Author: Soda Editor: Miriam

This article is reprinted with permission from phoenix weekly (ID: phoenixweekly).

If there is one thing that can unify the aesthetics of women in China, Japan and South Korea, it is not an idol, not a variety show, not a fashion trend, but a new game launched by Papergames this year - "Love and Deep Space".

Watching "Love and Deep Space" topped the IOS free list in Japan, the United States, South Korea and other places, friends couldn't sit still, and set off an unprecedented "National B 118 Incident" on Weibo.

The games are in a hurry to give benefits to steal the limelight, and finally the pattern is opened, shouting "bigger and stronger together".

The excitement of the scene is no less than the Beijing Auto Show where Lei Jun and Zhou Hongyi appeared, and Zhou Xun had to sigh when he came: There are so many people.

In April this year, the global revenue of "Love and Deep Space" was about 330 million, which is a remarkable achievement, and it is now the most profitable female-oriented mobile game in China, and the new king of domestic otome games. At the same time, it also drove the entire Papergames network to jump to the 15th place among Chinese mobile game publishers.

After Papergames opened the Chinese B game market with a "Love and the Producer", "Love and Deep Space" became a hit in the public beta again, which made people have to be convinced

- Paperfold, it has to be you.

As the saying goes, where the money is, there is love. The turnover income proves that the players really love the husbands of the paper people in "Love and Deep Space".

"Love and Deep Space" is a 3D love game that fascinates players from all over the world, players will play the role of "Deep Space Hunter" to fight with various monsters, explore the unknown with three male protagonists, and fall in love while fighting.

Its combat operation is similar to "Honor of Kings", with joysticks and buttons to put skills.

In addition, you can customize your voice and image, immerse yourself in love, and highly interact with the male protagonists, make phone calls, play cards together, and catch dolls.

A good skin is the starting point for boyfriends to gain attraction.

The male protagonists of "Love and Deep Space" have no dead ends, a highly folded nose bridge, not to mention the anger of people and gods, they must be super eye-catching, and their mood is much brighter at a glance.

You can tap his pectoral muscles at the workstation and ask him to help you solve the ultimate philosophical question of "what to eat at noon".

The character of the male protagonist is the ultimate weapon that makes thousands of girls sink.

Shen Xinghui has the face of an idol-level star, ostensibly a colleague who fights side by side with you, but in fact he is an alien prince who gave up his eternal life for you, waiting for more than 200 years just to reunite with you who have lost your memory.

The IF line stories of the other two male protagonists and players can be summarized as "the sea god who is tempted by the sacrifice" and "the lover who can predict the unknown but cannot escape the fate of life and death".

The story line will change, but the determination to come to you again and again, and not hesitate to resist fate, will not change.

They will be sultry, coquettish and jealous, want to indulge, their lips and hair are playful, and their eyes are seducing you every second.

There is another face in the romantic relationship that several people usually interact with.

Shen Xinghui looks like a confused milk dog in his old age, but he is actually a carnivore with super lethality.

Qi Yu's ostensible identity is an artist, and his body is a mermaid (yes, domestic otome games have evolved to ???? in love). Sensitive and melancholy personality.,It's the shy boy who is the easiest to blush and shy among the three.,If you eat innocent tsundere.,Choose him.。

Li Shen is your childhood sweetheart and attending doctor, he has become the deputy director of cardiac surgery at a young age, and he is an iceberg of abstinence on the outside, but he is actually warm and sullen, cold on the outside and hot on the inside.

The three male protagonists each lead the way, focusing on a "chaotic flower gradually charming eye".

One of the things that domestic women are best at in games is to create chats, video calls, and moments of friends that are similar to real social interactions to enhance players' sense of substitution.

Boyfriend messages love not to return, anyway, paper people can provide emotional value anytime and anywhere.

The electronic boyfriend comes to greet him on the phone from time to time, which directly brings a full surprise point.

They share the real dawn sky and city night with the player, respond to every comment from the player, and don't mind showing affection openly with the player.

"Almost downstairs in your house"

"The vitamins you give are sweeter"

This sultry opening will come

"Let's go"

"I want to see you"

There are also a lot of people who secretly poke and poke to meet and express their thoughts.

The three of them are full of love brains, and they can change their couple avatars according to the player's requirements, and they will also take photos with you to get the certificate.

As a result, women's games have simply become the culmination of female consumption:

has the appearance of idol idols, applying the characters and stories in romance novels, and interacting with them is more and more natural than the sprinkling of idol dramas.

Sell you the perfect love experience.

While all the women's games encourage women to be brave and free and strong, ironically, this courage and freedom come at a price.

In this era, only those who can krypton gold can enjoy electronic love first.

And the ways you pay for the electronic boyfriend recharge can be said to be very diverse.

