Love and Deepspace Official Promo Unironically Uses 'Tea Egg' Giveaway — The Same 'Tea Egg' That's Papergames' Most Legendary Employee Meltdown, and the Community Is Losing It

Can a game company actually turn its most infamous employee meltdown — storming the office, hijacking official accounts, and bodying a security guard — into a 10,000-egg marketing stunt? Love and Deepspace (恋与深空) just did, and they did it with zero irony.

The official Love and Deepspace Weibo account recently launched a massive promotional campaign: #恋与深空送万颗茶叶蛋求安利# (Love and Deepspace Gives Away 10,000 Tea Eggs for Recommendations). The pitch is simple — follow, repost, and 1,250 lucky 'hunters' (the game's term for players) each receive a box of 8 Wufangzhai tea eggs, totaling a grand 10,000 eggs. There's also a content creation contest with categories for fan art, video edits, and written posts, with a grand prize of 6,480 in-game diamonds plus 500 yuan cash. Their tagline? 'Play Love and Deepspace, be a happy woman! Date a 3D boyfriend, live a blessed life!' — delivered with maximum enthusiasm.

But here's the catch: 'tea egg' (茶叶蛋) carries some very specific baggage at Papergames (叠纸), the studio behind Love and Deepspace.

The lore goes like this — and yes, this is community legend at this point. A former Papergames employee, lovingly nicknamed 'Tea Egg Sister' (茶叶蛋姐), rose from customer service to the operations team. Struggling financially, she started selling tea eggs at 3.5 yuan apiece inside the office while constantly suspecting coworkers of discriminating against her over money and education. One day, a colleague posted a new iPad on their WeChat Moments. Tea Egg Sister took it as a personal attack, confronted the coworker in the parking lot, and that night penned a 6,000-word exposé on the company's internal app.

But the real kicker came next. According to player accounts, Papergames CEO Yao Runhao (姚润昊) read her essay — and Tea Egg Sister interpreted that as him being deeply moved by her story. She then proceeded to barrage him with private messages until 1 AM. Yao, utterly exhausted, called HR at 2 AM to fire her on the spot. Upon receiving her termination call, Tea Egg Sister marched straight to the Papergames building in the middle of the night, hijacked official social media accounts to rant, leaked confidential contract details for Path to Nowhere (无期迷途) — another Papergames title — and when security spent over an hour searching the building to find her, she physically attacked the guard.

And now, this — the very incident that became Papergames' most legendary 'digital criminal record' (赛博案底) — is being voluntarily weaponized as marketing material by the company's own flagship title. The comment section erupted. One player sighed: 'Is this really what otome game marketing has come to — competing over who can be more unhinged?' Another lamented that 'at this point, admitting I've played otome games is basically a digital criminal record of my own.' Others roasted the official tone: 'Does the marketing team really think big-character poster energy is cool?'

Of course, most people were just here for the entertainment. After hearing the full Tea Egg Sister saga retold in the comments, reactions ranged from 'this is actually hilarious' to 'I laugh every single time this story comes up.' One commenter offered the perfect career advice: 'If the guard can't even beat her, just hire her as the guard.' Another got tactical: 'You really can't fight a crazy woman — if you use any real force she'll just drop to the ground crying and suddenly you're the bad guy.'

So when a game studio voluntarily revives its own most embarrassing meme for marketing, is it a galaxy-brain PR move that owns the narrative — or just another spectacular case of operations brainrot? Only Yao Runhao knows whether the scars from that 2 AM tea-egg-induced phone call still sting.