Singaporean in $20,000 debt due to daughter's Genshin Impact addiction

If you're a parent, here's a reminder to keep your credit card information away from your kids - especially if they play Genshin Impact.

A Singaporean dead finds himself in deep debt – $20,000 deep – after his daughter spent fortunes on Genshin Impact.

Popular open-world action-adventure Gacha game Genshin Impact won TGA 2021‘s Mobile Game of the Year Award thanks to its overwhelming popularity. The game, which is available on mobile devices, PC, and PlayStation, has been wildly successful since its release in late 2020. Fueling its success is a very supportive community that spends a lot of money on the game. Players purchase in-game currency which they can use to “pull” on Character Event Banners and Weapon Event Banners. By “pulling”, these players get a chance at obtaining their desired characters and weapons just so they can use them in the game.

With miHoYo, Genshin Impact‘s developers, introducing brand-new characters and weapons almost every new version, you could imagine players spending a lot of money for each new one. And that's a fact for many of the game's players who experience FOMO from missing out on the latest releases – an experience typical among players of Gacha games, not just Genshin Impact. We imagine the daughter of Lim Cheng Mong is among these players. Late last year, the Singaporean dad received a notice from his bank notifying him of missed overdue payments amounting to over $20,000. He'd later find out that his daughter used his credit card on 89 occasions on a six-month microtransaction spending spree in Genshin Impact, happening between August and October (so we bet it was Baal‘s fault, primarily). He'd originally linked his credit card to his daughter's Grab account to cover her transportation expenses.

$20,000 is a big sum, and Lim Cheng Mong made his daughter understand this. “I told her off and said it was a lot of money – one year’s worth of school fees if she were to go to an overseas university,” he told The Straits Times. Thankfully, it seems like Lim Cheng Mong won't have any trouble paying off the debt – $10,000 was returned to him by his credit card issuing bank as a sign of goodwill. He's reminded his 21-year-old son about the dangers of microtransactions and has told him to be more responsible on spending on games.

We'd also like to take this as an opportunity to remind our readers to be more thrifty when it comes to in-game spending. We may cover the game extensively, but we do not wish for our readers to get into enormous debts. Trust us, getting that Yae Miko isn't worth drowning yourself in debts for. And that's why we make Genshin Impact guides on whether or not you should pull for the newest characters and weapons – so that you can prioritize those who you really need and save your Primogems and Wishes from characters that you might not even end up using.