The most basic is of course to recharge krypton gold in the game to get more card images, plots and interactive props. There are many names of paid items, such as monthly passes, gift packs, passes, and ......

If you want to increase your combat power and get a limited card, you have to top up your money. The unit price of "Love and Deep Space" is 15 yuan per draw for direct recharge, and the unit price of each draw for the more cost-effective gift package is about 3 yuan, and most of them cannot be purchased repeatedly.

70 draws can guarantee a five-star card, theoretically a player with bad luck in the card draws wants to recharge directly to get a limited card, which requires 1050 yuan.

If you want to voice chat with your boyfriend, you have to top up your money. Paid props "microphone", 6 yuan for 7 days, 18 yuan for 30 days, limited to one time a day, no more than 15 minutes at a time.

If you want to change him into good-looking clothes, each set is 128, and you want to buy them Bluetooth headsets, gold wire glasses and other small accessories, which also cost money, ranging from 3 yuan to 30 yuan.

In short, if you want to see him wear new clothes, post a new circle of friends, have new chats with him, and have new dates all lead to the same result, "you have to add money." ”

Taking "Love of Light and Night", the "first B game of the fan circle people" as an example, the annual turnover in 2022 will be as high as 947 million yuan. In 2024, the first month of the open beta test "Love and Deep Space" set a record for female-oriented games, with an estimated amount of more than 600 million yuan and overseas revenue of more than 300 million yuan. Behind the exaggerated numbers are players who have invested real money.

From the zero krypton party, the monthly card party (civilian players who only buy monthly cards) to the heavy krypton rich woman, the player group is naturally divided into different "classes" in terms of the amount of krypton gold recharge.

Some people choose to spend a hot pot every month, and the cumulative amount is 1,000 yuan in a year. Some players do not hesitate to invest heavily in each activity, until they spend hundreds of thousands or millions, and then they have peace of mind without anxiety, "so that the production team will be good to him".

Among the players, a "Krypton Gold" group similar to "Kayan Bureau" was born, and you need to recharge more than 50,000 yuan to join the group to communicate, and the group name is very appropriate - "Million Club".

In less than two months after the launch of "Love and Deep Space", there have been a large number of players with more than 8,000 yuan in krypton, but they still complain that they can't get a more pleasant game experience.

After personal experience, many players said that the demand for krypton gold in "Love and Deep Space" is only much more than that of other games, "The amount of krypton gold in playing "Love and Deep Space" for a month can be played in other games for a year. ”

Because of the high unit price of the gacha card and the lack of free resources in "Love and Deep Space", the official has successively launched a single-player and three-player mixed limited card pool, which has led to increasingly serious player complaints, and a large-scale "stop krypton, withdraw from the game, and defend rights" incident broke out around March 15. The player complained:

"The poor don't deserve love."

"Bottomless pit, I can't afford to play, I said you were the Hermes of the second game."

The game company's method of nuggets is not only in the game, but has already penetrated into all aspects of life.

In order to amplify the value of IP, the official will make related peripheral products for sale, from badges, figures, toys to mugs and folders. Many players will collect merch badges to make "Pain Packs" - decorate backpacks with their favorite character avatars.

The first batch of peripherals of "Love and Deep Space" made a lot of money. Among them, the best-selling "Qi Yu's Birthday Tinplate Badge" has sales of up to 700,000+, and according to the pricing of 18 yuan, this peripheral will bring 12.6 million sales to Stacked Paper.

According to media calculations, the sales of the first batch of peripherals of "Love and Deep Space" are at least about 80 million, and the peripheral sales alone are not less than the monthly sales of Douyin's head delivery experts.

In addition to the surrounding area, the official will also open a limited café, linkage with new tea drinks, clothing brands, and so on. According to the statistics of media TopMarketing, since 2019, there have been more than 30 co-branded cooperative brands of "Love and Producer", and "Love of Light and Night" has been launched late, and there are more than 20 cooperative brands.

With peripheral income, card pool income, and copyright income, Papergames can harvest hundreds of millions of yuan every month.

"Love and Deep Space" is the second otome game launched by Papergames.

At the end of 2017, the first domestic female love game "Love and Producer" was born, with more than 4 million DAUs (daily active players) in the first month, and the monthly turnover may exceed 300 million, and the total turnover of Papergames' games in 2018 reached 1.25 billion.

The explosive numbers and popularity have attracted Tencent, NetEase and other big game manufacturers to come down one after another, and jointly compete for women in the game market.

"Love and the Producer" almost laid the foundation for the gameplay and ideas of most domestic women-oriented games, and its success officially brought the paperstack game into the public eye.

Founded in 2013 with only seven members, the game company has attracted countless young female gamers with its dress-up game IP Nuan Nuan, and has received multiple rounds of financing.

