Love and Deepspace, the dating gacha built by Papergames and published by Infold Games, just posted the weakest revenue month of its life. After a year of steady earnings, the game collapsed to a fraction of its usual take in July 2026, and the drop lines up almost exactly with the fallout over a canceled love interest named Valko.
Quick answer: Love and Deepspace made about $10.3 million in July 2026, down roughly 73% from $38 million in June. The fall traces to the canceled sixth love interest Valko, an active player boycott, and a stretch of thin, delayed content.
The revenue drop, month by month
For most of the past year, Love and Deepspace sat comfortably among the top-earning gacha titles, pulling in somewhere between $30 million and $60 million each month. July broke that pattern hard. The $10.3 million figure is the lowest monthly total the game has ever recorded, and by a wide margin.
| Month (2026) | Revenue |
|---|---|
| May | ~$49 million |
| June | ~$38 million |
| July | ~$10.3 million |
The month-over-month slide from June to July works out to about a 73% loss. That kind of single-month collapse is rare for a live-service gacha game with a large, spending-heavy player base, which is why it stands out so sharply against the game’s earlier numbers.
What Valko was and why he was canceled
Valko, also known as Ao Yin, was set to become the game’s sixth love interest, joining Zayne, Xavier, Rafayel, Sylus, and Caleb. He was designed as a rugged tech CEO and werewolf clan leader, and his reveal on Weibo drew hundreds of thousands of comments, making it one of the most talked-about announcements the game has ever had.
The backlash came largely from the Chinese side of the community. The central complaint was not really about how Valko looked. It was that Infold kept adding new characters while the stories and cards for existing love interests, especially Sylus and Caleb, went untouched for long stretches. Players pointed to a storyline gap running past 500 days for one character, and argued the studio had the resources to update old content but chose to chase new-character hype instead.
The pressure worked. Infold canceled Valko’s release entirely, and later said it would not add him or any other sixth love interest, promising instead to focus on the five characters already in the game. That decision then triggered a second wave of anger from Western players who had been looking forward to him. A petition to bring Valko back gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures, and online personalities picked up the campaign.
The boycott put the anger on the balance sheet
The clearest link between the controversy and the revenue crash is a coordinated spending strike. Players, including some of the most active members of the game’s English-speaking Discord, publicly pledged to stop paying until Valko returned. A recurring genre of post shows screenshots of four- and five-figure balances that players say they are deliberately holding back, framing it as a kind of standoff with the developer.
Boycotts in gaming often fizzle out. This one landed harder than usual, and the July numbers are the evidence. The game’s official social posts have also been heavily downvoted and ratioed in the weeks since, a sign the frustration has not cooled.
The other reasons revenue fell
Valko is the headline cause, but he is not the only one. Several separate problems piled up during the same window, and each pushed players toward spending less.
- A content drought. The last major event, which dressed the characters in remixed versions of classic movies, ended in early July. After that came a rerun of old content and then very little. The next new event centered on a single love interest, leaving fans of the other four with nothing to chase.
- Delayed and missing updates. The main story had gone months without an update, and a new Rafayel story promised for July never arrived.
- Alienated queer players. Although Love and Deepspace does not allow same-sex relationships, its cast of emotionally sensitive men drew a queer audience willing to spend. Infold’s public framing that it is not an all-gender game, alongside reporting on its North American events, cooled that group’s willingness to pay.
- A bare Valko-less update. The 6.0 update, Shattered Quiet, had been built around Valko. Without him, players found the new content thin, and the release also arrived buggy.
Put together, these mean a big part of July’s drop is simply that there was not much worth spending on. Free giveaways used to soften the mood have since ended, and both Sylus and Caleb main-story updates were pushed toward the fall.
Government involvement made Valko’s return unlikely
The controversy escalated beyond fan pressure when China’s Ministry of Public Security weighed in. Its statement objected to Valko’s promotional material, in which he breaks into the main character’s home, warning that the marketing could be read as glorifying home intrusion and sexual assault. One promotional line read, “What’s wrong with letting a wolf into the house?”
This kind of entertainment-driven, traffic-driven creative work disregards public order and morality, crosses legal boundaries, and may ultimately endanger public safety.
Because China tightly regulates what games can publish, that statement carries real weight. Characters and storylines were pulled and put back through re-certification, and the ministry framed the case as a warning to other studios that content blurring legal lines or glorifying dangerous behavior faces removal. Papergames also pulled its booth from BilibiliWorld 2026, one of Asia’s largest anime and gaming conventions.
Where the game stands now
Valko has not returned, and with a government statement in play, his revival looks unlikely. In trying to satisfy both sides of the split fanbase, Infold ended up satisfying neither. The result is a game that spent nearly a billion dollars’ worth of goodwill over its lifetime now watching a large share of its spenders sit on their wallets at once.
Whether July was a one-off shock or the start of a longer decline depends on two things: how quickly Infold ships meaningful updates for its five existing love interests, and whether the boycotting players decide the studio has actually listened. Until fresh content lands and the story updates arrive, the pressure on Love and Deepspace’s revenue is likely to stay.
