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Online games are sapping money like trading cards, console games of old

On a Chinese online forum, a user was reminiscing about the good old days of playing the Yu-Gi-Oh trading card game. Out of curiosity, he posed a question: What games did you spend the most on when you were young?

The user said he started playing Yu-Gi-Oh trading card game in kindergarten. But it was only in primary school, when he was laughed at for playing with pirated cards, that he started buying official ones. For a primary school student, a pack of five cards costing about NT$70 (about S$3) is expensive! For that user, looking back on it now, spending thousands of Taiwanese dollars on trading cards was really a waste of money.

Quite a number of other users who saw his post mentioned Nintendo’s Gameboy – game cartridges cost a bomb. Besides that, users remembered spending lots of money on batteries for the handheld console as well. Luckily for the kids these days, although game console cartridges are still pretty expensive, they (or their parents) do not have to buy batteries in bulk to sustain their gaming life – all they need is electricity to recharge the battery of their Nintendo 3DS, for example.

But, it seems, Nintendo gaming consoles are not the worst. These days, according to forum users commenting on the thread, gamers are dumping their savings on online titles, thus: “Lineage’s monthly subscription”; “MapleStory really uses up a lot of money when you reached the higher levels”; “Wasted a lot of money buying Lucky Cards for Stoneage”; and “If you don’t buy anything, you couldn’t really continue playing GetAmped”.

True enough, casual games that make use of in-game purchases can turn out to be quite expensive over time. Usually, each purchase costs a small amount of money and people tend to shrug it off and pay without thinking through. These purchases can either give you more lives to play the game, or allow you to get rare items in the game, or simply help you level up and advance the game.

Did you play any games that cost a lot too but are not mentioned here? Share with us in the comments. Also, remember not to splurge on mobile games like this guy!


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