AI otome games lose ground as token costs outrun funding
Two heavily funded Chinese AI otome games, Xingmian (by Muyan Zhiyu) and Wuxiangu, opened their second beta tests last month; Xingmian raised nearly RMB 300 million across four 2024 rounds at a USD 120 million valuation, while Wuxiangu took over USD 10 million from ZhenFund and IDG Capital within half a year of founding. But the article says the sector has cooled: almost none of these studios train their own models, relying instead on Zhipu AI, DeepSeek and ChatGPT, so every extra free-form chat turn costs money upstream. EVE, the only AI otome game in official launch, drew backlash for offering just 10 free chat turns a day with monthly passes at RMB 68-328, sending its rating to 2.2, and the authors argue founders lack otome-game experience and staff far fewer people than Love and Deepspace's 300-person team.
It shows that LLM-powered consumer companion apps now hinge on inference-cost control and content production capacity, not just on plugging into a model.