Waifu Gacha Wallet: Nearly 20% Of Japanese Twentysomethings Admit Suffering “Financial Difficulty” Due To “Excessive In-Game Spending”
From Genshin Impact, to Fortnite, to Pokémon Go, a new report has revealed that a not-insignificant-portion of Japanese adults in their 20s admit to having let their general in-game spending habits, at one time or another, spiral to the point of causing them genuine financial hardship.
This insight into the current state of the Japanese player habits was provided to the public courtesy of a recent financial temperature survey conducted by the country’s locally-based Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation.
Conducted online “over a three-day period from February 19 to 21, 2025” among an open-participation pool of “1,000 [total] men and women aged 20 to 29”, said survey asked respondents a number of money-related questions, including their thoughts on the value provided by physical media vs. streaming services, average salaries, and what they ‘value’ most in life (surprisingly, those in their early 20s across both genders said “Hobbies”, while late 20s women shifted to “Family” and similarly-aged men stood by their previous answer but also added “Partner”).
As part of this line of inquiry, respondents were at one point pressed as to their relationship, if any existed, with “in-game spending” (while SMBC did not specify exactly what qualifies as a ‘in-game spending’, it’s presumed that respondents took it to mean any exchange of money for a digital item/service, such as gacha pulls, different character skins, or MMO subscription fees).
Per a translation of the results provided by ChatGPT, roughly 216 of the surveyed individuals – 141 men and 75 women – said that in the last year, they had actively chosen to “spend money on in-game purchases”, with monthly totals averaging out to roughly ¥4,247 JPY (~$30 USD) per player.
And while this amount seems more than reasonable in terms of live-service spending, this base statistic fails to truly detail the dark side of in-game spending, in particular as it relates to ‘gacha’ games such as Blue Archive, Honkai Impact 3rd or Goddess of Victory: Nikke (a genre which itself derives its name from the ‘gachapon’-style of random-chance capsule toys due to their similar mechanics).
Per the same pool of respondents, 188 total individuals – 114 men and 74 women – admitted to having “experienced financial difficulties due to spending too much on games”, with a further 136 men and 103 women saying that they “regretted spending money on games”.
Interestingly, while the survey found that the amount of players willing to spend money on in-game purchases had increased by an average of 58 per 1000 individuals, the profit potential of this ‘willingness boom’ is being offset by a simultaneous decrease in the actual amount of money being spent, with the monthly median dropping by approximately ¥891 JPY (~$6 USD).
Breaking this decrease down further, men pulled back their spending by a monthly average of ¥1,237 JPY (~$8.70 USD), while women cut a significantly smaller ¥216 JPY (~$1.50 USD) from their respective in-game budgets.
And though SMBC did not breaking the following data down by gender, they also found that 179 respondents agreed with the statement “I want to spend money to progress more easily in the game,” 208 admitted “I can’t enjoy the game without spending money,” 220 nodded “I’m willing to spend money to obtain items or characters,” and 333 beamed “I feel proud when I obtain rare items or characters in the game.”
So, after all those numbers and explanations, what does the above data actually mean?
In terms of real, true solid economic data, the answer is ‘not a lot’. As Homer Simpson once told Kent Brockman, “People can come up with statistics to prove anything“, and this sentiment wholeheartedly applies to the idea of trying to blanket determine the true spending habits of an entire national demographic based on the answers of just 1,000 online users.
However, even if we look at the sample size itself, the fact that while the average player spends just $30 USD per month on a given game or games, at least 188 people have spent so much that they have found themselves actually struggling to survive (it’s an embarrassing admission, so it’s possible some players may be less than forward with the truth).
Ultimately, the SMBC survey shows not only how gacha games are truly carried on the backs of so-called ‘whales’ (those few players who, whether through carelessness or addiction, make up a given game’s top financial sources), but how sadly dangerous the gacha mechanic can be to some individuals.
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