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“If people are creating good games out of [microtransactions], then I am going to invest my personal finances to support it,” said the anonymous player who had spent $6,000. “I feel like the general consensus is that Genshin is more acceptable, because [HoYoverse] did create something very unique and unprecedented.” She pointed out that Genshin has tons of lore, complex character designs, and intensive voice acting. “There’s a genuine effort invested into creating this game, setting a precedent. I think the concern is that there are many games that just try to take advantage of the [microtransaction] methodology, but not the practice of creating a rich game.”
Do their friends know about their high spending?
While some self-identified whales were open to their friends about spending thousands of dollars on Genshin, most of the interviewees were hesitant if not completely unwilling to inform their friends and family. Most people cited social embarrassment as the main reason why they wouldn’t tell their close confidantes.
“I’m already embarrassed to tell my friends [who play Genshin],” said Patrice. “Telling non-gamers is out of the picture”
A lack of education about microtransactions also prevented high spenders from telling others about their main hobby. “My closest friend still calls me a ‘whale’ to this day — a term she didn’t even know before I had enlightened her — because she’d heard that I’d spent hundreds on Genshin at the time. [She] has no idea how much that amount has increased since,” QQ told me over Twitter DMs. “And I don’t plan on telling her.”
Lansze simply didn’t think there was a point in telling people who didn’t understand whaling. “I wouldn’t tell my mom that I spend this much money on gacha games when I call her every week,” he said over a video call. “To non-gamers, I think the idea of spending on games in general is already pretty nonsensical.”
Not everyone had a negative experience, however. Jay refrained from telling her non-gamer friends, but she had a community of supportive Genshin players. “My Genshin Impact friends were all very supportive of my decision to spend on the game, and they’ve also been very supportive of the new ‘low spender’ me,” she said. “At first, there was some pressure to keep spending a lot because everyone was having fun with my ‘whale antics,’ but now the attitude about it has changed a lot. They encourage me to save and only spend a lot on characters I really love.”
Several high spenders were embedded in Asian communities for Genshin, which they felt were more accepting of whaling. “My experiences in a[n Asian] whale community are far more positive than the interactions I’ve had with America-based communities,” said Ely, who worked in IT. She has spent $8,000 since the game’s launch year. “Whales are still people, and it saddens me to think of when I got bullied in environments which feed into a ‘whales are wasting money’ mindset.”
For as long as I’ve been writing about Genshin for Kotaku, I’ve been an advocate for increased government regulation on gacha. “Minors should not be allowed to purchase microtransactions” and “companies should publish data about their incredibly lucrative business practices” are reasonable baselines that should not garner any sort of controversy. But experts say that regulating gacha and loot boxes is much more complicated than simply issuing a ban on all games that contain loot boxes. I spoke to Dr. Darshana Jayemanne, a researcher at Abertay University. This summer, he contributed research to a British government-funded study about loot boxes.
“There’s a lot of stakes in trying to get this right,” Jayemanne told Kotaku over a Zoom call. “Loot boxes seem to be an area where it’s an opportunity to think about how you would have oversight and [having] resources available for populations that may be harmed by them.” However, he said that these gaming companies currently do not have a lot of external incentive to provide researchers with disaggregated data. However, Jayemanne hopes that companies will voluntarily provide researchers with data in order to find a middle-ground approach to navigating regulation.
Even when governments do regulate gacha and loot boxes, companies don’t necessarily follow the law. I spoke with Leon Xiao, a researcher from the University of Copenhagen, over Zoom, and he told me that legal compliance varied across different countries, which have tried very different approaches to regulation. Laws on luck-based microtransactions are incredibly successful in China, where 96% of games comply with a requirement that they disclose the probabilities of getting a certain reward to players. In contrast, Belgium had much less success with its own approach, implementing some of the most stringent bans in the world on video game gambling. Xiao traveled to Belgium and discovered that 82% of the highest-grossing games on the App Store still had microtransactions.
“The problem was that the Belgian gambling regulator was so underfunded that it did not have the ability to go after these companies,” said Xiao. “Even though they’re technically breaking the law.”
Since underfunded governments are a persistent reality in our neoliberal hellscape, governments such as Japan and the UK have turned to industry-led regulation. “If you think about this on a practical level, there are 1 million games on iOS alone, and then we expect a lot of these games to get regular updates,” said Xiao, painting a picture of an industry that would require tremendous resources to keep up with and regulate effectively.
At least other countries are talking about it. Consumer protections in the U.S. are a complete joke, and there isn’t a concerted effort to regulate microtransactions (the last bill was introduced to Congress in 2019, and it seems to have died there). Right now, the best protection that Genshin players have is a community that looks out for them. None of the whales I spoke to wanted players to spend beyond their means, and some of them even took measures to ensure that others didn’t feel like they were missing out.
But with the exception of content creators, whales are largely an invisible group. They face social stigma from both people in their day-to-day lives and the Genshin community at large. As I interviewed some of these people who spent thousands of dollars on the game, I worried about less affluent players who felt too ashamed to tell their families. Who would they turn to if they started whaling beyond their means?
The answer should be “all of us.” Whaling should be an activity that players can discuss openly without fear of being shamed or ostracized from their communities. Many high-spenders have found supportive social networks within Genshin’s large player base, but empathy and support should be available to everyone. Even the people who spend $5,000 on anime characters.