ago), not much combat updates etc
2. Infold is making game less and less f2p friendly (free shop not updated for aaageess, while they keep introducing paid stuff. MC skin used to be free, now you have to buy them). Rewards for events had become less (not in terms of currency, but in terms of freebie (e.g we get literal ugly mug for this year's event compared to last years)
3. Powercreep, in a sense that the endgame which is a big source of currency has now become a whale territory. Can't even easily clear it at all even when you roll at least 1 dupe (r1 refinement) and all the myths (the cards with new combat kits)
4. Apparently CN players think Valko looks gay, intended to attract queer male audience. This one maybe different culture? Because most west fandom and lads subreddit seem ok with it.
TLDR, it feels like Infold is squeezing the fanbase way too much while not even giving back into/improving the game, and instead invested money to entice new players while leaving the core players in the dust (aka betrayal in more ways than one)
Edit: forgot to add, Valko literally had 0 introduction. At least with Caleb we kinda knew he was coming (Sylus was because he got leaked so people also knew beforehand). So new LI literally dropped outta nowhere.
Yep. Gacha games are greedy, but Lads are an a whole other level. Imagine earning millions of dollars every month, and can't even spare money to update the main story that is VISUAL NOVEL STYLE (aka you don't even need to design or make a new map like HSR or Genshin, and most "animations" are already pre-set).
Not only that but apparently western sensibilities is actually super gay in eastern eyes. The werewolf guy was plenty feminine looking but still too rugged for them. I guess eastern esthetic prefers men to look very feminine and that is considered manly.
You're probably right.
I saw asians do a random K-pop male idol side by side with Henry Caville and the western audience didn't understand how the Koreans could rate Henry lower than the random pop idol.
Goes to show we simply have different tastes and expectations to male looks across cultures.
Imagine you create an ultra parasocial game and then the playerbase becomes so creazy the devs have no choice to please them if they want to continue the game.
This is why companies should be more careful with handling their games whose meant to attract extreme audiences. We've gotten plenty of examples from waifu gachas.
no one really asked for a new LI because the main story only gets updated every 6 months, we haven't seen 2 of the LIs in the main story for over a year, renewable currency farming is at an all time low (if you're f2p, you can pull for maybe 3 cards a year when lads releases maybe 40 lol), this LI wasn't teased like the other new additions, and Sylus and Caleb are still missing standard content that the original 3 Lis had.
but it's kind of ballooned because CN fans are mad at all of the above PLUS they don't like Valko's character because he's too masculine, muscular, a little playful/more rude, is clearly oriented towards the western fandom, and believe that he's an unsafe character since he breaks into MC's house and just starts moving things around. MC in the PV is into it but since many LADS fans self insert, they weren't a fan.
meanwhile, the INTL fans seem to like Valko but they agree with the CN fans that the rest of the game has been put on hold for the sake of this LI, but many INTL fans were only looking forward to this update BECAUSE Valko would have been an interesting addition and would justify the delays on everything else.
now CN fans who threatened legal actions and boycotts are happy and INTL fans aren't, so now the INTL fans are quitting lol
and it's getting messy because now the teams have to redo the next few iterations of main story as well as banners/events, so expect the quality of the game to drop. they also confirmed no new LIs when the entire system was set up for 6 (6 primary battle colors when right now we only have 5 used with the 5 LIs) so it's just. stupid. man why can't people ignore things they don't like lmfao
I searched the guy Valko and he looked okish, like, he gives me Final Fantasy vibes. I was expecting basically Hulk Hogan with the wolf ears based on the comments
I always wondered why all the LADS characters look so similar. The one time they actually try something different with a more masculine design, the whole fanbase erupts in rage, screaming 'too gay' and 'man jaw'.
Me no expert in human psychology but me think if you give them what want after they act bad, they continue to act bad to get more what they want. Me think this dangerous for future if tiny thing make them act bad.
Tbf it's not like they got this kind of fandom by accident, LADS was specifically created to cultivate this sort of toxic parasocialism and they make big bucks from enabling their players.
It's sorta like firefighters were paid millions to fight fires.
Honestly I think that ship has sailed for this game waaaay before this incident. This is like the 2nd or 3rd nail in the coffin. But there were signs it would lead to this.
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u/MeowMixMax1 Jun 30 '26
Months of content gone in an instant.