Love and Deepspace, also known as LADS, has recently garnered attention from gamers and fans with new reports of the game’s latest financials. While fans of the mobile series praise its recent successes, others are taking this opportunity to reignite the discourse regarding the efficacy of Otome games, their target audience, and their place in the mainstream gaming industry. This is sparking another all-too-familiar controversy between female gamers and their vocal detractors.
Game Details
An action-packed, mobile dating SIM, Love and Deepspace, arguably follows the standard formulae for Otome games in that the main objective is to garner a relationship with multiple characters -in hopes of finding love and romance. Unlike many games of the genre’s past, however, LADS boasts a 3-D dynamic that incorporates the standard of such games and pairs it with a story-driving narrative full of fighting, intrigue, mystery, and danger. At the same time, it allows players to play the hero and indulge in the romantic fantasy offered by five handsome men -each with their own distinct nuances and backstories.
Numbers
In August 2024, Love and Deepspace shot from obscurity to the heights of popularity, garnering a gross monthly profit of over $48M. Unseating one of the most popular games in the free-to-play genre, Honkai: Star Rail, from the top spot in income generation for any mobile game on Android and IOS. According to Gacha Revenue and Sensor Tower, in the following four months, enthusiasm for the game increased, allowing LADS to outperform other massively successful games such as Genshin Impact and Zenless Zone Zero -only to be unseated by Pokémon TCG Pocket in December 2024.
Controversy
In early January 2025, developers announced new additions coming to Love and Deepspace in its 3.0 update. Aimed at the game’s overwhelmingly female audience and going live on 22 January, a new feature called “Remind Me” offered players a functional mechanic wherein the game would track the player’s menstrual cycle. Included in the latest addition was its ability to be added to the calendar and to notify players when that time of the month was near. Capitalizing on both LADS‘s ability to be even more all-encompassing and sustaining the daily integration built into most Otome-style games.
Discourse
Due to the sensitive nature of such a bodily function and the current state of politics, reactions to this new addition were mixed but accepted overall as a more inclusive feature for most of the game’s typical player base. However, gamers outside the sphere of the Otome genre took umbrage with this inclusion. Discourse online varied between the potentially dangerous nature of allowing a game to track such personal information and detractors’ distaste for female-centered games in general, reigniting the argument about the legitimacy of dating games and sparking a new slew of anti-gamer-girl rhetoric.
Fans of the game were not at all deterred from enjoying their game, however, as many outwardly defied detractors of the game and its genre. In full protest of the behavior being directed at an entire subset of the gaming audience, players rallied to counter the misogyny and outright hostility refocused on female gamers online. And the hate disproportionately directed against the Otome genre, and its legitimate place in the industry.
Impact
Generally, the discourse surrounding the new feature -and the typical hate games like Love and Deepspace normally accumulated from the genre’s critics- had minimal impact on the game’s revenue stream. Factoring in the drawdown that typically occurs in the months directly after the holiday season, revenue stabilized at around $54M. Downloads, however, have increased, speaking to the relatively foreseeable positive effect controversy can have on an IP, and surpassed the thirty-five million mark in January 2025 -one year after launch.
