
A Man Who’s Spent $70k Playing a Mobile Game - owens99
https://www.wsj.com/articles/meet-the-man-whos-spent-70-000-playing-a-mobile-game-1521107255
======
danso
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...](https://www.recode.net/2014/2/26/11623998/a-long-tail-of-whales-half-
of-mobile-games-money-comes-from-0-15)

> _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-...](https://www.polygon.com/2015/11/7/9687934/someone-has-
spent-30000-on-star-citizen-and-says-hell-spend-more)

~~~
CryoLogic
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.

------
coldcode
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.

~~~
stronglikedan
> If he has the money to waste

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

~~~
hashkb
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.

~~~
charlesdm
I actually found my WoW time to be highly productive: it made me realise you
can generally achieve the things you want in life if you focus on them (I went
from a total noob to playing competitively in a guild that achieved a few
world first kills in about 2 years). It also gave me an iPhone app idea that
made me a few hundred grand and took me about two months to develop.

Mind, this was about 10 years ago, during Burning Crusade. If I had to start
over, I'd do it all again -- had great fun.

~~~
thefounder
Some if not most remain stuck in the game with no iphone app project. Depends
how addicted you get. If you know you can't manage addiction you better avoid
it(i.e don't play games that never end)

~~~
JangoSteve
To build on that a bit, I think one of the main issues with comparing one's
own experiences with others' is that each person's brain is wired differently,
so how one perceives, internalizes, and reacts to an experience is not
necessarily how someone else does. I think it's the same kind of thing that
makes one person like a food that another person hates, or that causes one
person to like thriller movies while another doesn't. In the same way, I think
one person can spend a lot of time and money on an activity responsibly and
positively, while another person has a higher chance of succumbing to
deleterious interactions that become habit or addiction. However, the fact
that some people can enjoy a game responsibly doesn't really excuse the game
maker from taking advantage of those who can't.

~~~
ABCLAW
>However, the fact that some people can enjoy a game responsibly doesn't
really excuse the game maker from taking advantage of those who can't.

I agree with what you're trying to say, but not with this statement in
particular. I think it is possible to create a lovely game that unfortunately
ropes in an addict as a side effect, but that isn't what the industry is about
right now.

Game development conferences have been strewn full of talks specifically aimed
at exploiting human psychology to generate additional profit - triple A games
are designed around addictive loops constructed to provide maximum addiction
and resource extraction for a minimum of game assets. I recall one slide in
particular that measured the amount of profit per MAU and listed different
game mechanics (PvP adds 10 cents per MAU, adding a fake rate-limit to your
game adds 15 cents per MAU, cosmetics adds 7 cents per MAU, applying negative
effects to your friends for your non-participation adds 13 cents per MAU,
etc.) within a year, almost every large mobile game offering contained ALL of
the mechanics on the list - and now their prevalence has leaked into other
markets as well.

Accordingly, I'd say it isn't justifiable to build intentionally exploitative
addictive systems just because some people can moderate their designed
negative effects.

~~~
JangoSteve
> I agree with what you're trying to say, but not with this statement in
> particular. I think it is possible to create a lovely game that
> unfortunately ropes in an addict as a side effect, but that isn't what the
> industry is about right now.

I don't think you're actually disagreeing. _Taking_ advantage, as I put it,
implies intent. To incidentally benefit from the consequences of an
unfortunate side effect is not equivalent to taking advantage of the effect.

> Accordingly, I'd say it isn't justifiable to build intentionally
> exploitative addictive systems just because some people can moderate their
> designed negative effects.

This is the same statement in different words. "Exploit" is probably a more
direct word to characterize the sentiment.

------
HenryBemis
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 :)

~~~
Mozai
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.

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

~~~
wccrawford
I would go as far as to say that any expensive hobby would take 2 weeks of
someone's yearly salary. This could be music (listening or making), golf,
photography, painting, Blurays... Tons of things.

------
cecja
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.

------
danso
Archive snapshot [http://archive.is/LqLw2](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. _

------
cousin_it
Random rewards for money should be regulated as gambling.

------
man2525
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.

------
checkyoursudo
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.

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

~~~
knicholes
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.

------
wanda
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.

------
llao
Paywalled.

> To Read the Full Story > Subscribe > Sign In

~~~
fwdpropaganda
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/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/read-ft-wsj/)

~~~
1024core
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?

~~~
fwdpropaganda
Correct.

If domain is WSJ or FT, set referer="facebook.com".

That's it.

EDIT: BTW in case you don't know, Firefox add-on extension .xpi is actually
just a zip in disguise. Rename it to .zip and open it as normal. You can then
investigate the source. But I agree that it would be neat if the
addons.mozilla.org allowed to see this directly on their page. Although on the
other hand, this loses usefulness for larger addons.

~~~
spapas82
Can you explain why there's no paywall when the referer is facebook? (I don't
use facebook)

~~~
grzm
Because WSJ (and other sites) filter access based on the referer header.
They've made a business decision to allow access to people following links
from Facebook, likely in the hopes that the readers will find the article
useful and be more inclined to subscribe. They also benefit from the views
such links generate.

------
dlwdlw
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.