The latest work in the Nuan Nuan series, "Infinite Nuan Nuan", is a costume change + open world gameplay, and the test has just ended in May

By 2022, Papergames has more than 2,000 employees, dozens of studios, and a total annual turnover of more than 1.7 billion for all its games.

Cook visited Papergames during his trip to China

Because of the success of Papergames in female-oriented games, Papergames, miHoYo, Lilith, and Eagle Horn are known as the "Four Little Dragons of Shanghai Games".

However, many players are dissatisfied with the gaming experience provided by women such as Papergames to game manufacturers.

The key word that comes up from a search for "Paperfold Today" is "Did Paperfold apologize today?" And "Did Paperfold look at the player as a human being today?" ”

It's like players who only want to spend money on apples, but are forced to spend money on fruit to eat. The chef who served the dish could provide only one kind of fruit, but deliberately handed over the fruit in order to let people spend more money to eat a few more bites.

Comparatively speaking, Japanese otome games such as Idol Dream Matsuri!! Music", because of the large number of characters (49 members), the events are frequently launched, and the average number of single-player card pools per character is only a few per year. Even if there is usually less kryptonite, players can easily get the character card they want and play more comfortably.

And many players said: "It is almost impossible for national B players to play comfortably without liver." ”

Love is plump, reality is skinny.

The perfect and powerful electronic boyfriend is omnipotent in the virtual world, but in reality he is like a "hostage" in the hands of a game company.

There is a lot of money, and there are many imperfections in the experience, why are everyone still willing to eat it?

As Yiyou moves from a 2D paper man to a 3D cyborg, the emotional value and companionship functions that Yiyou can provide are constantly evolving.

The large-scale card surface of 18+ visualizes the above stimuli.

Kiss cards and hug cards are just ordinary, and the looming driving card is also the key to making players want to stop. As technology continues to evolve, this male temptation is even a sugar-coated cannonball that rushes into the player's wallet, and the player who can't resist it has the upper hand.

The player's second creation and fanfic adaptation directly pulled the game to the scale of "unable to be discussed publicly".

"Love and the Producer" and "Love and Deep Space" launched the function of accompanying sleep/concentration/fitness/memorizing words can directly replace the sleep blogger, Pomodoro, fitness and word memorization software, bringing sound stimulation similar to otome scratch (otome to radio drama, similar to the pure audio version of otome games).

The companion sports system and reward mechanism motivate players to check in, some players choose to focus on catching up with their papers together accompanied by Dr. Li Shen, and some players exercise with Shen Xinghui to slowly develop exercise habits.

The practical security voice system helps women cope with scenarios such as taking a taxi alone, walking at night, and strangers knocking on the door at night, and it also provides a sense of security.

The sexual satisfaction in the otome game is the outermost candy wrapper, and the deepest selling point is the emotional satisfaction of the female group.

Even if you know that the paper man is fake, the throbbing and love hormones brought by the paper man are real.

It's too difficult to get such emotional satisfaction in the real world.

How many women are disappointed with the celebrity marriage and love gossip on the hot search?

How many women are shocked by the reality of marriage and love and the ugliness of human nature displayed in the live broadcast room of marriage and love consultation?

How many people are enthusiastically spreading the WeChat PDF melon, but at the same time, they are deterred from the actual love because of the betrayal and hurt of their lover that is constantly staged in the news?

The endless arguments about gender inequality, bride price, and violence in intimate relationships have gradually pulled women further away from real romantic relationships.

But the emotional need doesn't go away, it's just replaced by something else.

Idol dramas, AI, and love variety shows are all contestants on the field, and the attraction of perfect lovers and painless love created by game companies is undoubtedly the most addictive and safest among them.

According to the theories of social psychologists Donald Horton and Richard Hall, this kind of behavior of communicating and empathizing with virtual personalities is called "pseudosocial relations". Although the personality of the electronic boyfriend is fake, this emotional relationship and bond are real and happening.

Entering into a "quasi-social relationship" can provide the subject with interpersonal security and satisfaction, because true love is hard to find, creating a pure love in the virtual world.

In essence, girls may still want to be treated gently, hoping that someone can say that you are awesome and hard when you are tired, and say good night when you are sleepy.

According to the "2019 Game Industry Report", the number of female users reached 300 million in 2019, accounting for nearly half of the total number of game users, and Asian female gamers are growing at an annual rate of 11%, contributing about 23.5% of the revenue of the Asian game market.

Such an astonishing consumer vitality and rich potential consumer group have long proved that women's games are not just games, but also the growth of women's consumption and insight into women's needs.

Since the birth of women's games, there has been no shortage of voices criticizing the "lack of love" and "pathetic" of female gamers, which are just supply and demand in the capital market.

And whether it's online novels, short videos, or games, who isn't looking for virtual solace and a moment of satisfaction in the ocean of information?

"Isn't it a kind of happiness to have dreams to do?"

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