In February of this year, amid a wave of service closures for games targeting female audiences, *Ningyuan*—a mobile game aimed at female players that had been dormant for nearly a year—suddenly received its publishing license. It immediately launched a beta test in April, drawing significant attention from players. Recently, the game made an appearance at Tokyo Game Show (TGS), further heightening user anticipation.
*Deep Abyss*, formerly known as *Code Name: LaB*, is a female-oriented mobile game centered on the spy genre. Since its initial reveal in 2022, the game has sparked widespread anticipation and discussion among users thanks to its unique art style, world-building, and "non-romance" tagline.On the day the game’s promotional video was released, it garnered over a thousand comments on Bilibili, and pre-registrations on both Bilibili and TapTap exceeded 100,000 in the first week—a remarkable achievement within the female-oriented game category.
According to Liu Jun (Cat), CEO of the developer Yidingtian, during the game’s first open beta in October 2023, it reached No. 1 on Bilibili’s New Game Chart and No. 3 on TapTap’s New Game Chart within just half a day of becoming available for download.The narrative presentation and gameplay features showcased during the test were also impressive. Not only did the combination of dynamic comics and fully voiced main story fully capture the dynamic tension of the agents’ action sequences, but the board-game-style card collection and play mechanics also allowed users to enjoy the thrill of strategic thinking, giving the product a significant edge over competitors in the same category.
But after the beta testing, the game remained silent for a full year and a half. Winning the revival tournament prompted some players to exclaim with delight, “You’re finally back.” The issuance of the publishing license also led the team to declare, “We’ve made it into the light.”
The game was developed by Shanghai Youdingtian, a team with extensive experience in the female-oriented game genre. In 2019, they launched the Japanese-style card-based mobile game *The Moment of the Sword*, which became one of the top three highest-grossing titles in the female-oriented genre in the Japanese market that year. *The Abyss* is their second title.
The Moment of the Sword
Taking this opportunity and drawing on previous testing experiences, Teahouse sat down with Liu Jun, CEO of Youdingtian, and ZZ, the project’s IP producer, to discuss the team’s growth and challenges. After weathering their darkest hour, Liu Jun noted that both the market for female-oriented games and player awareness continue to grow. The team remains actively refining *Ningyuan*, building up its content library, and preparing for the game’s launch on the Chinese servers later this year.
From *The Moment of the Sword* to *Deep Abyss*, they remain highly optimistic about the female-oriented genre and have never considered switching tracks; instead, they have chosen to expand their user base while continuing to develop their existing IPs. She stated, “After eight years in this field, of course we’re going to keep going.” “It takes a long time and a lot of content for an IP to truly establish itself, but once it does, the potential for expansion is enormous—and it won’t be limited to any single niche category.”
The team said, “Now that we’ve come this far, we have to see it through to the end.”
01
"For women" ≠ "otome games"
Winning the Play-In Match Through "Differentiation"
It’s fair to say that the revival of *Ning Yuan* was a pleasant surprise, though it was also quite a winding road.
After *Ningyuan* received its publishing license and began testing, the team felt as though they had “seen the light.” At that time, the latest updates on the product had stopped at the end of 2023. Liu Jun noted that during that year of silence, the team couldn’t help but feel anxious. Not only were they anxious about the lack of a publishing license, but the product and the team also underwent continuous iteration and validation in response to market changes.
This year, they have been working behind closed doors to refine *Deep Abyss*. The team holds *Deep Abyss* in high regard; building on the experience gained from *The Moment of the Sword*, they hope this title will showcase their growth and reflections. From the very beginning of the project, *Deep Abyss* was the result of deep deliberation and clear positioning, and the team has complete confidence in this title.
The development of *Ningyuan* began in 2021. The team aimed to create a strategy card game that caters to the needs of female players in mainstream global markets—one that is “rooted in Japan but aimed at the world.” At the same time, the game needed to generate significant buzz to provide momentum for its marketing and promotion.
In May 2022, the game was first unveiled, attracting players’ attention with its distinctive features, including a “story-driven narrative,” a “unique emotional experience of love and rivalry,” “powerful protagonists,” and a “non-romance-focused” approach. The game’s beta test the following year lived up to players’ expectations.
Liu Jun recalls that before the game’s initial launch, a major publisher conducted global testing using the game’s character designs. The results showed strong user acquisition potential: “The conversion rates and user volume were far higher than the local market average, while the cost per conversion was only one-third or even one-quarter of the local market rate. The game even performed exceptionally well in North America.” This further strengthened their confidence in global expansion.
According to the team, in order to cater to the emotional preferences of female players worldwide, they not only centered the story around globally recognized cultural themes such as "Western fantasy" and "spies," but also incorporated emotional elements like "love and rivalry." This approach allows them to stand out while still resonating with players in major global markets.
