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 argue that otome gacha operates as a form of "affective predation," in which the game platform deliberately structures romantic progression so that it can only be advanced through continued emotional and financial investment. This creates a recursive loop in which desire, intimacy, and expenditure reinforce one another. Reported spending on the game surpassed US$750 million by August 2025, excluding mainland China, a figure that underscores the commercial stakes of this design approach.

The study situates these dynamics within feminist game studies and extends prior research on gacha systems, which has largely focused on gambling-adjacent behaviour, by foregrounding the affective bonds players form with characters. Drawing on Ahmed's account of affective economies and Chess's concept of the "player two," the authors examine how the industry constructs profitable gendered audiences. They also stress that players retain agency, often willingly participating because they value the game and want to support it, and they note LADS's largely female development team as a point of contrast with the male-dominated games industry.

The methodology combines an application walkthrough focused on the game's gacha system with a discourse analysis of player discussions on Reddit and RedNote. Player responses are notably divided, ranging from accounts of the game as a rigged lottery to open defences of spending on favourite characters. The authors present their findings as early insights, proposing a framework for understanding how economic and affective structures co-produce gendered forms of play.