The domestic game "Love and Deep Space" has shown a good record of "fascinating" blockbuster female players overseas.
As early as January 18 this year, when the global open beta began, "Love and Deep Space" topped the iOS free charts in more than 10 countries or regions, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Singapore, Australia, and Japan.
The best performer was the Japanese market. "Love and Deep Space" entered the top five best-selling lists of iOS in Japan in March, and ranked 7th again in early April.
While Japan and Taiwan topped the double download charts, in the United States, "Love and Deep Space" even broke the long-term record of "Monopoly Go", showing strong market competitiveness.
In terms of revenue, Diandian data shows that in the first month of its launch, the overseas revenue of "Love and Deep Space" has exceeded 100 million, easily topping the global new game revenue list of that month. As of March 5, the estimated total revenue of "Love and Deep Space" in the global market exceeded 310 million yuan (after deducting platform shares) - Japan has become its largest overseas gold market, and the publisher's Papergames revenue surged by 246% month-on-month, jumping to the top 30 list of Chinese mobile game publishers in terms of global revenue.
"Love and Deep Space" topped the free charts in many countries and regions, and rushed into the top 10 of many best-selling lists
In the past April, "Love and Deep Space" swiped the screen outside the country three times: in the European and American game communities, foreign players launched a heated discussion on the new image PV of the game's protagonist Qi Yu, which received as many as 2.8 million views; The new gameplay of "Companion Sports" was praised by Japanese users as a reference material for studying animation production because of its realistic character joint movements.
For a long time, female-oriented games have been relatively niche in the gaming market, which is dominated by male players. How can "Love and Deep Space" stand out from the vertical track, successfully top the best-selling list of global interactive narrative mobile games, and occupy a place in the two T1 game markets of Japan and the United States?
It's not easy to fall in love in 3D
Breaking it down under the female game, the nature of "Love and Deep Space" belongs to otome games.
Otome games are romance simulation games that target women, and Japan is the birthplace of them. From the earliest otome game "Angelica" to bestsellers such as "Heartbeat Memories Girl's Side" and "Heartbeat Restaurant", it is not easy to be acclaimed by competitors in this mature market.
Angelique
"Love and Deep Space" has sprung up and created a grand scene: on the day of the open beta, it topped the Japanese free list, and then rushed to the top 6 of the best-selling list, and its sales even won the top 1 of Japanese women's games for a time. January 23, #恋与深空#成为日区X趋势第一; So far, on social platforms such as 5ch, a large number of discussions can still be found, which shows the popularity of Changhong.
The reason why "Love and Deep Space" can "foreign monks chant scriptures" is that although the Japanese B game culture has been developed for a long time, it is also conservative, resulting in Japanese players suffering from "nothing new in the world for a long time".
Otomat, a veteran Japanese otome game manufacturer, is limited by the traditional product production system and is still spinning in low-cost production; A number of domestic mobile game manufacturers are also in the 2D safe zone, continuing to roll up the value and krypton degree. In contrast, "Love and Deep Space" innovatively shouted the official positioning of "fantasy high-immersion 3D love game", which can be called a risk.
The reason for this is that the production cost and R&D cycle of 3D games are much higher than those of 2D products. The producer of this game, Fang Die, has always been known for sparing no expense. In September 2023, Papergames pledged 6 million shares to miHoYo, accounting for about 10% of Papergames' total equity.
This shows that Papergames has invested a lot of money in the research and development of games in "Backlight Infiltration", "A Thousand Faces" and "Infinite Warmth". And "Love and Deep Space" took more than 3 years to come out, and the financial pressure on the R&D side at that time can be imagined.
"Backlit Sneak In"
On the other hand, in the mobile game world, 3D's breakthrough attempt may even mean unlucky.
In an interview about the technical difficulties, the Papergames R&D team mentioned the risks of adopting a 3D realistic style: "Too close shots, too tricky angles, too cartoonish animations, or too mechanical performance expressions will make players 'play'." ”
Indeed, this is a technical choice of "knowing that there are tigers in the mountains, and preferring to go to the tigers". In early testing, the modeling of Love and Deep Space was criticized. There is no shortage of player criticism, the character's hair is "rough like hay", and the kitten he met while dating the male protagonist is "like papier-mâché".
Fortunately, a team that is willing to let users be "whetstones" will eventually succeed. In the official online version, dozens of layers are used in the modeling of character hairstyles to express the sense of hierarchy; In the ends of the hair, bangs, etc., a large amount of translucent treatment is also used to express the lightness of the hair; Even the material and thickness of each costume have been optimized to be presented through visual textures, and the realism of the male protagonist's image is about to come out.
For lip syncing, the papergames team spent two years scanning millions of frames of data from more than 30 actors from different native speaking countries, using neural networks to train animation algorithms, and independently developed a new system that can customize multilingual lip shapes for each character to adapt to users in different language regions.
When the details are polished to perfection, the thin "paper man" is successfully cultivated into a "three-dimensional husband", and 3D love has also entered the scope of application of the "law of true fragrance", realizing the corner overtaking of the B tour track.
"The Little Prince and the Fox"
To some extent, it can be said that the meaning of the existence of Yiyou is to provide players with enough emotional value. However, overseas users who have been immersed in the base camp of B Travel for a long time have already developed a sense of fatigue and numbness.
How do you stand out from the crowd? "Love and Deep Space" shows the "three axes" that make players feel fresh: to carry out an electronic relationship, if the user cannot achieve a "sense of substitution", it means that it has failed in the first step - in order to allow female players to produce self-projection as much as possible, "Love and Deep Space" has developed a unique face pinching system in the current B game market.