The game is set in a world divided among rival factions. In the Duchy of Nard, several Alliance agents have been killed. To investigate the incident, players—as the Alliance’s top agent—will infiltrate a newspaper office in the Duchy of Nard under the guise of a “journalist” to carry out their mission. Here, the characters you’ll interact with belong to different factions—people who were smiling allies one moment may become enemies pointing guns at each other the next.
Available for men and women
To bring the characters to life, *Deep Abyss* invited renowned Japanese illustrators, including KINAKO—the original character designer for *Detective Boys*—to contribute to the character design.The game’s factions are divided into British, French, Greek, and Japanese styles. In terms of art style, the game employs a contrasting color scheme, giving its characters a high level of distinctiveness that sets them apart from other titles. The story is primarily set in a world inspired by Greek mythology, allowing players worldwide to find a strong sense of cultural resonance.
Character Art
In terms of narrative presentation, the game uses a dynamic comic format with full voice acting for the main storyline to highlight the intensity of the action. “To align with the comic-reading habits of players in Japan, Europe, and the U.S., we’ve incorporated elements of American comics into the color palette while maintaining the cinematic flair that Japanese comics emphasize,” said ZZ.
Producer ZZ, formerly an avid manga enthusiast and creator, felt that the text-based dialogue format of traditional visual novels limited the creative possibilities for spy-themed storytelling, so she opted for a dynamic comic format to present the narrative.
Animated comic creation process: Sketch out key storyboards for the plot, then use the project’s story editor to animate the storyboards.
Dynamic panels, combined with voice acting by renowned Japanese voice actors, special effects, and sound design, bring the comic panels and characters to life, allowing users to read the comic while experiencing it as an animated series in their minds. At the beginning of the game, the protagonist descends from an airship to the ground, moving downward through the comic panels. Coupled with the suspense surrounding the character’s mission objectives, this creates the same sense of anticipation players feel when following a new comic series.
This unique style has also won over users, with countless clips from the show being shared on platforms like Bilibili.
In terms of gameplay, *Deep Abyss* features a strategic card-based system with a board game-like feel. Players must build decks and execute combo strategies to launch attacks. This gameplay style is relatively rare in the current market; it balances the fun of strategy with the progression of collecting and leveling up, while also taking into account the learning curve for female players. Overall, the game offers a perfect blend of depth and casual appeal.
How to Play
The way the storyline, gameplay, and audiovisual experience support and complement one another, along with the game’s clear differentiation from competitors, also reflects the rigorous thought that went into the planning and design of *Ningyuan*.
After two rounds of testing, feedback indicates that players generally praised the protagonist’s character design, the dynamic comic format, the development of romanceable characters, and the strategic depth of the card-based gameplay. However, some players felt the game required excessive grinding and lacked a “sweep” mode to reduce the workload. In response, the team stated that in the latest small-scale test version, they have significantly reduced the need for repetitive battles by interweaving story and combat in a more balanced way, thereby substantially lowering the perceived grind.Currently, the game is undergoing various optimizations and continues to undergo small-scale testing and validation.
There has also been some debate regarding the protagonist’s character design: the character is gender-neutral and does not reflect gender differences, which has sparked a clash with the current “BL vs. yuri” debate. However, many players have pointed out that female-oriented content is not limited to “either BL or yuri”; users are free to choose their own perspective—whether to identify with the characters or simply watch the story—based on their personal preferences. The *Ningyuan* team has also stated that the game is generally female-oriented, and the developers will never take sides in this debate.
The team also emphasized that games targeting female audiences are not synonymous with "otome games."Since its inception, the team has positioned itself as creating games aimed at female audiences, but not "otome games," because women’s views on romance vary greatly from country to country. Furthermore, based on their research, in Japan, female-oriented games without romantic elements are the mainstream in the mobile gaming market. Starting with *The Moment of the Sword*, their stance has been: "The developers do not take sides; everything is left to the players’ imagination." This approach has been carried over into *The Abyss*.
Player Reviews
However, amid high expectations and controversy, *Ningyuan* fell into obscurity after its 2023 beta test. On the one hand, the team faced unexpected development challenges: while the projected development cost prior to launch was 50 million, the industry downturn led to funding difficulties and increased sunk costs.
But the team was determined: “We’ve come this far, so we have to see it through to the end.” The players’ expectations also kept them going. Liu Jun recalls that, without any marketing budget, the game had already garnered 400,000 pre-registrations in China alone.
02
Origins
After raking in billions in profits, they pivoted to developing mobile games for women
The confidence behind the team’s recent release of *Ningyuan* stems from their experience in the female-oriented genre.
