A Man Who’s Spent $70k Playing a Mobile Game

https://www.wsj.com/articles/meet-the-man-whos-spent-70-000-playing-a-mobile-game-1521107255

by owens99 • 8 years ago

70 64 8 years ago

wsj.com

llao• 8 years ago

Paywalled.

To Read the Full Story Subscribe Sign In

shawabawa3• 8 years ago

This should get around the paywall https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https...

fwdpropaganda3• 8 years ago

Firefox add-on that fakes the referrer when accessing the WSJ and the FT in order to remove the paywall. Five lines of code.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/read-ft-wsj/

1024core2• 8 years ago

I don't like downloading random extensions, and Mozilla makes it hard to view the source of this extension. What's the trick to avoiding the paywall? Use Facebook as a referer?

dang• 8 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

People usually post workarounds. There's one elsewhere in the thread.

danso2• 8 years ago

Archive snapshot http://archive.is/LqLw2

edit: This is not much of an article, it's more of a video. From the description:

For this video, The Wall Street Journal met 31-year-old Daigo, who dedicates most of his time—and financial resources—to “Fate/Grand Order.”
The gamer, who declined to give his last name, says he has already spent more than $70,000 collecting rare “FGO” characters... and has no regrets.

Reply

danso2• 8 years ago

I didn't read the article (it's a video of a 31-year-old spending $70K), but $70K, even in a year, is not the craziest extreme compared to what whales have reportedly spent over the decade, right?

For example, from this 2014 Recode article:

https://www.recode.net/2014/2/26/11623998/a-long-tail-of-wha...

At a conference I attended last year, a representative of a gaming company — who declined to be named or interviewed for a story — claimed that his firm had worked with a Japanese game company with one player who spent about $10,000 per month on in-app purchases. The company, he said, had assigned an employee to cater just to that whale, to ensure that she was always satisfied with the game and therefore likely to keep coming back.

Of course, there's also the money spent on PC games, such as Star Citizen. Looks like the biggest spender is $30,000 (though the game hasn't been released yet):

https://www.polygon.com/2015/11/7/9687934/someone-has-spent-...

Reply

CryoLogic2• 8 years ago

I think the reason people are so willing to invest in SC is much different than the reason people are spending tons on in app purchases in mobile games.

SC is a game in a genre that has been mostly dead for years (free economy space sim) so when someone buys in they are buying in in hopes of an old genre getting revitalized.

SC is also pushing the boundaries in terms of technology. No loading screens, vast universe that takes days (real time) to cross. 1/4 scale planets. Animations for everything, you turn your head in your ship it turns. You touch a control in your ship your character touches it. Multiplayer throughout the universe, sometimes with thousand of objects all on the physics grid synced up with all players. Basically all items have physical space, rather than just a DB entry somewhere (all on the grid). You literally stack inventory in your ship and secure it.

So with SC you are paying a lot to buy into a super premium space sim. Your purchases go to funding the game. The emphasis is not on the game's quality or on the mechanics itself but instead on taking advantage of your brains wiring and using the game as an outlet to get you to spend money in an addictive fashion.

With mobile games you are buying into a feedback loop which is solely designed to make money off of you. Usually with loot boxes and gambling mechanics.

tl;dr SC is expensive but it's more like an expensive premium good as apposed to a gambling simulator. So they are quite different in what you are getting for the high price.

Reply

HenryBemis• 8 years ago

To the point..

The guy mentions "I did stocks and futures". If the guy is a (retail) trader, and he's half good at it then he could be making $5k per day, and in that lense, 70k is peanuts.

There are so many things we don't know about this story, that's a WSJ clickbait :)

Reply

Mozai• 8 years ago

70k / $5k = two weeks of wages. This is not peanuts; think about how much you make in a month and setting fire to half of that.

Reply

tlrobinson• 8 years ago

Over what time period? Lots of people probably spend 2 weeks of wages per year on entertainment of some kind.

