DISCLAIMER: Extreme “Didn’t Ask” material incoming.

Up until yesterday’s yap session about spending money on mobile games, I have been a closeted gacha game whale for years. Started with Arknights, played Genshin for a while, and was on a good streak of not spending on mobile games until I started back up with Pokémon Masters earlier this year. I have a personality which is highly susceptible to addiction, so I knew going in to every game that I was likely to get hooked, but didn’t care because I had disposable income. I enjoy traditional gambling as well, but have always been more drawn to gacha games for the collectible aspect and whatever half-decent gameplay I could get from them.

Across all three of these games, I have not kept detailed records of my spending because I knew it would make me feel disgusted, but total spent is easily approaching $10k, if not more with other random games being counted as well. I know there are many who have spent far more than I have, but there are many like me as well, and probably even more who have yet to reach my level of degeneracy. I do not wish to convince people to quit playing gacha games if they don’t want to quit, only to explain my come-to-Jesus moment on their monetization/microtransactions.

Hearing Wubby’s rant, from the perspective of someone who I am not friends with and does not play gacha/mobile games, was a much-needed wake-up call. I also really appreciated the way he approached the subject, not wishing to shame whales but to understand why. His main gripes with the actual gameplay/games themselves really highlighted something for me that I already knew, but actively tried to ignore to make myself feel better about spending money on these games; the people who make/market/control games focused on microtransactions DO NOT CARE ABOUT YOU OR THE ACTUAL GAME, THEY CARE ABOUT TAKING AS MUCH OF YOUR MONEY AS POSSIBLE WHILE GIVING BACK AS LITTLE AS THEY CAN. They are predatory to the max - they design the gameplay and MTX to make you spend more, to create more whales like me, to find people who are more susceptible to addictive games and capitalize on their free time.

The gacha game I’ve been playing the most recently, Pokémon Masters, is about to have its 5th Anniversary. Normally, for gacha games (and other genres like MMO’s), it’s tradition to have special events/MTX sales/bonuses/game modes and things going on in-game to celebrate anniversaries. This helps increase play time and the amount of new players joining the game, which in turn increases MTX revenue. The quality of new content and amount of free materials being given out for Pokémon Masters’ 5th Anniversary is pretty much worse than the content/bonuses put out in any given regular month of the game’s calendar, and it is being received very poorly by the player base, many people expressing desire to quit the game. The developers have crossed a line of overt, excessive greed at this point for a lot of players, myself included.

I got a real-time, simultaneous reminder of how difficult it is for these companies to give the tiniest crumb of a fuck about their players, while Wubby was yelling at me (not really) about it. I know so many people already knew all of this, and those people probably aren't playing these kinds of games in the first place, which is the smart choice. I will not be spending money on these games anymore. It will be much better spent on shiny cardboard instead. Not like WOTC cares about me either, but at least I own the cardboard. D&D Secret Lair comes out tomorrow, so I’m gladly spending on that what I would normally spend on a silly phone game.

Thanks for the proverbial slap in the face. Love you, say it back.