Love and Deepspace: The $650 Million Romance Game the Industry Underestimated
A 3D sci-fi dating game made for women, starring five men with very different ideas of a good date. How Papergames built one of China's biggest global hits, and why so many people missed it coming.
For decades, the games industry treated romance games for women as a niche, something for small Japanese studios and visual novels. Then a Chinese studio built a romance game with the production values of a blockbuster action RPG, and players spent hundreds of millions of dollars on it.
Love and Deepspace, made by Papergames, launched worldwide on 18 January 2024. By mid-June 2025, players had spent about $650 million on it through the App Store and Google Play, according to Sensor Tower estimates. Papergames said in January 2025 that the game had passed 50 million downloads.
Romance, in full 3D
Love and Deepspace is an otome game, a genre of story games aimed at women in which the player character is courted by several male leads. What sets it apart is presentation. The men are fully animated in 3D, they react to your touch and your choices, and many scenes are shot from a first-person view, as if you are on the date.
The setting is a sci-fi city threatened by monsters. You play a hunter who fights alongside the love interests in real-time combat. Each of the leads has his own story, personality and fan base. The cast started with Xavier, Zayne and Rafayel, and has since grown with Sylus and Caleb.
The money and the map
The game sells through gacha: players spend premium currency on random draws for memory cards, illustrated scenes that also power up combat. The rarest cards come with special animated sequences, and that is what fans chase.
China is the biggest market, with 48% of revenue in May 2025, according to Sensor Tower, followed by the US on 19%. The share coming from outside China has been gradually rising. The tracked figures also leave out China's many Android stores, so the true total is higher.
Why the industry missed it
The success of Love and Deepspace says as much about the industry as about the game. Big-budget development has long been aimed at men, on the assumption that women spend less on games. This game shows that women will spend heavily on experiences built for them, especially when the quality matches what action games receive.
It also comes from a studio with a track record. Papergames built the long-running Nikki dress-up series and, at the end of 2024, released Infinity Nikki, an open-world fashion adventure. Together, the studio's games are reported to have earned close to $1 billion in a single year.
Why it works
Production values. The 3D animation and voice acting make the romance feel personal and expensive.
Variety of leads. Five very different men mean five different fan communities, each with its own art, theories and favourite scenes.
Rituals. Birthdays, events and daily messages turn the game into part of the player's routine.
WGC's take
Love and Deepspace is one of the most important mobile hits of the decade, not because of its revenue alone, but because it exposed a blind spot. Women were always a huge part of the mobile audience; few studios built a premium experience just for them. Papergames did, and others are now racing to catch up. Expect more big-budget romance and fashion games aimed at women in the next few years, many of them built on the lessons of this one.