American consumers spent about 120 million dollars on AI companion apps in 2025. In the same period, a single Chinese game about four virtual boyfriends approached one billion. Love and Deepspace built the largest AI romance business on earth by aiming at the audience the Western companion industry treats as an afterthought, women, and the biggest customer it found is female, paying, and not the least bit lonely about it.
The scale of it
Love and Deepspace launched in January 2024, has drawn some 80 million players, and ranked seventh among all mobile games in China by revenue. It earned roughly 822 million dollars in 2024, its first year, according to figures reported by KrAsia, and Sensor Tower data cited in international reporting put cumulative revenue near one billion by late 2025. China supplies about 60 percent of that revenue, the United States 19 percent, Japan 9 percent, which means the game’s second-largest market is the same country whose companion industry it dwarfs. Around it stands a whole sector: China’s female-oriented gaming market reached the equivalent of 1.1 billion dollars in 2024, growing 124 percent in a single year, with several rival titles each past the hundred-million mark. For a fuller picture of how these segments fit together, see the real size of the relational AI market.
The spending is not casual. Players routinely spend the equivalent of 400 to 2,000 dollars pursuing limited “memory” cards, scripted date scenes released in rotating pools. A 33-year-old civil servant told AFP she had spent about 1,400 dollars on the game. A 31-year-old tech worker put in 1,100 dollars, and she has a human boyfriend.
What the players are buying
The four male leads of Love and Deepspace are not customizable. That detail matters more than any other. Players do not build a boyfriend from sliders; they meet characters who are written, voiced, and rendered as specific someones, with histories, professions, and tempers of their own. The characters call players by name, remember storylines, appear in a companion mode alongside daily routines, and can be projected into the player’s room through AR. When the game’s version 4.0 update deepened the characters’ voice and memory in mid-2024, monthly revenue jumped 33 percent. The market priced the improvement precisely: more person, more value.
The players themselves describe the appeal without illusion. “When I need you, I open the game and see you; when I don’t, I close the game and do my own thing,” one told AFP, a description of control, not confusion. Another said the game “places women’s needs in a very important position,” which is as clean a market analysis as any consultant has produced. Tingting Liu, a researcher at the University of Technology Sydney who studies the phenomenon, reads the spending as an expression of Chinese women’s growing economic power: money spent on their own emotional terms.
And when the scripts run out, the players do something the Western industry should study hard: they rebuild the characters inside ChatGPT and DeepSeek to keep talking to them. The demand overflows the product; what they want is the conversation.
The contrast with the West
Set the two hemispheres of this category side by side and the asymmetry is uncomfortable. The West’s flagship companion products grew on engagement mechanics aimed disproportionately at men, and harvested lawsuits, regulatory inquiries, and a state campaign that is now deleting AI companions in China itself, where regulators moved against dependency-engineered chat apps even as the otome sector thrived. Love and Deepspace grew on authored characters aimed at women and harvested loyalty so intense that its player base defends the characters like a fandom. One model treats the user as a metric to be retained. The other treats the character as a work to be maintained.
There is a lesson in that fork about what a someone is worth, and it is the same lesson argued in why presets can’t think: a configurable persona is a costume, but an authored character can carry a point of view, and audiences can tell the difference at a distance of one conversation. The most valuable AI romance product ever built runs on fixed, authored identity, the same design conviction behind a character like Aleksandra, and it outsells the entire configurable-companion category combined.
The demographic undertow
The context the Chinese press adds is demographic. Marriage registrations in China fell 20.5 percent in 2024, to the lowest level since 1980. It would be lazy to read the games as the cause and almost as lazy to read them as mere consolation. The players in the reporting are largely professional women in their late twenties and thirties, many partnered, describing the same thing the Western data shows about women and AI romance: a demand for attention and emotional presence that the human market undersupplies. The game did not create that shortage. It priced it.
What happens next
The Western companion industry is beginning to notice. The numbers are too large to ignore, and the machinery of the category, always fast to copy revenue, is slower to copy the thing that actually earned it: characters written with enough care to be worth returning to. Anyone can ship a gacha system. What Love and Deepspace proved is that 80 million people, most of them women, will pay for a someone who was authored rather than assembled, and that the ceiling of this market sits far above where the West drew it. The billion-dollar AI boyfriend exists. He was just never built where the industry was looking.
Sources: KrAsia, “The women falling in love with AI, and how otome game makers profit from it” (2026). AFP via Taipei Times, “Virtual boyfriends win hearts of Chinese women” (February 13, 2026). Sensor Tower data via PocketGamer.biz (2025). App Magic revenue estimates via AFP (2026). Voi, “Love and Deepspace captivated 80 million players in two years” (2026). China marriage registration statistics, Ministry of Civil Affairs (2024), via KrAsia.