The system can accurately extract the facial features, makeup, hair color and other features in the player's own photos, generate a two-dimensional effect that is not only like a photo but also conforms to the mainstream aesthetics, and supports photo input under different races, expressions, lighting and 360° rotation, and customizes the voice, so that the game master "I" is as close to the player as possible.
"Love and Deep Space" can be customized with a voice
In addition, in order to inspire players to be thrilled with male characters, Love and Deep Space also holds on to a key called "immersion".
Relying on 3D animation with a very realistic atmosphere, "Love and Deep Sky" boldly breaks through the traditional Japanese game path that relies on delicate text to touch players. There is no need for players to rely on large sections of reading to imagine the plot, and the clear scenes directly convey the vivid charm of the characters, and the climactic plot points of the sense of love are embedded, which is naturally more visually impactful and emotionally explosive.
In this way, while satisfying the demands of female users to pay attention to plot development and emotional satisfaction, it also bypasses the most difficult part of the game to restore when it takes root in foreign culture-text narrative, so this work can detonate a "small national B shock" overseas.
After accurately hitting the audience, the "long-tail effect" of Yiyou cannot be ignored. The game with superior interactive performance allows players to "break through the dimensional wall", blurring the boundary between the virtual utopia of love and the real daily life, forming a strong bond like a Mobius loop.
In recent years, the "Idol Dream Festival" series, the most popular female-oriented game in the Japanese market, has almost never dropped out of the Top 5 list on Google Play and the App Store. One of the attractions of this game is that it forms a closed-loop world from online to offline.
"Idol Illusion Festival"
Therefore, the "sense of companionship" linked to reality has become the last key word of "Love and Deep Space".
In the main interface, players can hold down the voice button to start a dialogue, and the character is the "tree hole" that pours out their hearts, chatting about three meals a day and choosing what to wear when going out; In addition to the main interface, you can also reproduce the "must-do for couples" such as catching the claw machine, shooting headshots, and going to the gym to exercise with the characters.
On social media X, there is even a hot article on game evaluation, which is interactive from the perspective of a father helping his daughter find a partner, which is very popular because it hits the hot spot of social concern, so as to get a high degree of discussion.
In The Little Prince, the fox's vision of love is "domestication", and domestication means to establish a relationship, thus bringing a heart-tugging experience to its monotonous life: "You have to be very patient and sit closer to me every day. If you come at four o'clock in the afternoon, then from three o'clock onwards, I start to feel happy. The closer the time gets, the happier I feel. By four o'clock, I will be restless, and I will find the price of happiness. ”
It seems that the reason why "Love and Deep Space" can make players around the world fall in love is that it effectively constitutes a large-scale human-machine cultivation model similar to domestication, so that users can develop a "quasi-social relationship" with the media characters they have been in contact with for a long time.
A platform for women's self-interpretation
However, it is unavoidable that in the world of B-game, all emotional experiences are generated by a string of program code. Players who know it well, when they are for the commodification of electronic love kryptonite, are they really just addicted to the fictional "high-quality men" and can't extricate themselves?
Love & Deep Space offers an interesting perspective on this: for the first time, the game introduces real-time combat in Game B. This confrontational game mode, which has traditionally been stereotyped as the standard for male-oriented games, has unexpectedly been widely welcomed by female players of Love and Deep Space.
"After a series of fierce battles, my phone got hot and the app crashed." As one anonymous gamer commented, there are many posts that are keen to discuss combat skills when searching for "Love とDeep Space" on 5ch, a large anonymous forum in Japan.
The player and the male protagonist fight together
The reason is that in "Love and Deep Space", the heroine "I" is set as a "deep space hunter" with both wisdom and combat power. In the plot, "I" has always maintained full action to explore the truth of the world; In the battle, "I" and the male protagonist are more like comrades-in-arms who fight side by side and grow together. This setting changes the image of the "delicate little white flower" in the traditional B game in which the heroine is overly dependent on the protection of the male protagonist, and shows the demeanor of the heroine who is dazzling to overseas players.
In the same vein, the concept of love and the expression of love in "Love and Deep Space" also redefine the relationship of "love".
In the game feedback of "Love and Deep Space", a Japanese user "いン Yuichi" explained that the reason why she will continue to play is that the "I" who likes Deep Space very much belongs to the type that will take the initiative - this kind of love attitude of Chinese girls has brought an impact to the Japanese B game industry that is generally portrayed as a passive heroine.
Although there are also criticisms that the male character design of "Love and Deep Space" still follows the logic of "dream girl", allowing women to look up with Mu Qiang's filter and fantasize about the perfect man, but still fall into the trap of traditional gender relations.
But the flaws are not hidden, and the fact that "Love and Deep Space" can be loved by players around the world proves the success of its underlying logic - its emergence provides a window to express oneself and release desires, reflecting women's demands for independence, strength, and assertiveness. And this idea has long gone beyond the original proposition of the Japanese-style B tour.
Sigmund Freud said, "The essence of art is daydreaming." "As a video game of the ninth art, its virtual plot is precisely the "reality" of the dreams that adults pursue in reality. In a country where reality and fantasy are intertwined, "Love and Deep Space" witnesses a dance of contemporary women's deep collective consciousness.
This article was first published in Issue 10 of World Watch magazine
Author | Xiao Yin
Edit | Wu Yangyu
Editor-in-Chief on Duty | Zhao Jinghan
Typography | Qianwen