Light and Night Suddenly Announces Cancellation of Collaboration with Hushang Ayi!

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Huyi Auntie's Collaboration Controversy

Yesterday, news about Huyi Auntie's latest collaboration was making quite a stir. Earlier, Huyi Auntie's official Weibo account had already hinted through their store profile picture that the collaboration would be revealed on December 14th. Until around noon yesterday, the romantic mobile game "Light and Night" officially announced its collaboration with Huyi Auntie, with the co-branded limited new product series set to launch on December 17th.

Just as everyone was waiting to purchase the collaborative milk tea, Huyi Auntie was exposed for having some store staff insulting "Light and Night" and its players. As soon as this news broke, the topic shot straight to the top of Weibo's trending list, with the related topic accumulating over 450 million views to date.

About Huyi Auntie

Public information shows that Huyi Auntie is a new-style fresh fruit tea brand. The "Huyi Auntie" brand was officially applied for with the Trademark Office in 2013 and belongs to Shanghai Zhenjing Industrial Co., Ltd. Shan Weijun and Zhou Rongrong are the brand founders. Like most new-style tea drinks, Huyi Auntie also adopts a chain franchise model for expansion. By October 2022, Huyi Auntie had opened over 5,000 stores in more than 200 cities nationwide.

About "Light and Night"

"Light and Night" is a highly immersive interactive romantic mobile game created by Aurora Studio. It was officially launched for public testing on June 24, 2021. On November 9th this year, "Light and Night" officially launched a new version.

The Controversy

Screenshots circulating online from the trending topic show that a certain Huyi Auntie store responded very unfriendly when customers asked about the co-branded products, failing to show even basic respect. A staff member asked, "Want to ask if that widow scam game is so fun to play?" When the customer replied, "What do you mean by widow scam game?", the staff member responded: "That's not what I meant, it's just a trending topic online recently." Some store staff even went as far as insulting the game characters. Yes, this series of actions directly pushed Huyi Auntie to the top of the trending list.

It is understood that earlier on social media, there were rumors that due to Huyi Auntie's collaboration with the romantic mobile game "Light and Night," co-branded products needed to be launched simultaneously, and materials needed to be delivered to various stores in advance. However, this led to negative news that some store employees were selling these materials in advance.

Collaboration Terminated

From 12 PM to 3 PM, in just three hours, "Light and Night" issued another statement saying that due to incidents of store staff insulting players and the game's male protagonist on the day of the announcement, "Light and Night" announced that it would immediately terminate its cooperation with Huyi Auntie. This collaboration was dubbed by netizens as "the shortest collaboration in history!"

In the official statement from "Light and Night," they roughly described the entire cooperation process: Several months ago, they received an active inquiry from Huyi Auntie (hereinafter referred to as "the partner"), and after multiple rounds of negotiations, they agreed to proceed with the collaboration, setting the official announcement for December 14th and the official launch for December 17th. However, starting from November 24th, multiple negative incidents involving the partner's staff occurred on various social platforms, including early leaks of materials, spreading false information, and privately selling co-branded giveaways. On the day of the official announcement on December 14th, there were even incidents of the partner's employees verbally insulting players and the game's male protagonist.

When the early material leaks and false information incidents occurred, the "Light and Night" project team immediately demanded that the partner conduct a thorough investigation and provide a solution. After the partner provided a solution and issued a public apology, the team accepted the apology based on the principle of respecting the cooperation. However, today's behavior of insulting players and the male protagonist directly crossed the project team's bottom line.

Apology and Public Reaction

Subsequently, Huyi Auntie issued a statement apologizing, stating that regarding the situation at individual authorized stores during this collaboration, the company immediately organized various internal departments to conduct a detailed investigation. They tracked and followed up on verified inappropriate behaviors, seriously criticized the involved stores, and the stores had already dismissed the employees involved.

However, netizens and players expressed that they do not accept the apology: "No matter how you look at it, I think it's very rude. Jokes should be made according to the occasion, and directly deleting comments on the official Weibo is also very disappointing." "This is obviously emergency PR to silence people." "This is forced explanation." Many netizens even stated that "they will never buy their products again"... Of course, some netizens also expressed that this is just the problem of individual employees.

Conclusion

Now that the incident has actually happened and has hurt many game players, should Huyi Auntie consider how to win back this wave of consumers? Or how should they adjust to prevent similar incidents from happening again? What is your take on this matter?

Image source: Internet

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