You can't celebrate the Lantern Festival, but Halloween and Christmas get the full treatment — Love and Deepspace just dropped what might be the most tone-deaf holiday gacha move of the year. A Chinese-made mobile game downplaying its own cultural holidays while rolling out the red carpet for Western ones? Players are livid.
According to the original post, during this year's Lantern Festival (元宵节, a traditional Chinese holiday celebrated on the 15th day of the Lunar New Year), Love and Deepspace sent players an in-game mail that referred to the holiday as '繁灯节' (Fán Dēng Jié) — a made-up, sanitized name that strips away any cultural significance. Meanwhile, Halloween and Christmas kept their original names without any rebranding. To make matters worse, when Chinese New Year and Valentine's Day overlapped this year, the game only acknowledged Valentine's Day. Chinese New Year events? Only available in the domestic Chinese version — the overseas version didn't mention them at all.
But here's where it gets really spicy. After players started calling this out, the dev team pushed an emergency hotfix in the dead of night, quietly renaming Halloween to a generic 'Costume Party' (换装派对). This frantic cover-up didn't extinguish the fire — it only confirmed two things: first, the ops team has been monitoring community feedback the entire time; and second, they clearly knew this was a bad look but chose to do nothing until they got publicly exposed.
Additional evidence surfaced showing that the overseas version completely omitted Chinese New Year, while domestic players got a limited-time celebration. This further confirmed the double-standard strategy: whitewash Chinese traditions at home, and erase them entirely abroad.
The comment section zeroed in on the most ironic part of the timeline. Just one day before this scandal broke, Papergames (the developer) was actively dragging competitor game 'Yishan' (以闪亮之名, a rival fashion/gacha game) for alleged political stance issues. The very next day, their own dumpster fire erupted. One player summed it up perfectly: 'Yesterday they were attacking Yishan for politics, today their own mess exploded.'
A veteran player who'd followed Papergames since their Nikki series pointed out this isn't a one-off: 'This is just how the company operates. The Nikki games had the same BS. They love waving the 'cultural export' flag domestically while groveling abroad. They can't even clean up their own act but still have the audacity to drag competitors for political correctness.'
Some players went scorched earth: 'Papergames is permanently tagged as borderline traitors in my mind — the sneaky kind who think they're clever about it.' Others called it a match made in hell between the devs and their fanbase: 'This is just a two-way love affair between otome game companies and their stans.' The old meme about Papergames' CEO being 'Yao Runhao Ichirou' (a jab implying Japanese sympathies) also resurfaced.
As of now, Halloween has been renamed to 'Costume Party,' but the Lantern Festival is still called '繁灯节.' Papergames has issued no official statement on the matter.
This is a textbook ops disaster: attack your competitor's political stance one day, get exposed for your own cultural double standards the next. The overnight stealth-edit only made it worse — the classic 'nothing to see here' move that screams guilty conscience. As one commenter put it: 'Doesn't this just prove they know their target audience well?' — well enough to paint themselves into a corner, that is.
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