Reply

pkkim• 8 years ago

He also implies he lives with his parents, since he says he cleans for them when they ask.

Reply

ryan_j_naughton• 8 years ago

The article says: >For this video, The Wall Street Journal met 31-year-old Daigo, who dedicates most of his time—and financial resources—to “Fate/Grand Order.”

Thus, it explicitly says he spends "most of his financial resources" on the game. For anyone to spend > 50% of their financial resources on a video game is clearly indicative of an addiction.

Reply

coldcode• 8 years ago

Addictions generally cost money. If he has the money to waste, its still beats other addictions that can kill you. I used to work with someone whose brother-in-law bet and often lost $10,000 a day in Macau on baccarat when on vacation.

Reply

stronglikedan2• 8 years ago

If he has the money to waste

Money isn't wasted if spent on something that makes the spender happy.

Reply

grecy2• 8 years ago

In fact I would argue that's the entire purpose of earning money in the first place!

Reply

hashkb• 8 years ago

These games don't make you happy, they addict you to short term dopamine dumps. The games are engineered to reward spending money.

After quitting WoW, I realized it was a waste of time. During my addiction, I would have used this argument.

Reply

bitumen• 8 years ago

Feeding an addiction doesn’t lead to happiness, it staves off withdrawel. Happiness is a positive thing, not the absence of a negative thing. Addictions also tend to lead to other addictions, since the underlying “circuitry” is the same, in the same way that strong belief in one conspiracy theory is the biggest risk factor for believing in others.

Reply

jaclaz• 8 years ago

The traditional quote being by W.C. Fields:

“I spent half my money on gambling, alcohol and wild women. The other half I wasted.”

Reply

take4• 8 years ago

He says he plays every waking hour of the day unless he's "sleeping, driving, or taking a bath". I think he's wasting a bit more than just money.

Reply

tytytytytytytyt• 8 years ago

Yeah, wasting his bath time, since he could be playing then, too.

Reply

trappist• 8 years ago

I had a mobile game I spent nearly this much on before my wife persuaded me, with some help from my experience with addiction, that it was exactly this. A year or so later I still get a little adrenaline rush if I happen to look at the clock and it's exactly 2pm which means I'm running late for an important event in the game. Sucks.

Reply

crescentfresh• 8 years ago

with some help from my experience with addiction

Is there a spectrum to addiction? A dopamine response is a dopamine response, at what point would an activity be classified as an addiction outside the hyperbole of "affects your job/relationship/eating/etc"

Reply

jrs95• 8 years ago

Honestly I think I'd rather OD than have people find out I was spending this much money on a mobile game

Reply

man2525• 8 years ago

The american version of the card game in question, FGO, follows a similar schedule to the japanese version, but delayed by two years. The japanese players are tossed all kinds of special banners. Having a better sense of what's coming helps curb some knee-jerk spending, but I guess it depends on personality. You can also use another player's character through a support slot, which helps some.

Reply

cousin_it• 8 years ago

Random rewards for money should be regulated as gambling.

Reply

checkyoursudo3• 8 years ago

Lotta comments talking about waste of time, waste of money.

You can have your own preferences for what you would spend your money and your time on without trying to force your preferences on others.

I could be making a lot more money than I do, but I would rather waste my time on hanging out with my kids.

Don't be so quick to judge what other people waste their resources on.

Reply

TAForObvReasons• 8 years ago

Time spent "reading HN" is definitely more wasteful than "hanging out with [your] kids"

Reply

zzzzzzzza• 8 years ago

maybe - what if you're hanging out with your kids smoking blunts? What if you find an article on hn that completely changes how you do software dev and your productivity increases 20% from that point out? Definitely is a strong word.

Reply

knicholes• 8 years ago

Maybe to you it is. To me it would depend on the content I'm reading on HN or the activities (or lack thereof) while hanging out with my kids.

