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This is one thing I'm terrified of going forward: industries being built by the 1% for the 1% and to Hell what the rest of us proles want. I'm not at all again

This is one thing I'm terrified of going forward: industries being built by the 1% for the 1% and to Hell what the rest of us proles want. I'm not at all against elites being able to get tons of money, so long as there's at least some scraps left for the rest of us.

knieveltech 9y ago
You denounce the logical conclusion of the system you claim to support.
stillhere 9y ago
This already exists. One example is luxury brands. A middle class person might infrequently buy something from a luxury clothing boutique as a gift whereas Ivanka Trump might shop for clothes there regularly. I'd wager that the more expensive a good or service is, the more important it is that the business cozy up to the the wealthier customers (the whales).
neolefty 9y ago
Interesting. I feel both ways about it. On the one hand, if those scraps are enough to live on (and educate my children and so on), it's fine with me because it's enough. On the other hand, the economy as a whole is so much healthier with vigorous participation by the 99%. But maybe that's all a fallacy -- if the economy truly becomes driven by the 1%, then maybe there can't be enough for the 99%?
- whatshisface 9y ago
  I doubt we will ever see productivity concentrated in the aristocrat class: people are too lazy, and after a couple of generations it falls down between either a society that encourages rent or a family that isn't rich anymore. However, if when you say "the economy becomes driven by the 1%" you mean "the economy reaches a point where it is funded entirely by the 1%," then I have an interesting thought experiment for you: You may not know this, but I am the richest man in the world. All economic activity is technically mine, carried out by stewards of my capital. However, I have decided that the most humanitarian approach to this massive responsibility is to let things run their course - I am comfortable on a meager living, so I take no interest. It's not like someone is going to replace me: after all, everyone in the world simply manages my funds, and does their best to earn the right to manage more. Now, my brother on the other hand - he's a notorious criminal. He owns nothing rightfully, but his famous heists have resulted in a 3% annual decrease in the value of every bank account in the world; and even worse, the multitude of shots fired in the ensuing high-speed chases have done the same to essentially every asset. Congress has decided to close the loopholes my brother has been using to escape justice, but they're fine with me.
  - mulmen 9y ago
    I don't follow. Why shouldn't the government lock up a criminal that does so much damage? And what does it have to do with you? Does it matter that he is your brother? Are we supposed to judge you by his actions? Are you saying we are lucky to have a benevolent dictator such as yourself?
    - whatshisface 9y ago
      I've essentially presented the argument that gets you from either historical materialism or utilitarianism to communism/socialism. Here's the rest, laid out more explicitly: .1 If my brother and I were one person, it would go from illegal to legal but nobody's balance sheets would change. .2A (use this one if you like historical materialism) Laws and ethical notions are constructed because of balance sheets. Why, then, don't we change the law so that the apparently arbitrary distinction goes away? .2B (use this one if you like utilitarianism) There's no basis for law beyond utility, and it's obvious that both cases have the same result. Therefore, there's no basis for a legal distinction. I've never figured how to get out of this argument, except by making private property a fundamental right. That sounds a lot like objectivism, though.
- mulmen 9y ago
  If that's the case why would the 99% allow such an economy to be built?
  - AlexandrB 9y ago
    > If that's the case why would the 99% allow such an economy to be built? Allow? I'm pretty sure they don't need to allow anything. Media is becoming more potent at manipulating public opinion and the politician with the most donations can afford the best media. Whether his/her actual policies are in the material interest of the 99% voter is irrelevant. Just note how much of the most recent election hinged on social signifiers instead of economic policy.
    - mulmen 9y ago
      If the 99% don't have any power why would manipulating their opinions be worthwhile?
- r00fus 9y ago
  > On the one hand, if those scraps are enough to live on (and educate my children and so on), it's fine with me because it's enough. That's a pretty sad state of affairs though. Constant "revenue optimization" means it's almost guaranteed that scraps will be less as time goes by. I mean, rich folks can always want more, no? The issue isn't with "we have scraps" but the 1% focusing on the 1% and that if you don't have an economic voice, you will eventually lose all of your remaining scraps and your rights (e.g. Native Americans, Palestinians, etc). Now you just have to add in privatized military and drone/AI based policing and it starts to look a lot like dystopia.
olalonde 9y ago
Another perspective is that the 1% is subsidising the 99%. This is something anti-ad people often fail to consider.
