Otome Game: Emotional communication with video games

Definition

Otome games are a type of relationship simulation game with a female audience as the target audience. Raiders are generally male characters, with a few games containing female raidable characters.

Scale of the market

In late 2017, Love and Maker came out of nowhere and became an industry story. The game’s peak revenue year, 2018, saw domestic iOS revenues reach $56 million, and when Android revenues are added, annual domestic revenues are predicted to exceed $100 million. Since then, the trend has risen. Currently, four major otome battlegrounds have been formed in China, including Stacked Paper’s “Love and Maker” (late 2017), NetEase’s “Painted Traveller in Time and Space” (2020), Mihayou’s “Undecided Incident Thing” (2020), and Tencent’s “Love of Light and Night” (2021).

These games are set in a range of themes such as the modern workplace, antiquity, cultivation of immortality and metaphysical fantasy, and to a large extent give many players a kind of spiritual soothing through the first point of view brought in.

And this has given rise to the writing of homoerotic texts, the production of short videos, and cosplay at offline comic shows, which have become part of the “secondary anime culture”.

Cosplayers of some of the more famous otome orientated game characters will also gain a large number of fans and attention.

The picture below is a very famous cosplayer netizen in China who cosplayed a character from a otome game.

Prospects

Female-oriented game is a relatively obvious type of cultural characteristics, and the values and aesthetic preferences of local female users are closely related, such as the current chinese female users no longer like the silly white sweet female protagonist, European and American female players prefer independent, brave female protagonist, etc., so the manufacturer has to have a very strong localisation ability.

Data from other platforms.