As we’ve extensively covered, Pokémon TCG Pocket is a lovely mobile card game version of the 30-year-0ld trading card game, but also a wide-open doorway to gambling mechanics. It’s shocking to realize, early on in your time with the game, that it lets you pour as much as 720 Poké Gold a day into opening new packs, meaning it only cuts players off at roughly $105. Per day. Which is how much one Japanese player has been spending as he celebrates acquiring his 50,000th card.
The person responsible, as reported by Automaton, is Japanese YouTuber Hajimesyacho. Spending around 14,000 yen a day, he’s opened the maximum number of pretend packs of Pokémon cards possible since the game launched around 12 weeks ago. That works out to almost $9,000, although to be fair he likely took advantage of monthly discount offers, perhaps making the total cost closer to $8,500. A bargain for a mobile card game!
Now, I wish I could piously report that I’ve never spent a single cent on Pokémon TCG Pocket, but this would be a big lie. I have, in fact, paid for the god-awful Premium Pass for three months running (partly out of some naive belief that the company might finally see fit to add some actually meaningful missions to the battle pass, and partly because I’m as dumb as anyone and just want that extra pack a day), alongside a couple of occasions where I’ve—with plenty of guilt—paid some real-life money for a pile of imaginary golden coins. I wanted to open even more packs, OK!? Was it worth it? No! Of course not! But I got to watch the little ripping animation so many times, and the dopamine feedback loop is real. But I’ve spent maybe $50 total? With that, I’ve pulled a total of 1,476 cards.
Of course, Hajimesyacho is playing with YouTube money. He has 15.5 million subscribers on his channel, with regular viewing numbers in the seven digits, so he’s spending money to make money. (Why he’s playing in French, I have no idea.) It’s the sort of goof you can do in that situation. But it also really underlines just how ridiculous the spending limits are on the game.
I go back and forth on this subject—catch me in an hour and I might have changed my mind—but when something is so gambling-adjacent, I feel like there should at the very least be a way to set personal spending limits within the app. It’s currently possible to spend $38,235 per year opening packs in Pocket, and I’m not entirely convinced that half the average U.S. salary is the amount Pokémon should be willing to take off any one customer. And to be clear, this is how much you can spend just opening packs—you can keep on buying more Gold if you want to.
Obviously, there’s no way to financially benefit from playing PTCG Pocket, so at least it stops short of having any of the real-world game’s resale market. Even when trading finally arrives this month, it can’t be converted to cash via third-party apps or the like. But there’s still this residual ickiness given how the more packs you buy, the better chance you have of pulling the ultra rare cards, and believe me, the pull is strong. There are these pretty things just out of your reach, and if you only pay a bit more, they could be yours!
You can fully enjoy the mobile game without ever spending a penny, but obviously The Pokémon Company doesn’t want you to. Although let me attest, while I’ve been weak a couple of times, I’ve still managed to pull a pretty impressive array of very pretty cards, mostly on the daily grind.
In fact, given we’re learning that so many seemingly random elements in the game are in fact not (the pack you get from the carousel seems to be pre-determined, and it’s now widely believed that Wonder Picks are equally decided for you), I’m noticing that in the last few days I’ve been very coincidentally suddenly filling in a whole bunch of conspicuous gaps in my Genetic Apex Pokédex. And yes, it could just be random fortune, but there sure have been a lot of them showing up. And yay! But also, hmmmm.
Anyway, point is, don’t be like Hajimesyacho, unless you, like Hajimesyacho, have more money than you know how to spend. Maybe open a couple of packs a day and then give some money to charity?
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