Eight years ago, the *Ningyuan* team was arguably the first studio in China to publicly announce its goal of creating a 2D game aimed at female audiences.
Before coming together to start a business, the team members met by chance.
Liu Jun first entered the gaming industry from the traditional media sector.She previously worked at NetDragon and Hunan TV. During her time at NetDragon, she oversaw the development of mobile game adaptations of numerous well-known IPs, including *Where Are We Going, Dad?*. At Hunan TV, she was responsible for IP licensing and game publishing. It was during this period, while working on *Moe Jianghu* and *Young Three Kingdoms*, that she met the publishing lead for these titles—who would later become her close friend and business partner—Mao Dou (Feng Jingjing).
Cute World
Liu Jun described how, at the time, the gaming industry was dominated by digital products, but everyone could see that these products had reached their ceiling. She, however, saw the ceiling of her career. At the time, while serving as general manager of Hunan TV’s Beijing branch—where she had generated hundreds of millions in profits and helped Mango Super Media go public—she still decided to strike out on her own in 2019, teaming up with her close friend Mao Dou.
They were enthusiastic about and optimistic toward the "anime and manga" genre, and they realized that the "female-oriented" segment within that genre was still in its infancy. The idea of "creating a game specifically for female anime and manga fans" began to take shape in their minds.
The catalyst that helped shape this idea also came from the launch of the Chinese server for *Touken Ranbu: ONLINE*.In 2016, after leading the mobile game publishing team at Youzu to generate billions in revenue with *Teenage Three Kingdoms*, Maodou vigorously promoted and expanded the company’s anime and manga business line. He took the initiative to target the wildly popular Japanese female-oriented title *Touken Ranbu: ONLINE*, bringing it to China and gaining a deeper understanding of the female anime and manga user base and market in both China and Japan.
"Men have Kanmusu, women have Daolang"—Daolang
In its first month, the Chinese version of *Touken Ranbu* attracted over 5 million users. Although it did not replicate the social impact of the original series in Japan, it has dominated the top spot on the fan-made works charts at CP Comic Con for many years. In 2017, when the team behind *The Moment of the Sword* (also known as *Ningyuan*) first launched their startup, they secured two rounds of investment from backers including Youzu.The team also had no shortage of talent, as alumni from the University of Science and Technology of China and enthusiasts of the anime and manga culture within Shanghai’s gaming community gradually gathered around them.
For example, ZZ was serving as lead designer on the *Audition* mobile game at the time, and she also enjoyed writing novels and comics aimed at female audiences. She recalls, “Back then, there were virtually no anime-style products targeting female audiences on the market, and this team’s direction and vision were incredibly appealing.” That’s precisely why she joined the team, where she collaborated with top Japanese creators and was finally able to leverage her personal strengths—which she had struggled to fully utilize in previous projects.
03
Experience
Dual-producer system to capture the Japanese market
Each card costs 1 million; this calls for serious reflection.
When the team launched their first game, *The Moment of the Sword*, the domestic market for female-oriented games was still in its infancy. Their approach was straightforward: building on a foundation of strong characters and compelling storytelling, they aimed to create a female-oriented IP with superior gameplay and visual appeal.
According to Liu Jun, in 2016, China had virtually no talent capable of creating original anime-style content, so they chose to partner with Rejet, a leading Japanese content creation team specializing in content for female audiences. Over the course of two years of collaboration and learning from their Japanese mentors, they gradually built their own IP creation team and accumulated a wealth of creative resources, including illustrators, voice actors, and musicians.
In response, Liu Jun stated that the key to this process—rather than simply “entering the Japanese gaming market”—is “integrating into the Japanese creative ecosystem.”
Liu Jun shared with the Tea House that the core of anime and manga content creation lies in “characters”; the stage for these characters is the “worldview”; and the game itself serves as a performance by these characters, presenting a slice of the story within that world. Therefore, the team must first establish the worldview and lay down the foundational rules governing the IP; then, they must develop the characters, showcasing their charm through their visual design and their backstories, so that users fall in love with them and foster a community ecosystem similar to a “fan circle.”
However, as a debut product, it was inevitably a bit too idealistic. They later did the math and found that the total production cost for a single character card in *The Moment of the Sword* was as high as 1 million RMB; only by maintaining extremely high revenue could they support the game’s ongoing updates. This is a pitfall that many anime-themed development teams have also fallen into.
It is precisely for this reason—and to ensure the highest quality of content creation—that the team gradually developed a “dual-producer” system: “One producer oversees gameplay mechanics, game balance, and business design, while the other is responsible for world-building, character design, and content creation management; the two roles complement each other.” This system has remained in place ever since.
