Cover image is a screenshot from the mobile game Honkai: Star Rail published by Hoyoverse
It started out with an innocent enough question: “Can someone convince me to waste money or not on this game?”
Before I scrolled down further, I already knew what I was going to read. This person is asking a question about spending money in a mobile gacha game to an audience of people who are so deeply into this game that they have joined a discord server just so they can play it more effectively. They were not going to get an unbiased answer.
People trotted out the arguments I usually see: make sure you have enough money for your needs first, you should have your own income, don’t just spend in order to make impulse purchases, but ultimately things boiled down to “if it makes you happy and you have some ‘fun’ money, sure, go for it.”
Which isn’t wrong, per say. I’m not an uptight Dutch penny pincher who believes that absolutely everything you spend money on has to be a necessity and that “fun” isn’t a line item in a budget. I have actually spent money on this game, in fact, buying an in-game battle pass—essentially making the time I already spend in the game go a little further—for eighteen dollars a pop over the course of six months. But it does make me a little sick when I remember spending $120 for an app on my phone.
In the moment, I did stand up and respond, “No, I don’t think you should spend money on this game.” It did not go over very well.
“I give up other things like going out to eat and spend that money on this game.”
“It’s my money; it’s going to be spent in some way. I want to spend it on the things that make me happy.”
“When people spend $300 on a concert, they aren’t going to look back on it and think about the money but instead about the experience.”
“Just let people enjoy things.”
And I get it! Who wants to be told that everything needs to be utilitarian? It’s your parent saying, “No we can’t get McDonald’s; we have food at home.” It’s picking up a game that has been sitting in your Steam library or a book that’s been on your shelf for years rather than getting the latest popular new release that’s sweeping through social media. It’s choosing to weed your front bed rather than watching another episode of the hot Netflix show. Regardless, I cannot stomach recommending someone spend money on a mobile game, in particular a gacha game. (For the purposes of this piece, you can just think of gacha as gambling. Because that is what it is.)
Every so often, a horror story comes along about someone spending an insane amount of money on a gacha game. But the bigger issue is that games are designed to hook people and get them to blow money, sometimes money that they don’t have, in order to get ahead in a game. If you want to guarantee a certain character in my game using only straight money, it’ll cost you $500 (there are three new characters every week); else you grind like hell and save for months or pray to the gacha gods and hope you’ll be lucky. I remember my neighbor and her son who had stolen her credit card and spent money on Roblox bucks, actively putting stress on the family budget. When teenagers and college-aged students are dropping anywhere from five to seventy-five dollars a month on a subscription to a game, do they see the money adding up? Is anyone teaching them about compound interest?
But even deeper than that, I have a problem with paying money for something immaterial that can be yanked away from me at any time. Eventually this game will go into end of service, and I will not be able to access it beyond screenshots I’ve saved and files archived on websites. The only thing I will be left with from my 120 dollars are the memories of thousands of hours spent playing. The person who spent 200 dollars to get a character now is left in the same spot as me, who never got them, because ultimately neither of us own what we spent money for.
Games have to make money somehow. I know that the only reason I am able to enjoy this game is because people—people whose names I know, people who I’ve played with, friends who I cherish—spend their own money on this game: some thirty dollars a month like clockwork, others dropping thousands in a week. But I’m just not convinced how good a justification “I enjoy this thing, so I spend money on it” is when the thing in question is a tar pit designed to entrap you, to twist your mind to minmax it no matter the cost, to convince you that you can’t compete or catch up to other people if you don’t cough up the cash.
Save for college. Get yourself ice cream. Buy Deltarune. Venmo your friends twenty dollars for no reason. Donate to a small local community organization. Find joy in outsmarting the gacha system that still has you in its clutches. Consider not renewing that gacha subscription, at least for one month.
Alex Johnson (‘19) is a high school English teacher in Massachusetts. She spends her days being an uncool adult who enjoys reading romance novels and explaining niche rhythm game strategies.
