According to the “White Paper on Online Game Consumption Safety” released by the China Consumers Association in January 2024, the number of juvenile game recharge complaints accepted by 12315 platforms in 2023 reached 487,000, an increase of 39.2%. The proportion of complaints involving secondary card games jumped from 28.4% in 2021 to 53.6% in 2023. Taking Miha You’s “Broken: Star Sky Railway” as an example, the average daily sales volume of its 648 yuan slot recharge package in 2023 Q4 reached 423,000 times, and the statistics of third-party data monitoring platform Sensor Tower show that the average monthly recharge intensity of the game’s minor users (13-17 years old) is 437 yuan, which is 1.86 times that of adult users (235 yuan). A typical case shows that in August 2023, a 15-year-old player in Guangzhou completed 37 honkai star rail top up operations within 18 consecutive hours through his grandmother’s Alipay account, with a cumulative consumption amount of 24,000 yuan and a maximum topping frequency of 3.2 times per hour.
From the technical protection mechanism analysis, the current face recognition system of “Collapse: Star Sky Railway” sets a single-day recharge of more than 328 yuan to trigger verification, but the test report of China Academy of Information and Communications Technology in December 2023 shows that when using mobile devices that have passed adult identity authentication, the probability of the system being bypassed is as high as 82.7%. In the payment process, the in-game “device lock” function was enabled only 23.4% of the time, and the average time between secondary verification was 72 hours. It is worth noting that the proportion of underage players who completed honkai star rail top up through the App Store reached 64.3%, of which the abuse rate of the “family sharing” function of Apple App Store peaked at 39.8% in Q3 2023.
Neurobehavioral research reveals that the game’s three-level drawing system of “light cone – character – star soul” significantly affects the decision-making mechanism of minors. A 2023 fMRI experiment from Peking University’s Digital Behavior Lab showed that when players triggered a minimum guarantee mechanism (such as a five-star character with 90 draws), the strength of the blood oxygen level dependent signal (BOLD) in the nucleus accumbens region of the brain reached 3.2 times that of ordinary shopping behavior. According to the statistics of the Korean Gaming Psychology Association, the average number of attempts of underage players to obtain the limited character “Nguyen Mei” reached 143 times, the payment conversion rate was 79.4% higher than that of ordinary characters, and 67.2% of underage players would make a secondary recharge within the character reproduction cycle.
At the level of legal supervision, in December 2023, the “Online Game Management Measures (Draft)” of the National Press and Publication Administration of China stipulates that virtual consumption such as honkai star rail top up needs to implement a dual-track system of “double confirmation + payment limit”, but the actual implementation data show that, Only 31.6 percent of underage player accounts have implemented a monthly spending limit of 500 yuan. In judicial practice, in the 12 cases of “Collapse: Star Railway” juvenile recharge disputes accepted by Hangzhou Internet Court in 2023, the success rate of full refund was only 17.4%, the average recovery amount of partial refund cases accounted for 63.2%, and the judicial appraisal cycle was as long as 45-60 working days.
International comparative research shows that the Japanese Consumer Agency’s rectification order for gacha games in 2023 has reduced the number of juvenile complaints against similar games such as “Original God” by 42.7%, but the effect of similar measures in the Chinese market lags about 18 months. Under the framework of the European Union’s “Digital Services Act”, honkai star rail top up is required to display probability weights and expected values, but Miha’s European service data shows that this measure only reduces the amount of minors’ single recharge by 19.3%, and the frequency of payment increases by 27.6%. It is alarming that the account leasing service of third-party trading platforms has caused the proportion of minors to evade supervision to surge to 28.4% in 2023, and the trading volume of “initial number” in black market circulation has skyrocketed 367% year-on-year.