19-year old Redditor spends $13,500 on microtransactions

A 19-year old Redditor, going by the name Kensgold, has taken to the site to talk about his addiction to microtransactions, and how his susceptibility has meant he’s not able to try EA’s Star Wars Battlefront II.

It’s the latest tale in the increasingly thorny area of microtransactions that seems to have sprung up around EA’s latest shooter in a galaxy far far away. In this case, Kensgold has talked about how he spent $13,500 on microtransactions in the last three years, between the ages of 16 and 19.

Kotaku contacted Kensgold, deserving a hat-tip for breaking the story, and verified his claims, claiming to have been shown bank statements corroborating the spend.

Kensgold claims to have spent most of this cash on free-to-play mobile games: Age of Warring Empire, Clash of Clans and other games. His poison was chance based microtransactions, often known as loot boxes.

“I had to get up the nerve to ask for help,” Kensgold tells Kotaku. “To get a therapist to lay it out for me, like ‘This is what you’re doing, this is how you can help yourself, here are the tools to help you.’”

Part of his readjustment, like anyone recovering from a dependency, is to swear off of the cause. This means Kensgold no longer plays games with any in-game microtransactions, something that is locking off more and more games for the Redditor.

Interesting reading for developers involved in microtransaction and free to play monetisation. Kensgold’s original Reddit post is readable here.