Seventy Thousand Euros, and Trying Not to Think About It
Before judging anyone for what they spend on a gacha game, I run a quick internal audit—the mobile titles I’ve touched over the years, the skins, the battle passes, the "just this once" premium currency purchases that never were. It adds up in a way I prefer not to calculate. Then I read about Daigo, a Japanese Fate/Grand Order player who has put somewhere north of seventy thousand euros into the game, and I feel comparatively disciplined.
Fate/Grand Order is a free-to-play mobile RPG built on the bones of the long-running Fate franchise—time-traveling summoners, historical and mythological figures reimagined as anime characters with impractical armor, improbably large eyes, and the occasional inexplicable navel. You fight demons with magical cards. You collect heroes through a gacha system that converts real money into Saint Quartz, a premium currency granting access to rare character summons. It’s a carefully engineered slot machine wearing a fantasy epic as a costume, and it works on a lot of people.
Daigo described his situation with the weary clarity of someone at a support group: My name is Daigo. I play Fate/Grand Order. When I’m awake I’m usually playing. Even while eating. I play constantly—except when I’m sleeping, driving, or taking a bath. I’ve invested around seventy thousand euros into the game so far. Maybe more. I try not to think about it.
That last line is the whole story. The not-thinking-about-it is the mechanism. It’s the same logic as a casino floor with no clocks—the moment you stop and calculate, the spell breaks. The game depends on the running tab staying abstract. Seventy thousand euros is a car, a year abroad, a serious art collection, a down payment on something real. Turned into Saint Quartz, it becomes numbers on a server that Aniplex can shut down whenever they feel like it.
I don’t think Daigo is stupid. I think he found something that gave him what he needed, and the people who built the game were considerably better at extracting money than he was at holding onto it. That’s not a bug. That’s the product.