National Coalition of Independent Scholars

Leaving Teyvat: Gendered Expectations and Exit Discourses

This paper examines why players quit or disengage from Genshin Impact and migrate to Love and Deepspace, framing player exit as a form of critical commentary rather than a rejection of the gacha genre itself.

• The study frames players intentionally quitting Genshin Impact and moving to Love and Deepspace as a form of critical commentary, not a rejection of the gacha genre itself.
• The analysis is a thematic study (after Braun and Clarke) of roughly 400 comments from a single Reddit thread, so its findings are explicitly preliminary and not generalizable.
• Key complaints about Genshin Impact include the scarcity of male five-star characters, the perceived prioritization of sexualized female characters aimed at a male audience, and weaker storylines and writing in the Natlan expansion compared with earlier content.