Genshin Impact is technically free-to-play, but someone that wants to collect all of the game’s characters will likely have to spend a significant amount of money thanks to its gacha game mechanics, wherein players don’t purchase content directly but rather get a random item in exchange for their cash. Genshin Impact is estimated to have made billions of dollars from its microtransactions despite only being a couple years old, and it likely owes quite a bit of its success to specific individuals that the industry has dubbed “whales.”
It’s well known that the majority of people playing a free-to-play game don’t spend a significant amount of money on it. It’s the “whales” that keep free-to-play games afloat by spending enough money on the game for everyone, and that’s likely the case with Genshin Impact. Case in point, an 18 year old girl managed to spend over S$20,000 in Genshin Impact over the course of a six week period.
According to a report by The Straits Times, Lim Cheng Mong was contacted about 89 mysterious transactions on his account. At first believing he was the victim of fraud or a scam of some kind, Lim Cheng Mong was then informed that all the transactions were actually legitimate and that he was out S$20,000 (roughly $15,000 or so in USD). He was able to get S$10,000 back from his bank, but the rest of the money can’t be recovered, having been spent on Genshin…
