New video game has £250 microtransaction but that’s not the most expensive ever

If you think Dragon Quest Smash/Grow’s microtransactions are outrageous, you’ll be shocked to learn how much worse they could be.

By definition, a microtransaction should be a small purchase but as they’ve grown more pervasive in, not just free-to-play video games but full priced ones too, their use of the word ‘micro’ has become a bad joke.

Following its price hike, the smallest bundle of Fortnite’s in-game currency V-Bucks is £6.99 for 800, with the most expensive offer being 12,500 V-Bucks for £69.99. That’s as much as first party PlayStation 5 games like Spider-Man 2 and the upcoming Saros.

Every once in a while, though, people will come across a truly obscene microtransaction – or macrotransaction as it really should be called – with the newest example coming from mobile game Dragon Quest Smash/Grow.

A new free-to-play roguelite spin-off for Square Enix’s Dragon Quest series, it only launched on the Apple and Google Play stores this week and naturally has its own premium currency – gems – which are used for gacha pulls and other in-game purchases.

You have to buy the gems with real money and if you thought Fortnite charging £69.99 for V-Bucks was too expensive, you’ll be shocked to hear Square Enix is offering gem bundles (in-game and via Square Enix’s own website) for as much as $329.99 in the US and £250 here in the UK.

That nets you 50,000 gems plus an extra 9,500 ‘free’ gems and 100 web coins (another form of in-game currency). Helpfully, Square Enix notes that there’s no hard limit to how many of these bundles you can buy at once.

While there’s certainly nothing micro about this microtransaction, you might be more shocked to learn that’s not even the worst example out there.

The most expensive microtransactions ever

While it has since been delisted and no longer available for purchase, twin stick shooter mobile game Gun Bros offered an in-game gun called the Apathy Bear Gun, which is appropriately named as you’d have to be very apathetic about your spending habits to purchase it for the equivalent of £420.

That’s nothing on Star Citizen, though. The sci-fi MMO was successfully crowdfunded in 2012, netting over $2 million, and then launched in early access in 2017, but it’s chock full of expensive microtransactions.

The most expensive one is the Legatus Pack bundle, which comes with every spaceship in the game plus a whole heap of extras and costs $48,000 (about £35,610).

On top of that, you need to be part of the Chairman’s Club to even buy the bundle, which you can only join if you’ve spent at least $1,000 (about £742) on the game to begin with.

And yet, that’s still not the most expensive microtransaction ever. That ‘honour’ goes to a microtransaction found in Peter Molyneux’s Curiosity: What’s Inside The Cube?

While not technically a game and more of a social experiment, it still required people collaborating to chisel away at a giant cube to reach the grand prize inside, which would be rewarded to whoever found it first… though said prize was infamously mishandled.

You could pay for stronger chisels, with a diamond chisel costing a staggering £50,000; something Molyneux admitted he didn’t expect anyone would actually buy.

We don’t know if anyone did choose to buy it (we certainly hope not), but Guinness World Records lists it as the most expensive piece of DLC, and thus the most expensive microtransaction, ever made.

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