To put LADS continued downfall into perspective: This month had the highly anticipated new myth pair featuring Rafayel who is the poster boy for the game in China. That event, BY ITSELF, should have easily pulled in more than 17mil. His last myth pair, Lumerian Sea God, alone made 22mil. This month also had a highly desired Sylus rerun, a new Caleb solo card, a bunch of new outfits, and the bimonthly reset of their battle pass featuring new cards of their two most popular love interests.
They are fully cooked. Don't mess with a girlie's husbandos.
They basically destroyed their own game and it’s kind of amazing to look at it, especially since they kind of did it to their other game as well. Like who is running this game studio and do they actively hate what they do?
Literally every one of their flagship games have had some kind of massive community backlash. This is the first time Infold is actually dealing with consequences though. The boycott has been fascinating to watch and participate in.
JP and KR too. JP players have been the only other server that stood with global from the start, and KR players started making noise on their side since they set up the Valko billboard in Seoul.
Of course they're getting consequences. LADS is their clear moneymaker and most likely funds their other games. If it goes down, then they're in trouble.
They do reinvest. You can actually see improvements in quality of everything in the game. It's just they reinvest not as much as we, players, really want.
CEO of Papergames wants to break into general audience(=male leaning mainstream) gaming landscape and all those juicy extra funds are funneled into games like 'Project: The Perceiver' and 'Ballad of Antara'. And since their mainline game is Nikki series, I'm pretty sure some funds are/were shared with Infinity Nikki.
LADS is basically a cashcow for the whole company and is left with breadcrumbs.
Yes, I'm aware that they reinvest... far less than they should for something they need to continue being a cash cow.
Quality? But the story is barley updated, there's nothing to battle for late game users, and the last story, there were only 2 animated scenes. They reinvest the money into other games while severely neglecting LaDS.
I'll just echo what everyone else says... the one running that company has issues.
Animated Scenes:
Under Deepspace: 41
Long-Awaited Revelry: 5–9
Prologue to Tomorrow: 3
Homecoming Wings: 5
Death and Rebirth: 2
To Our Yesterday: 2
Oh... I didn't realize they wanted to break into a male player base. I knew of Ballad of Antara, but I just assumed it was going to be 'soulslike for the girlies,' so to speak. If that's their direction, it feels like kind of a betrayal...
They announced a new character (Valko), then a highly vocal minority of their playerbase engaged in some foul tactics, including making false reports to the government, which led to Valko's cancellation before he was even released.
The quiet majority has been (less quietly) protesting and boycotting ever since. The dev ran a month of dead air and some basic reruns in July which led to a predictably horrible month of 10m, but they pulled out some content that should have absolutely smashed charts for August; the last comparable release (same content type, same character) was June 2025 which made $53m.
Some will claim that the anti-Valko group is the actual majority, and they're still boycotting for "other" reasons like the glacial pace of main story updates (which would have been remedied by the new character... they had a POV missing from their story that the new char was meant to fill in), but the DAU, when pulled from reliable sources like SensorTower, and the revenue charts simply don't support that. In fact, throughout August we kept seeing them rallying the whales to spend as much as possible to prove how much they want Valko to stay cancelled... and 17m is all they could scrape together despite isolated reports that some of them exhausted all available packs and went on to buy literal decades of the monthly pass.
Tl;dr they announced a new character, then canceled him after backlash where Chinese antis reported the company to the ccp. Lot of the backlash wasn't about Valko, but lingering issues such as long waits between updates, lack of f2p currency, and an earlier update which referenced numbers related to atrocities in WW2.
Valko became the sacrificial lamb. So both Asian and Global big spenders went full boycott.
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u/BookerDeWittsCarbine 9h ago edited 9h ago
To put LADS continued downfall into perspective: This month had the highly anticipated new myth pair featuring Rafayel who is the poster boy for the game in China. That event, BY ITSELF, should have easily pulled in more than 17mil. His last myth pair, Lumerian Sea God, alone made 22mil. This month also had a highly desired Sylus rerun, a new Caleb solo card, a bunch of new outfits, and the bimonthly reset of their battle pass featuring new cards of their two most popular love interests.
They are fully cooked. Don't mess with a girlie's husbandos.
NoValkoNoMoney