- CaptSpify 9y ago
  Or rather: It's that our economic models are so poor, that we need to use poor monetization techniques to make up for it.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
mulmen 9y ago
Yeah I don't take such a generous view of it. In my opinion a person can work hard and make money in the millions in a lifetime. That can be done by penny pinching and good old fashioned hard work and bootstraps. But a billion dollars? Ten billion? You can't get there without stepping on someones neck. The fact we even have elites means someone's getting screwed. Eat the rich.
- xtreme 9y ago
  Assuming this not a sarcastic comment, whose necks did the "Bitcoin billionaires" step on?
  - tomlor 9y ago
    The people buying Bitcoins now?
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    The environment, if the reports of the electricity usage of BTC are accurate.
    - smt88 9y ago
      This is very similar to mineral mining in the physical world: a small number of people create immense wealth while leaving huge costs of environmental destruction to the rest of us.
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    There is a good chance that they will be stepping on the necks of the people who are buying Bitcoin now. Bitcoin is still a zero sum game.
  - googletazer 9y ago
    Its more along the lines of - whose tea and coffee did they pour salt in? Its incredible that for a tech related site like HackerNews so many here are salty about people getting wealthy off technology.
- 9y ago
matz1 9y ago
But there are seemingly many area where you can be the 1%. The difficulty is finding that area where you can be the 1%.
dpweb 9y ago
Most people don't mind the elites having tons of money, which is one of the reasons why they do. There is not a ton of outrage about inequality. Orthodox capitalism would say its just. But, capitalism is to serve the well being of society, not the other way around, and it is possible to preserve the idea of a person compensated according to their contribution/work while maintaining a certain level of fairness for all. That fairness can be measured by the inequality/wealth gap. Its been growing worldwide since 1980, except for Russia, nowhere faster than in the US. This is not a political argument its a fact. Also, much of the political debate falls short. Its already accepted that govt should redistribute, to compensate for capital inherent advantage over labor, after all the us income tax is a progressive tax. For instance, taxing incomes higher than cap gains results in increased inequality. Sure you can argue that's a hypothesis, but as far as hypotheses go, it doesn't boggle the mind. Whats the plan? Lower corp rates, leave middle income rates essentially unchanged. Add in the new economy where people are less needed. Expect more inequality for the time being. Btw, UBI is a lousy approach to solve this. You don't compensate people to not work. That brings inflation which is very bad. You correct for the imbalances of the rich feeding off the lower income groups in the tax code.
eddieplan9 9y ago
Interestingly, the IRS has a WI80 of 22.6, higher than all the industry averages listed in the article except gaming: the 1% pays 50% of the income taxes, and the top 20% pays 85% [1] [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/13/top-1-pay-nearly-half-of-federal-income-taxes.html https://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/13/top-1-pay-nearly-half-of-fed...
- jhayward 9y ago
  What do you conclude from that, and what do you conclude from studying, say, 1950, when the top federal income tax rate was over 90%? My point in asking is this: quoting statistics such as the above is often a 'push poll' type situation, trying to suggest a particular conclusion, often by idealogues. Interpreting that information requires a whole lot of other information and the conclusions to be drawn are not what one might initially assume.
justrobert 9y ago
The mobile space is built around whales. A recent mobile linage game came out, and it is the ultimate gacha (spend to gamble for random chance of results) game. Those that spent at least $5000 were at the top in no time. To be in the top 500 you had to spend over $200. It is sad to see the industry this way, but there are people willing to pay so the market exists.
BearGoesChirp 9y ago
As long as the rest of people are spending money, some part of the industry will still target them. In video games, for all the games that chase the whales, there are still many games that don't. As long as there is money to be made, someone will go chasing it. While I have concerns about chasing whales, this is not one of them.
