Papergames
Company
Documents about Papergames
Article
Affective Predation: Gendered Play, Monetisation, and Precarity in Otome Gacha Games
This paper examines how Love and Deepspace (LADS), a popular female-oriented otome gacha game launched by Papergames/Infold Games in January 2024, uses romance conventions and gacha mechanics to monetise players' emotional attachment.
- The authors frame otome gacha as "affective predation": romantic progression in Love and Deepspace (LADS) is structured so it can only advance through continued emotional and financial investment, creating a loop where desire, intimacy, and spending reinforce one another.
- LADS, developed by Papergames/Infold Games and launched in January 2024, reportedly surpassed US$750 million in spending by August 2025, excluding mainland China, illustrating the large commercial stakes of this design approach.
- Unlike prior gacha research that focused mainly on gambling-adjacent behaviour, the paper foregrounds the affective bonds players form with characters, drawing on Ahmed's affective economies and Chess's "player two" concept to explain how industry builds profitable gendered audiences.
DiGRAJun 2026
Article
The Husbando Super-App: Tracing Player Investment with Love and Deepspace
This work-in-progress paper examines how players become invested in Papergames' Love and Deepspace (2024), a free-to-play mobile otome and gacha game, and uses it as a case study for a broader argument about player investment.
- The paper uses Papergames' Love and Deepspace (2024), a free-to-play mobile otome and gacha game, as a case study for how player investment operates both materially and affectively.
- It proposes five non-exhaustive dimensions of investment (monetary, temporal, storage, affective, and fandom) as a lens for understanding how neoliberal capitalism structures leisure, particularly women's leisure.
- The monetary dimension centres on crystals, a currency obtainable only through microtransactions, which offer the easiest route to otherwise time-limited romantic content.
DiGRAJun 2026
Article
Avatar and Real Me: Identity Anxiety of Chinese Mobile Otome Game Players: A Case Study of Papergames
This paper examines identity anxiety among Chinese players of free-to-play mobile otome games, using Papergames' Love and Producer (2017) and Love and Deepspace (2024) as case studies.
- The paper argues that existing otome game scholarship, which treats avatars as stable and players as closely identifying with them, fails to explain mobile players, who often reject or feel unease toward their avatar's presence in the two-dimensional game world.
- Within free-to-play otome games, the paper proposes that three identities, the player, the believer, and the lover, come into conflict, and it distinguishes mobile otome games from buy-to-play otome visual novels in how player identity is constructed.
- The study uses semi-structured interviews with thematic analysis organized around the acquisition, retention, and monetization model, supplemented by game narrative and mechanics and official Sina Weibo posts from the developers; the interview sample size is not specified in the extended abstract.
DiGRAJun 2025
