Arknights: Endfield Microtransactions Are a Complete Mess (And It's Getting Worse)

Arknights: Endfield has only just launched, but it already finds itself in the middle of a controversy that no live service game ever wants to be associated with during its release window. Hypergryph’s latest project arrived with heavy expectations and strong interest, positioned as a major step forward for the franchise and its universe. Early impressions should have been about systems, tone, and long-term potential.

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Instead, the game’s launch period has been defined by confusion, frustration, and growing distrust around spending and its microtransactions. Within days of release, community discussion began drifting away from gameplay and toward payment concerns that felt unusually severe for a brand-new title. When a game’s first major talking point involves money behaving unpredictably, it sets a tone that is difficult to shake.

How PayPal Microtransactions Turned Into a Mess

Arknight Endfield Featured Image — Image courtesy of Gryphline

Within the first days of Endfield’s release, reports started appearing on Reddit and other platforms about unexpected PayPal charges tied to in-game purchases. In many of these reports, players believed a transaction had failed or been canceled inside the game, only to find their PayPal account had still been charged. In other cases, players noticed amounts that did not match what they thought they had agreed to spend. What should have been straightforward payments instead became confusing and stressful.

Even more alarming were multiple player reports claiming that purchases were somehow going through on other people’s PayPal balances. There is no clear explanation for how such a thing could happen, and Hypergryph has not publicly detailed how or why this could occur. Still, the volume of reports with similar language brought these claims into the spotlight almost immediately. Whether it was a bug, a payment routing issue, or something else entirely, the fact that players were talking about it so intensely in the first place was enough to make many people hesitate before spending.

In response, the developer temporarily disabled PayPal as a payment option while it investigates the problem. That move was necessary, but coming in the middle of a launch week makes it feel much bigger than a typical glitch. Payment systems are supposed to be rock solid, especially at release, when players are deciding whether they trust a game with their money. With an already confusing purchase interface and a payment channel that suddenly feels unstable, many players have been left uncertain about how safe it is to make purchases at all.

Ongoing Chaos and What the Developer Is Doing About It

Even with PayPal turned off, the fallout has not calmed down. Players continue sharing experiences about who was charged and when, warning each other to be cautious, and debating whether credit card or platform purchases are actually more reliable. The conversation has become persistent and detailed because there has not been a clear, transparent explanation of exactly what went wrong or how similar problems will be prevented in the future.

Developer messaging has acknowledged that something is wrong, but it has stopped short of walking players through what happened or how it happened. In most launch controversies that get resolved quickly, the pattern is clear communication followed by swift fixes. That has not happened here. Instead, players are left piecing together threads from community reports, screenshots, and their own experiences. In the absence of clarity, speculation fills the space, and distrust grows.

What makes this especially damaging is that community discussion has shifted away from strategy, setting, and the game’s design philosophy to focus almost entirely on payment reliability. Players who were ready to support the game financially are choosing to hold off entirely until confidence returns. Those suffering from these additional charges are struggling to get refunds. There are also reports of people getting refunded, but keeping all the gains in-game. For a live service title that relies on steady engagement and optional spending, that hesitation during launch can hang over the entire early lifecycle of the game.

Endfield’s Microtransactions Were Already Bad, and This Makes Them Worse

Arkknights: Endfield — Image Courtesy of Comicbook

The PayPal chaos comes atop a monetization system that was already drawing criticism from players long before release. Endfield’s microtransaction setup includes layers of currencies, exchanges, and conversion steps that make it difficult to understand the real value of any purchase, even by normal gacha standards. Premium currency gets turned into other forms, which then feed into banners, bundles, and limited-time packs in ways that feel opaque and hard to track.

That complexity has led many players to conclude that the system was designed to be confusing rather than clear. When spending is filtered through multiple layers of value abstraction, it becomes much harder to know exactly how much real money is going out. It also makes discussions about value difficult, because answering a simple question like “Is this worthwhile?” often requires a long, convoluted explanation. That feeling of obfuscation was already a source of frustration in the community well before the payment controversy erupted.