What started as a harmless hobby collecting virtual horse girls turned into a nightmare for a Japanese worker. A sales supervisor recently revealed the tragic case of one of his employees, who discovered the world of horse racing after playing Uma Musume Pretty Derby and ended up losing his family, savings, and job due to a severe addiction to real-life betting.

According to the 58-year-old supervisor, the employee began betting on real horse races after becoming fascinated by the mobile game. What started with small amounts soon got out of control, reaching weekly losses of between 30,000 and 50,000 yen. Over months, the family’s 1.5 million yen savings disappeared, leading to an inevitable divorce and his wife returning to her parents’ home with their four-year-old son.

The situation worsened when the company discovered a financial anomaly during the supervisor’s absence. An internal review confirmed the worker had taken 459,000 yen from company funds to cover his debts. Despite his boss offering to pay the money himself in exchange for the employee quitting gambling, the worker refused help, admitting he suffered from an uncontrollable gambling addiction and couldn’t stop, ultimately resigning from the company.

Launched in 2021 and developed by Cygames, Uma Musume Pretty Derby is a popular video game and anime franchise that personifies famous Japanese racehorses as high-performance anime girls. Although the title combines simulation and training mechanics of waifus, its massive success in Japan has led thousands of players to become interested in real horse racing, a sport that represents one of the few legal forms of gambling in the Asian country.

With such severe stories of how a video game can lead to real-life addictions, do you think titles promoting races or chance elements should include stricter warnings about real betting?