When a gacha game tries to please both waifu-chasing otaku and Weibo feminist stans at the same time, the result is usually a spectacular faceplant on both fronts. Dragon Song (归龙潮) just delivered a masterclass in how NOT to run community management in 2024 — offering ¥20,000 travel prizes on Weibo while Bilibili fans got acrylic keychains, then panicking and adding cleavage to female characters after the backlash. Spoiler: nobody was impressed.
The drama kicked off when players noticed the wildly lopsided giveaway across platforms. Weibo users were entered to win travel funds worth ¥20,000 and gold bars worth ¥5,000, while Bilibili — the home turf of gacha gamers — offered a measly 3 acrylic stands.
Bilibili players coined the now-viral phrase '微博治游' (Weibo-ran game) — a snarky label implying the devs only care about Weibo's female-dominated audience while treating core male gacha gamers as second-class citizens.
Under mounting pressure, the producer rushed out an apology.
But the apology wasn't enough. What happened next was pure comedy gold — eagle-eyed players spotted that the devs had quietly added cleavage lines to previously flat-chested female character art in the latest update.
Community researchers dug up the full timeline and found the character art went through THREE versions: initially heavily exposed skin, then fully clothed with no cleavage, and now — post-backlash — cleavage added back. One commenter quipped: 'These prosthetics keep appearing and disappearing — make up your mind!'
Of course, this desperate pandering pleased exactly nobody. Weibo users were still unhappy —
And Bilibili fans weren't buying it either —
As one NGA user put it perfectly: 'Can cleavage just be toggled on and off like a switch? Now you've lost both sides.' Another was more blunt: 'Confirmed trash company that only simp-pleases women. If there's a playable male character, I'm out.'
But the real gem was a now-legendary comment from user '冰水冰糖冰梨膏' who laid out a brutally comprehensive '7-step speedrun-to-shutdown template for 2024 gacha games': 1) Chase new demographics while ignoring your core audience, 2) Community managers suppress dissent instead of addressing concerns, 3) Every future update gets scrutinized under a microscope by emotionally charged players, 4) Negative clues trigger chain-reaction scandals, 5) Public perception becomes irreversibly toxic and IP value tanks, 6) Fence-sitters won't start, existing players want refunds, 7) Fewer real players remain — only doomposters watching the shutdown countdown clock. A reply called it 'brilliant', and another added that devs' go-to strategy of 'using community managers to divide and distract players' has finally stopped working — players are now directing their anger straight at the studios.
The predictions in the comments section wrote themselves: 'This is a side-scrolling action game — dead on arrival. First month ¥3M revenue, second month flatline, servers down in six months.' Another offered a more optimistic timeline: 'Speedrun shutdown, betting less than a year.' And a final kicker: 'They didn't even take the coat off. Verdict: no sincerity whatsoever.'
Worth noting: one diligent commenter actually fact-checked the character art timeline and found the original post's framing was somewhat misleading — but in today's hyper-toxic climate, that kind of nuance doesn't matter anymore. Once a game gets slapped with a negative label, every single update will be dissected under a microscope. Which, ironically, is exactly what the 'Girls' Frontline 2 shutdown template' predicted.
Bottom line: Dragon Song perfectly demonstrated what 'fence-sitting backfire' looks like. Cleavage can be added and removed from character art, but once player trust is gone, no amount of digital cleavage is going to patch things up.
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