Arknights: Endfield players hit with extra PayPal charges at launch

• Gryphline’s Arknights: Endfield faced a launch day issue where some paying players were overcharged if they used PayPal.
• As DTC becomes commonplace, there is a debate to be had around payment security outside Google and Apple stores.

Players of the newly launched action RPG Arknights: Endfield were hit with payment problems last week that led to some being overcharged hundreds of dollars when making PayPal transactions.

Almost four years after its reveal, Gryphline’s latest gacha game launched globally on Thursday, January 22nd, but a payments glitch quickly arose.

By 2am GMT on launch day, Gryphline received its first player feedback highlighting a PayPal issue, followed by reports from other users who made 'direct-to-consumer' purchases and were struck with higher or additional fees.

Around 3am, the company confirmed the issue and disabled PayPal as a payment option to prevent more users from being affected, then began to review and identify affected transactions to refund players.

The issue appears to have impacted only certain platforms when using PayPal, meaning not all users who made early purchases were hit with additional fees.

However, PayPal as a payment method remains unavailable in Arknights: Endfield as Gryphline investigates the issue. It will remain this way until the team is confident the matter is resolved.

Erroneous fees

Players impacted by the PayPal issue have taken to Reddit to air their concerns, with some claiming they had wrongly been charged hundreds of dollars.

Gryphline has assured users it doesn’t store their payment information and that PayPal handles that information directly.

"We want to sincerely apologise to everyone affected by the PayPal payment issue that occurred shortly after launch. We understand how upsetting and concerning this kind of situation can be, especially when it involves purchases and personal payment details," Gryphline said in a statement.

"At the moment, PayPal payments will remain unavailable while we continue to investigate the root cause together with our partners. We won't re-enable the payment option until we're confident the issue has been fully resolved. We're truly sorry for the stress and inconvenience this caused, and we're grateful for your patience while we work through this carefully."

Though Appcharge has not been directly involved in the incident, as a big D2C player, director of engineering, payments Oran Stern weighed in to say: "As direct-to-consumer monetisation expands, more publishers are taking on the responsibility of building and operating their own payment infrastructure. With that shift comes exposure to failure modes that don’t surface in functional testing, but emerge under real traffic, real money, and real pressure."

Despite the troubled launch circumstances for Gryphline’s Arknights: Endfield, Appcharge CTO Amit Porat told PocketGamer.biz that it’s "unlikely" this will harm gamers' trust in D2C initiatives industry-wide.

"Incidents like this can dent trust in D2C specifically for Arknight players, but are not likely to affect D2C trust for other games. The reality is that this wasn’t a failure of D2C monetisation - it was a failure of DIY payment infrastructure," he said.

"When D2C is done right, it strengthens trust by giving players safer, more transparent payment experiences - not the opposite."