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Lim Cheng Mong from Singapore was treated to a surprise when he was called by his bank stating he missed a credit card payment of S$20,000 (RM61,936) linked to 89 mysterious transactions, little did he know these came from Genshin Impact.
“At first I thought I was scammed, but the credit card company said these were all legitimate transactions and there was nothing it could do,” said Lim, aged 56 who works as the production manager for a German company in Singapore.
He soon found that these mystery transactions were actually linked to his 18-year-old daughter’s Grab account that she was using for transportation expenses. He soon found that his daughter had linked her Grab e-wallet to the mobile gatcha game Genshin Impact and had gone on quite the shopping spree for the last few months between August and October of 2021.
“I told her off and said it was a lot of money – one year’s worth of school fees if she were to go to an overseas university, A huge sum was spent in the blink of an eye,” he said.
Cases such as these have unfortunately become quite common with the rise of gacha and microtransactions in video games, not just with Genshin Impact or in Singapore but other games around the world. One such incident involved a 16-year-old in the UK who spent nearly £2000 British pounds from his father’s bank account to purchase microtransactions in one of the NBA Basketball games.
Lim’s daughter would spend up to S$300 (RM929) on Genshin Impact’s gacha mechanic where the players can pay to have a chance the roll for a randomized item that could potentially help their character.
This has become a contentious aspect of gacha or loot box games as the function has often been likened to gambling marketed towards younger audiences. This has even come to a point that gacha games like Genshin Impact have been banned in certain countries like Belgium and The Netherlands.
Mr. Lim has since recovered around S$10,000 (RM30,968) from his issuing bank which was apparently given to him out of goodwill. He says “We as parents have totally no control. It is a disaster waiting to happen and I want to make sure more parents are aware of it.”
