Fuji TV’s series Where Did That Money Go? interviews people who had it all and lost it, like game designer Yoshiki Okamoto (Sponichi Annex via Automaton). During his years at Capcom he was producer on Final Fight and Street Fighter 2, as well as racking up credits on Darkstalkers and Resident Evil games, among others. He left to found indie studio Game Republic in 2003, which hit trouble when their American publisher Brash Entertainment went bankrupt, leaving him in debt to the tune of 1.7 billion yen (almost $US11 million).
As the interview documents, he built himself back up again with Monster Strike, a mobile gacha game that boasts more than 65 million players as of December. Now he’s a producer at Deluxe Games with a portfolio of gacha hits, an income of 1.2 billion yen per year ($US7.7 million), and a Malaysian mansion “the size of about 20 tennis courts.”
Which is why he can afford to drop 80 million yen ($US515,000) on the personal account he has in each game. “I need to understand what people who spend a lot of money on them think. I do this to make sure the people who spend the most don’t end up dissatisfied,” he said.
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Surely, you may be thinking, he could just give himself an administrator account with unlimited funds and test things with that? Asked this very question on Twitter, Okamoto replied that he spent his own actual personal money because if he didn’t, “I think it’d be hard to understand users’ feelings.”
I wonder if a man who earns almost eight milly per annum has the same relationship with money as the rest of us, but maybe Okamoto gets just as upset as everyone else when his latest gacha pull doesn’t net him the particular anime girl or horse or puppet he was hoping for.
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