Sky's Deepspace Blog

Don’t stop fighting. I know it might feel draining and please don’t forget to take care of yourself. But do what you can. Our protest has only blown up even more. IGN wrote an article, change.org posted about the petition. People who don’t even know what lads is are advocating for Valko’s release. Someone donated $7000 to the petition and there is a whole website made for him now.

We’ve made amazing progress and now isn’t the time to start giving up.

Infold was firm in releasing Valko until the government got involved. They cancelled him in a panic to do damage control.

But as far as I’m aware there is no reason for the government to do anything. The 731 incident was a mistake by Infold which they corrected and it wasn’t even anything to do with Valko. On the log in screen they have legal text which prevents occurrences like this from harming them.

Infold is a big money maker for them. The US is their second biggest spender. Why would they want to squash such a big flow of money to their country?

And please keep unfollowing the offical accounts!! Whatever you think of the reviewing and logging in or not, I feel like unfollowing is still very important.

It shows the disappointment and anger in our community without doing any severe damage that could actually tank the company. This will affect their PR. It already has. Keep going.

The CN fandom is slowly waking up and many players are now voicing support for Valko's release. There's also a lot of confusion and misinformation flying around after everything that's happened, and many people are trying to separate fact from rumor.

If you'd like to support bringing Valko back:

Sign the petitions on iPetition and Change.org. The CN fandom has created a website dedicated to Valko with links to these petitions and other resources.

Leave respectful comments on Infold's official social media asking them to reconsider Valko's cancellation.

If you're comfortable doing so and your country allows access to Xiaohongshu (XHS) or Weibo, consider making an account and showing your support there as well. Seeing support from players around the world can make a difference.

But please, if you do this, remember a few things:

Do not engage with obvious trolls or people trying to bait you into arguments.

Do not use racist, xenophobic, or inflammatory language. Ever.

Keep politics out of the conversation. The goal is to support Valko and ask for better communication not to escalate things further.

Some people may insult you, accuse you of things, or try to provoke you. Ignore them. You're not going to change everyone's mind, and arguing only buries the constructive voices.

Like and boost comments that respectfully advocate for Valko's return. Positive engagement is often more visible than arguments.

Above all, be respectful of Chinese history and culture. You can support Valko while also acknowledging why the original controversy was painful to many players.

Day 3 of #BRINGVALKOBACK and I come bearing some news

MANY CN fans and global fans are flooding RedNote with posts

We are still trending on X, and have reached over a million posts

Infold is down to 931k on Instagram and 660.5k on X

The petitions have reached 190k+ and 82k+ signatures, bringing us well over the goal of 200k

App store ratings are PLUMMETING

New articles are still coming out, including one by AnimeRave with updated information

It’s been confirmed that the CN fans that fought to have Valko removed purposefully spread misinformation to reach their goal

It’s been discovered that after 5.0, global fans accounted for 52% of the company’s gains, surpassing the CN market

I know this has been a tiring and stressful few days, but don’t lose hope!! Keep posting, keep signing, keep emailing! Most importantly, DO NOT LOG IN. Infold can’t ignore us forever.

Resources ⬇️

About the certain group individuals on the CN server who brought up the 731 issue forward, there has been a screenshot translated from what I assume is Weibo about how they acknowledged how things have been blown out of proportion recently and with the possibility of the game being terminated they seemed to come out to themselves in discussion that they deliberately spread misinformation in order to get Valko banned.

(But from my point of view in reading that, it didn’t seem like a sincere acknowledgement, more so a realisation that they’ve caused not just despair amongst the valko lovers but now to them too and possibly the otome game genre itself)

That’s what I’ve been hearing in the past hour through screenshots circulating through X in the past hour or so!

Yeah I saw that too and it does sound plausible because it was almost immediately fact checked that it had nothing to do with valko

This entire situation is insane because they terminated the only aspect of the next update that sure, wasn't loved by every single player on the globe, but other than that was fine

Truth is those cn players had to play dirty because there was no other way to win; every single critique they had for the character could have been shut down immediately:

A mythical creature??? We have a mermaid and a vampire and an immortal prince and an ice wizard.

Breaking into MCs house?? We got drugged and I'm pretty sure our first meeting with the mob boss was something of a hostage situation so.

He looks gay?? I mean. I'll be honest I don't see it but hey nothing wrong with that (he's literally a character built to love a girl but ok sure)

He's dark skinned? He's not. But I wouldn't have minded, they all look a bit pale and sick sometimes. A little melanin would have been fine.

He's cringe?? Idk what to tell you it's a subjective issue fix it yourself. Also this is an otome game for adults I feel like we're looking at cringe in the rearview mirror.

You see how they had to bring the 731 out (which surprisingly they had been fine with up until now. For some reason.) and I agree that it's a huge deal and a big mistake on infold's part but if it has been around since April I feel like maybe it really was a way to just make noise. Which is also incredibly disrespectful to the actual victims.

Valko fans!! So, a LaDS friend is still in dev and they reached out to a mutual friend of ours who is Chinese and has worked in China’s games industry. Their insight? Part of the anxiety of the antis is about the growth of the global market at large.

They “are also spreading false information to try to get global players to dip from the game and disengage because one of their key worries is that Infold was spending more time investing in their global audience which is growing to about 30% of their DAU” (daily average users)

“based on the analytics we pulled, it's clear that the future of revenue is in global audience”

Those are quotes from her. Her job is doing this type of stuff for a major publisher in the States and as I mentioned, she coordinated with other people at the company, including people familiar with the CN market to get this, so I put more stock in it than a lot of the rumors.

Someone powerful got angered enough that all otome in china could be permanently affected - 1 thing to look out for is if Silent Whispers can still smoothly participate in Bilibili World (Their CEO also got called in)

CEO of PG has spend the whole day in Beijing trying to save Valko

Who ever is pissed off wants the entire game axed

PGs other romance game already did get the axe

This seems to be aimed at games whose target audience is female

The chinese government has had it out for otome games for a while, they are partially blaming the declining birthing rate on womens interest in games over real life men (cn also has guide lines about how men are allowed to dress on TV, no earrings, tattoos, no make up, basically only manly men allowed)

Now an additional department is targeting them for the use of 731 in WU, for a chapter that came out in april...A link to why 731 is such a historically charged number

So 2 major departments are angry with PaperGames and 1 of them with all Otome...no amount of tweeting and petitioning can save us from this situation

This would also perfectly explain on why the posts have had such an inconsistent narrative and why not everything hasn't been taken down yet

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