Fortunately, as Liu Jun recalls, *The Moment of the Sword* “became an instant hit in Japan as soon as it was unveiled,” thanks to its exceptional visual design and accessible match-three gameplay. In Japan, they promoted the game primarily through a combination of offline events and online Twitter campaigns, fully leveraging the influence of the game’s voice actors and artists as well as the impact of cross-promotional collaborations. This highly “localized” approach helped the game and its IP establish a strong foothold in the Japanese market.
She also shared an amusing anecdote with the community about the "Bajie" giveaway event that the game’s design team organized right before launch.
Recognizing that Japanese people tend to maintain a certain degree of social distance, and that conventional advertising struggles to generate buzz on social media, they took over a massive cylindrical pillar in the Ikebukuro subway station and covered it with images of the character Barajji.“Players could go and randomly tear open a blind box, but if they didn’t get their favorite character, they would spontaneously trade online, and those who couldn’t go in person would seek proxy draws online,” Liu Jun recalled. “Through these spontaneous trades and proxy activities, the game sparked a wave of intense discussion on Japanese social media, which also helped boost the game’s popularity.”
The Chinese version of *Blade of Time* was published by Tencent and launched in China in August 2019. It received nearly 40 recommendations from Apple, including a feature on the Today page. In October of the same year and December of the following year, *Blade of Time* launched in Japan and Traditional Chinese regions, respectively. In Japan, *Blade of Time* achieved impressive rankings, reaching No. 4 on the iOS Free Chart and No. 21 on the Top Grossing Chart.In 2019, just two months after its launch, *Sword of the Moment* broke into the top three in annual cumulative revenue for the Japanese female-oriented game category, trailing only *Touken Ranbu Online* and *Idolmaster Cinderella Girls*.
Unfortunately, however, the Chinese version of *Sword of Time* has faced a somewhat rocky road. Aside from the initial buzz surrounding its launch, the game has remained relatively low-key. After the contract with Tencent expired, the team reclaimed the publishing rights and began operating the game independently. To this day, the Japanese version of *Sword of Time* remains in operation, having been online for six years.
Ding Tian currently has a team of nearly 40 people in Shanghai and Japan. They remain confident that, after thoroughly reviewing the successes and challenges of *The Moment of the Sword*, they will set out anew to ensure that *The Abyss* not only establishes a foothold in the Japanese market but also expands globally—which was one of the original goals of the project.
Looking back on the journey, Liu Jun remarked that it was just like the Japanese TV series *The Family at the Top of the World*: there was a kind of naive love, persistent dreams, the support of family, and the serenity that comes with acceptance.
04
Focusing on the female gaming market
But exploring new directions
In 2023, several high-quality games aimed at female audiences were discontinued one after another, reflecting the current downturn in the female-oriented gaming market.
The reasons behind these closures cannot be generalized. When a particular genre transitions from a niche market to the mainstream, it inevitably experiences both its rise and its fall. After the dust has settled, it appears that otome games have emerged as the most profitable genre in the current domestic market.
However, the *Ning Yuan* team remains optimistic about the female-oriented genre. What other areas of female players’ needs are worth exploring? As someone with firsthand experience, You Ding Tian has also observed changes in the needs of female players.
Producer ZZ shared: “Unlike the ‘protectee’ role of protagonists in early games aimed at female audiences, as times have changed, more players now expect capable, proactive protagonists who can experience relationships between equals.” Liu Jun, meanwhile, observed a shift in female players’ spending habits: “Female players are more loyal; they place greater value on storylines, characters, and cross-promotions, and are gradually making in-game purchases a part of their daily routine.”
At the same time, however, content-focused products are reaching a turning point. Youding Tian has also undergone an evolution, shifting from the “purely content-driven” approach of *The Moment of the Sword* to the “equal emphasis on gameplay and content” seen in *The Abyss*.
Players in the game’s chat group are eagerly awaiting the release of *Ningyuan*. Liu Jun revealed, “The game is already 90% complete, and we plan to launch the Chinese server first by the end of the year.” The team is currently seeking regional distributors and funding worldwide.
However, the current financing environment is not favorable, and Liu Jun admits that the prevailing sentiment in the gaming industry is one of "caution."
However, they believe that even after a period of rapid growth and subsequent cooling off, there remains a significant amount of unmet demand among female players waiting to be tapped, and that female users are increasingly becoming a key growth driver in many markets. Moving forward, they plan to deepen their focus on female-oriented genres while also exploring new avenues, such as developing an H5 version of *Ningyuan*.
With *Prosperous Realm* recently surpassing one million in sales, perhaps we can redefine what women want—it’s not limited to otome games, simulation management games, or strategy card games. By thinking outside the box and trying something new, we might just open up a whole new world of possibilities.
原创文章，作者：游茶妹儿，禁止转载：https://youxichaguan.com/en/archives/194588
