Can Girls' Frontline 2 Survive Its First Anniversary? Forced NTR Plot + Cratering Revenue Spark Wild Mockery, But the Writing Team Thinks They're Doing Great

"The 95 controversy turned out to be just the foreplay?" — One NGA user dropped three separate gossip threads and boldly asked: Can Girls' Frontline 2: Exilium even survive to its first anniversary?

The OP compiled three sources: a livestream featuring so-called 'uncle leakers' (insiders), a Tieba post allegedly from someone inside the writing team exposing their current state, and real-time tracking of the game's post-holiday free chart and revenue chart rankings. If all of this checks out, the game's death spiral might not last another 6 months. The most insane part? Apparently the writing team genuinely believes their work is good. The abysmal launch week rankings? Leadership reportedly felt just fine about them.

Even more jaw-dropping: the character 95's NTR (cuckold) storyline controversy — arguably the biggest drama of the game's launch — was apparently just the warm-up. Supposedly even bigger bombs are incoming. The OP deadpanned: "Would announcing an immediate shutdown right now count as the best example of cutting losses in gacha history?" Though they admitted that if Sunborn actually did that, "shareholders and investors would tear the CEO apart, mince him into meat pies, and feed them to dogs." They closed with a cheeky: Would this be the record for fastest gacha shutdown ever?

But against this apocalyptic framing, the comment section reacted with surprising calm — or rather, calm in a darkly comedic way.

The top-voted take cut straight to the point: "The gacha market has changed, but not completely — bad revenue is one thing, a game dying is another." In other words, bleeding money ≠ instant death. Sunborn's specialty has always been surviving on life support — half-dead is their default state.

One commenter delivered a surgical diagnosis of the game's core contradiction: "It's internally fragmented — the xxn (radical feminist) writing team wants to express their personal agenda, the marketing goes full ML (Master Love / waifu-pandering), the gameplay flip-flops in every direction, and the balance designers are stuck in 2014. It's worse than a Frankenstein." Summed up: the devs and their remaining whales are in a mutual suicide pact.

Regarding the NTR (netorare / cuckold) scandal, one player questioned: the company already went full silent treatment on the whole drama — why not just go all-in on a public apology? Instead they're still "thinking about that potato flower" (a reference to a controversial plot element). Sunborn being permanently tagged as "the NTR company" and its players labeled "cucks" — that reputation isn't going anywhere.

Another highly-upvoted comment attacked from the capital angle: high-fidelity 3D models drive operational costs an order of magnitude higher than 2D gacha games. Capital demands returns. "With GFL2's current revenue... even if you recoup the initial investment, so what? Development took so long the time value of money nearly matches those meager returns." Cold conclusion: "If I were one of Chairman Huang's investors, I wouldn't be able to eat this week."

Of course, some pointed out that "keeping a gacha game barely alive is easy" — the real problem is that "making people question this team's competence is the bigger issue." The original Girls' Frontline and Neural Cloud (Cloud Atlas) have even lower revenue, and they're still running. As long as Yuzhong (Sunborn's boss) doesn't want to pull the plug, no amount of bad revenue will kill it.

Others brought up Silude (Thresher) — Bilibili's in-house gacha that never even cracked the top 200 on free charts, yet it's still running. "And Silude is the strongest title in Bilibili's self-developed lineup." Meanwhile JieShenZhe (another failed gacha) kept its servers running for over a year after stopping updates. They'll milk the pre-made content and remaining loyal whales dry before even thinking about shutdown.

Finally, two "last resort" survival paths were proposed: either parachute in a heavyweight producer (Yoshida Naoki saving FFXIV style) and radically rebuild from scratch, coming back in a year; or limp along on fumes, patch and stitch until the initial dev resources run out, then fade into obscurity. As for the Valentine's Day 'Wa' character carrying the game? One optimist said "she might just top the charts" — but that reads like weapons-grade copium.