A “Fate/Grand Order” Kraken

Hey gang! As long time readers of my blog know, I’m a MASSIVE fan of the Fate franchise. This includes titles like Fate/stay night, Fate/Zero, Lord El-Melloi II’s Case Files, Today’s Menu for Emiya Family, and so much more. And of course, this includes the gacha mobile game, Fate/Grand Order.

On one of my recent FGO Twitch streams (click the link and give me a follow if you want to see me doing some game streaming, and not just FGO 😁), we were talking about whaling out on the game, or even going “full kraken”. If you don’t know the terms, there are different kinds of players in a free to play mobile game.

What is a kraken?

For starters, there are your free-to-play (F2P) folks who never spend a dime. Then there are minnows, who spend a few bucks on the game, maybe as much as what they’d spend on a regular PC game. There are dolphins, who might spend as much as a few hundred dollars on the game. There are whales, who spend multiple thousands of dollars on a game. And then there are krakens, who spend tens of thousands of dollars on a game, sometimes easily going over $100,000 over the lifetime of said game.

That aside, some of my awesome viewers made me aware of a 2018 video piece from the Wall Street Journal, talking about a Japanese player of Fate/Grand Order who’d spent over $70,000 on the game. No doubt by now, he’s spent over $100,000 dollars on the game, which has generated well over $4B in revenue world-wide for Sony’s Aniplex. Most of this revenue comes from Japan, where you can’t call yourself a true fan of something unless you spend pretty much all of your money on said something.

Here’s the short Wall Street Journal video, “Meet the Man Who Has Spent $70,000 Playing a Mobile Game”. (There are subtitles translating what the Japanese man said. If you don’t see them, and there’s a Google banner ad up, the ad will be hiding the subtitles.)

Having sampled the life of a whale with the funds I received from adapting the True Tenchi Muyo! novels for Seven Seas, I can certainly understand the appeal. The Fate/Grand Order game is MUCH easier when you’ve whaled out.

Let me know what you think in the comment section! 🙂