Reply

MarcScott2• 8 years ago

I don't know why you've been down voted. But I agree with you - I'll make less money and spend time with my family.

Reply

checkyoursudo3• 8 years ago

Dunno. Doesn't matter. I just think it's a bit weird that so many people care what others waste time on. We all have our things that we like to do that don't make a lot of sense to other groups of people.

Edit: See, even I am doing it there, thinking it's weird that other people waste time on caring about what other people waste time on. If you want to waste time on trying to convince people that they should be more productive, and that makes you happy, then go for it!

Live and let live.

Reply

dlwdlw• 8 years ago

A gun isn't fair in a knife fight. Certain technologies allow bullying. I think math is one such technology. Non intuitiveness of exponential growth is one that many debtors don't understand. A sense of knowing how society/money works is another, it allows seeing the value of money in being able to get stability and freedom rather than just say new shoes or TV's.

Reply

cecja• 8 years ago

In the late 2000s I worked at a gamepublisher in Europe and was friends with the monetization guy. It was a really shitty asian mmorpg badly supported, bad gameplay it was ass. Still there were hundreds of whales spending over 20k a month. The whole micro transaction business is way older and way meaner than everyone thinks.

Reply

wanda• 8 years ago

Let's have a look at WSJ's comments. Just for fun.

    "You need to get out and walk, and get a job. 
    You have too much time on your hands..."

    ----

    "Bet Daigo is a supporter of Universal Income."

    ----

    "Pathetic."

    ----

    "I bet the girls are just lining up for this guy."

    ----

    "These folks should be pitied, not celebrated.
    Shame on the WSJ for giving him airtime."

    ----

    "I bet the girls are just lining up for this guy."

    ----

    "1. He isn't a man if he spends most of his time
    playing a video game.

    2. If this is our future generation...
    we are all screwed.

    3. Where did he steal the 70k?"

    ----

    "The guy's brain is just going to be oatmeal
    in 10 years..."

    ----

    "Guy's lucky my parents aren't his.
    He'd be out on the street so fast his butt
    would be burning from road rash."

And people are puzzled by the hikikomori phenomenon in Japanese society. I think hikikomori exist in any nation/society where self-important "humans" react to another individual human being's life choices like this.
Ironically, these "humans" probably think the completion of daily sudoku puzzles, perhaps the occasional game of something well-regarded like chess, and just doing their jobs, will preserve the integrity of their precious brains. These video game addicts are doing the same thing with "rare characters" i.e. solving puzzles etc.
The automatic assumption that the man is unemployed and leeching his parents' money is also amusing. I have met some of these "whales" that play gacha video games. Many of them have well-paid jobs and simply choose to divert their money towards what may seem to many to be a frivolous and silly, even ephemeral thing like the acquisition of video game characters.
I'm not saying this guy has got it figured out, he's probably neurotic on some level, but these comments are symptomatic of a society that will cause people to go in these directions of neurotic escapism. They're also demonstrative of a society that is itself scared or unwilling to acknowledge the existence of problems that drive people to such extremes, and indicates at a rotten core and an emptiness to the people who are so quick to cast judgement.
There were comments about how the money has been wasted and the man will wake up later in his life and regret everything. What do these people think they will do with their savings, assets and so on? Do they think that they can buy their way into an eternal afterlife? I don't think these people have acknowledged the possibility that when they're dead, that's it, and all the wealth they accumulated is meaningless when you're in the ground.
I'm not defending this person's behaviour. I'm not a video game addict or mentally ill (I smoke, but I don't see myself in this guy, so I don't think I'm biased). I just think there's a problem in any discourse where there isn't a single person playing Devil's Advocate, and I think it's hilarious that the people leaving such comments are so utterly blind to the fact that their attitudes are precisely the reasons why many people end up mentally ill.

Reply

A Man Who’s Spent $70k Playing a Mobile Game

Related Stories