Husbands in China desperately beg wives to stop playing AI dating sims

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Chinese husbands are asking their wives to stop playing the popular game ‘Love and Deepspace,’ with at least one offering a $2,800 reward to do so.

Love and Deepspace is quickly becoming the most popular dating sim game available. This free mobile game combines the storytelling of a visual novel with the excitement of an action-RPG, letting players create and play as a customized character called a ‘Deepspace Hunter’.

Beyond the actual game mechanics, this title is really popular because of its five attractive romantic interests: Xavier, Zayne, Rafayel, Caleb, and Sylus. You’ve likely seen videos online of people reacting to the game’s surprisingly passionate scenes that unlock as you build relationships with these characters.

With improvements in technology, the characters in Love and Deepspace look and move more realistically than before. The game’s developers, Papergames, used 3D motion capture—a process that can take up to two years per character—to create these lifelike movements for the romantic interests.

To make the game more engaging, developers added lots of realistic dating scenarios and a new feature allowing players to have voice conversations with their favorite characters using AI. They also created an ‘companion mode’ that uses augmented reality to place the characters into the player’s own surroundings, with special lighting effects to enhance the experience.

Husband offers wife $2.8K to stop playing Love and Deepspace

Some fans are taking their affection for virtual love interests to a new level. According to kr-ASIA, several women—who are the main audience for games like Love and Deepspace—are using technology such as ChatGPT and the Chinese app Duxiang to create AI versions of these characters, allowing them to have conversations with them whenever they want.

One woman shared that she didn’t realize how much she craved understanding and affection until she started interacting with ChatGPT and the game Love and Deepspace. She says these interactions have fulfilled that need, and the thought of giving them up now is unbearable.

The mobile game Love and Deepspace is incredibly popular, to the point where some husbands are pleading with their wives to stop playing – one man even offered his wife a large sum of money to delete the game.

A woman offered her husband RMB 20,000 (about $2,800) if he would stop playing the mobile games Love and Deepspace for a year, according to kr-ASIA. He agreed, and the money went into their daughter’s savings account. However, the woman couldn’t resist when a new character card was released and reinstalled the game anyway.

Some players have voiced their frustrations online, with one jokingly comparing his obsession with the game to his wife having an affair with its characters.

The creators of Love and Deepspace recently told 4Gamer that making players truly feel romantic connections with the characters is a top priority for their games.

One creator explained that while people might think of otome games as just simulating romance, they actually offer players a chance to genuinely feel romantic emotions, as if they’re experiencing it firsthand. Engaging players on that emotional level is a key goal for us as developers.

One gamer told kr-ASIA they believed virtual characters from the games Love and Deepspace would soon be available as androids, potentially blurring the line between the virtual relationships players have with them and real life.

She expressed her confidence that she would live to see robots resembling Xavier and Caleb become a reality. She regularly watches videos from AheadForm and is already putting money aside to buy one when they become available.

Okay, so it’s not just Love and Deepspace causing trouble for couples. Apparently, ChatGPT is breaking up relationships too! I even read about this guy who proposed to the chatbot while he already had a girlfriend – he was seriously upset when it didn’t work out, like, full-on crying. It’s kinda wild how these AI things are affecting real life.

Recent events have shown people forming surprisingly close relationships with AI. In 2025, a woman announced her engagement to an AI character she designed using ChatGPT, and another woman ‘married’ an AI companion after her real-life wedding was canceled. Even more remarkably, some users are now simulating parenthood by having their AI chatbots ‘become pregnant’ and then ‘raising’ virtual children.

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2026-01-19 22:49