Mobile Game Takes Down Ad Portraying Its Players as Horny Nerds

Tencent, the company behind the popular, frequently mocked, and loudly horny mobile shooter, NIKKE: Goddess of Victory, has caught flak for releasing a Thai ad portraying its players as horny nerds, which led to Tencent taking the ad down—then, because we are Online, there was a backlash to the backlash where a noticeable portion of the game’s U.S. Reddit community decided that being called horny nerds was good, actually.

NIKKE is a much maligned gacha shooter known for its jiggle physics and audience pandering. Even among the gacha community, it is a near constant target of mockery. It’s a simple mobile shooter with a wide range of horny characters, its own cottage industry of cosplayers, and an uncomfortable place in the wider gaming ecosystem as both wildly popular and widely derided. It is no different from many, many mobile gacha games, except it just so happens to be louder and includes more jiggle physics.

The ad depicts a teenager at a birthday party playing NIKKE on his phone. As he plays the game his tongue starts to lick at the air and he begins to bounce up and down. Eventually, a younger child approaches him with a cake and wishes him a happy birthday. At this point, he begins fantasizing about cosplayers, and becomes lost in the fantasy until the younger boy snaps him out of it—at which point he blows out the candles and the ad ends. It is a deeply uncomfortable ad.

The ad was uncomfortable enough that, following some fan backlash, Tencent apologized for it before the company attempted to pull the ad from the video platforms to which it’s been posted. This resulted in a counter-backlash, where other players complained about the ad having been removed. This counter-backlash was bolstered by a recent censorship controversy, following the release of a character with slightly more clothes than leaked images suggested, as part of a winter holiday event. Players were already mad at Tencent, creating a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation where the company would either be accused of mocking its player base or censoring content.

If there is a major critique of the ad to be made outside of its implicit fatphobia, it is that the ad revels in a problem that the game it’s selling created. Gacha games are, by their nature, designed to alter human behavior. It is, after all, a genre built on the back of gambling addictions. This particularly objectifying brand of horniness is no different. Nikke doesn’t just capitalize on an extant mode of horny, but actively reinforces it in the playerbase, because it, like the gambling addictions that underpin the game’s business model, keeps people coming back. It isn’t alone in this, either.

Ads like this are, as some in the days old Reddit thread point out, self selecting. The goal is not to attract the average person to the game, but is instead to only court those most likely to spend money on the game—socially isolated, horny nerds. The mockery is just one part of the self selection process. The cringe is the point.