Romance, Resistance, and Regulation: The Pink Tax in Chinese Business Otome Games
The “pink tax” refers to the phenomenon where goods or services marketed to female consumers are priced higher than nearly identical or functionally similar products, thereby creating an additional gendered economic burden. While this concept is usually associated with traditional retail and service markets, its operation in the digital platform economy has become less visible and more structural. Using digital games as a lens, this article examines how gendered digital consumption is produced and normalised in Chinese commercial otome games. Focusing on Love and Deepspace and comparing it with the male-oriented anime-style game Wuthering Waves, we argue that the digital pink tax in this context is shaped less by direct price differentials than by platformised monetisation systems that turn emotional attachment into a condition of payment. Through mechanisms such as gacha design and cross-media extensions, affective access, narrative continuity, and ordinary gameplay participation are selectively bound to sustained spending.
Digital ethnography of the Xiaohongshu player community demonstrates players are not passive recipients of these systems, for example, they do articulate critique through discourses of coercive spending, selective segmentation, narrative withholding, and mounting payment pressure. Yet such criticism often remains constrained within platform-specific grammars of participation, making substantive disengagement difficult. The article further argues that although otome games appear to offer women a more subject-centred viewing position, this counter-gaze is itself selectively monetised through emotional attachment, narrative anticipation, and sunk investment. On the governance level, we found that the current regulatory structures, which focus on probability disclosure and protection of minors, may fail to pay attention to the structural risks posed by fragmentation of content, promotional framing, and binding narrative development to payment.
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