If you’re playing For Honor, you know that you don’t need to spend any real money to unlock the game’s goods. You have to earn steel, and that’s done through play.

Though you can buy steel with real money to take a shortcut. The crazy thing? It’s insanely expensive (both in terms of money and time) to unlock everything for the base characters.

Reddit user bystander007 did the math. Each character costs around 91,500 steel to unlock with all customizations. There are 12 characters. That’s roughly 1,098,000 steel to get all characters and their unlocks. You’ll need 7.32 $100 microtransactions to buy that steel for yourself.

Or? You can spend two-and-a-half years of your life playing. Here’s how bystander007 figures that stat.

Casual players who play 1-2 hours 5-7 days a week will never reach this goal. Completing Orders/half-Contracts will get you roughly 1000 Steel, another roughly 200 for the matches you played. So 1200 a day is a good estimated gain for casual players. That’s 915 days. Roughly 2.51 years.

That’s a tall order

This comes before Ubisoft adds any extra characters (which, of course they will). I haven’t played For Honor, so it’s entirely plausible that these unlocks are widely unnecessary.

Word on the subreddit, though, is that you need to grind for gear to stay competitive. That means this game needs some reworking because it is not free-to-play. It’s a full-priced game with $732 worth of microtransactions.