Only days after the mobile giant Love and Deepspace announced its sixth love interest, Valko, its developers released a statement on June 30th, 2026 saying they would not move forward with him and will be scrapping the character entirely. Infold is known for delivering high-quality mobile games, and Love and Deepspace is no exception. Its developers have been working long into the night to build this content, only for executives to throw all of it straight into the bin. Why? Let’s try to puzzle the pieces together, because I am as clueless as most of the international fan base.
Infold seems to have reacted to the intensity of a signal without diagnosing the substance of it, because the backlash was real and it was loud. The game reportedly lost around a million followers across its Chinese social platforms, and protest spilled into the physical world: cow dung left in the studio’s delivery lockers, funeral chrysanthemums, curse banners, and ritual cleansing items placed around a Valko display outside the headquarters, all of it carrying death-wish symbolism in Chinese culture. That is not feedback you can ignore. But it is also not feedback you should obey on reflex, and the distinction is the whole point.
As a user research practitioner, I can say plainly: this is not how you handle feedback. The volume and aggression of a response tell you how strongly a segment feels. They tell you almost nothing about whether that segment is right, or whether it represents the playerbase as a whole.
And here, the loudest segment was not the whole playerbase. The outrage came overwhelmingly from the Chinese audience on Weibo. Internationally, the reception to Valko was largely warm. Players were, on the whole, more than happy to welcome a promising, fresh new character. Some were reserved, as people always are with anything new. But Infold treated a concentrated regional reaction as a global verdict, and that is the first error.
The second error is that they appear to have misread what the complaint was even about. Dig into the Chinese feedback and a different story emerges: this was never really about Valko himself. Players objected to a sixth love interest pulling writing and production resources toward someone new while the five existing characters sat neglected. For example Caleb’s main story, by community accounts, hadn’t been meaningfully updated in over 500 days. Others raised his impact on gacha pull rates. Which means that the character was the trigger and the grievance was content cadence and resource allocation. “Negative sentiment” is not a finding but a starting point. And the sentiment here was pointing at something Infold could have actually fixed without deleting a character at all.
What they should have done instead:
Faced with a wave of negative sentiment off the back of an announcement, the strategic move is to postpone the content and buy yourself the time to make a clear-minded decision grounded in research, not reaction. A delay costs you a news cycle. A cancellation costs you the character permanently and, as we’re now seeing, the goodwill of every player who actually wanted him.
And Infold already had the tools to do this properly. Love and Deepspace runs in-game surveys tied to specific events, which means a direct line to structured player sentiment was already built into the product. This was the obvious instrument to reach for: deploy a targeted survey, segment the responses by region, and let the data tell you whether the backlash was broad or concentrated rather than letting the loudest corner of one platform decide for the entire global audience.
That research should have run alongside community management, not in isolation:
Community teams sit on top of exactly the qualitative signal you need to understand what specifically was driving the negativity. In this case, that signal was readable. The complaint was about neglected existing characters and resource allocation, not about Valko’s right to exist. Once you know that, the solution writes itself: commit to faster main-story updates for the existing five, reassure players on pull rates, and then decide where Valko fits. That addresses the actual grievance. Cancelling him does not.
Because here’s the asymmetry Infold seems to have missed entirely. In solving one segment’s complaint, they manufactured another’s. The cancellation has been met with its own intense backlash, this time from the international side, with players pointing out the obvious that the game could simply have had Valko and more frequent content updates. They traded one vocal unhappy group for a second one, and gave up a finished character to do it. The reaction on Infold’s own apology Instagram post says it cleanly enough, the top comment reads simply: “Valko was never the issue. I’m gutted. #BringValkoBack.” These were players who would have spent money on this character, telling the developer directly that the cancellation solved a problem they never had.
None of this is to pretend Infold faced an easy call. The protests crossed a genuine line with real-world harassment, items sent to the office carrying death symbolism, security concerns at the headquarters. That is a legitimate crisis, and no team should have to weather it.
But a crisis in how feedback is being delivered is not the same as clarity about what the feedback means, and conflating the two is exactly how you end up making a permanent product decision under duress. The intensity demanded a response but it did not dictate which response.
Postpone. Survey. Segment. Triangulate qualitative and quantitative signal across your whole playerbase. Then decide. That’s the difference between reacting to feedback and acting on research and it’s the difference between losing a news cycle and losing the trust of the players who were on your side.
A note, with my researcher hat off
I’ll set the practitioner perspective aside for a moment, because I’m not only writing this as someone who studies players. I am one.
I’ve played Love and Deepspace daily for two and a half years. I was looking forward to Valko. And reading that apology letter, what struck me wasn’t the cancellation itself but the feeling that came with it that my reaction simply didn’t register. The decision was made over the heads of an entire international playerbase that, by and large, was excited. It’s a strange thing, to log in every day, to care this much, and still feel like you’re shouting into a room where the door is already closed.
That’s the part that’s easy to lose in a strategy discussion. When a studio reacts only to the loudest voices, the quieter, steadier players, the ones who show up daily, who would have happily welcomed the new character, are taught a small, deflating lesson: that being satisfied makes you invisible, and that no matter what you say, it can be set aside.
Happy players don’t complain. But that doesn’t mean they don’t notice when they’ve been disregarded.
I don’t think Infold meant to send that message. But it’s the one I received. And if a developer’s goal is a community that grows alongside them, their words, not mine, then the players who quietly stayed are exactly the ones worth listening to next.
Playful Brain Demand 