AlexandrB 9y ago
> This is one thing I'm terrified of going forward: industries being built by the 1% for the 1% and to Hell what the rest of us proles want. That's an interesting hidden pitfall of increasing income inequality and wealth concentration. Companies like Coca Cola got huge because their target market was basically every American - rich or poor. If income inequality continues to rise a more profitable strategy might be selling very expensive beverages to the wealthy instead, leaving the poor underserved. This is already happening with prestige, "health" beverages like cold-pressed juice and Kombucha.
tikhonj 9y ago
I think the games in question are actually the opposite of that: they are played by millions and millions of people, often for free, but financed by a small, rich minority. It is super aggressive price discrimination, which actually benefits the 99%—we get something cheaper (or even free with F2P games) because other people are willing to pay so much. In a very real sense, the F2P business model only really works if the game is popular amount non-paying customers—otherwise, what would motivate whales to get into it in the first place? A whale-based system pretty much guarantees a product that's as widely accessible as possible. Of course, it has its own massive ethical issues; I am no fan of the practice. (Not least because the people spending the most money aren't always the ones who can afford to spend that much!) But it does neatly invert the dynamic and uses the top 1% of spenders to finance something primarily enjoyed by the 99% who spend little to nothing.
- bsder 9y ago
  Clash of Clans used to have an enormous Arabic contingent with the high-end upgrades. I once calculated what it took to have a fully upgraded base within a week (New Level 11--if I remember correctly ...) and it was something like over a million dollars. And there were multiple fully upgraded bases within a week. Now that's a whale. o_O!
  - dummyfunnytoo 9y ago
    I'm not sure about Clash but there are often game mechanics that kick in to heavily multiply your rewards. Spending $X gets you Y in game value but spending $2X gets you 5Y. And then it can compound with follow up offers targeted at the player/whale which may not be generally available. So I don't doubt your figures but there's probably a "one week whale" trajectory that's built into it to give quick gratification for something like $250,000. Still seems outrageous but they can discount digital goods differently than retailers can.
- brandmeyer 9y ago
  > but financed by a small rich minority I'm not at all convinced of this. Considering that much the properties of the game that land such whales are based on triggering addictive behavior, it seems much more likely that the whales' income profile is similar to that of a lotto ticker purchaser in the US: relatively poor people.
elihu 9y ago
Are the whales actually the elites? > "But Zynga’s big spenders really live up to their reputations. Customers in the top 20 percent spent an average of $571 in 2016, and customers in the top 1 percent spent more than $4,000 each! (This means, at Zynga, WI80=30x and WI99=49x.)" I don't play Farmville and maybe I just don't get it, but I can't imagine normal people spending that kind of money on an online game (even if they are rich), unless there's some kind of addiction involved. If someone told me that the top 1% of slot machine players (by amount spent) spent an average of $4,000 each per year, I wouldn't say "boy, they must be loaded to be able to afford that kind of cash", I would say "I think they have a gambling problem and many of them are probably spending money they can't afford." Zynga isn't necessarily responsible for their users financial decisions, but it's kind of a different situation if they're catering to the elite vs exploiting psychology to extract money from people who make make poor financial decisions. I don't know anything about Zynga's practices and don't have an opinion one way or another, but I found the dollar amounts kind of surprising and potentially alarming.
- Retra 9y ago
  It's not hard to imagine spending that kind of money. Lots of people spend comparable amounts on alcohol, sporting events, concerts, tools, car mods, computers, collectables, board games, clothes, jewelry, gambling, whatever. > exploiting psychology to extract money from people who make make poor financial decisions. I've no love for Zynga and their shitty practices, but you could make the same criticism of people who have children. People will spend whatever they've got to be happy. $4000 per year is not an alarming amount unless you're ruining lives to pay it.
  - retsibsi 9y ago
    There is a big difference between feeding an addiction and spending money on things that make you happy.
    - roarktoohey 9y ago
      Is there?
frik 9y ago
Not too long ago there were casinos and gambling for whales, there were offline board/card games, there were video games. Then Facebook with FarmVille (2011) came along, and introduced Free2Play aka Pay2Win to everyone. You had to spam friends (exponential scale) with requests to advance OR pay real money - this was for whales. Since FarmVille (2011) we saw a whole sub-market of Free2Play (most are Pay2Win after a few hours) gambling games, that is based on gamification, gambling and other casino elements and relies on "addicted players" aka whales. In 2017 this Free2Play crap swooped over to full prized boxed video games for PS4/XBox/Switch/PC. Bad greedy publisher like Warner Bros, Electronic Arts and Ubisoft risked bad PR and shy away decade long core gamers to earn more from 1% whales - Assassin's Creed Origins, Middle-earth: Shadow of War, Star Wars Battlefront 2, Need for Speed Payback - known for Free2Play/Pay2Win elements like microtransactions and loot boxes. It saddens one, reading between the lines the PR news from Ubisoft yesterday, they are pushing back all three mayor releases a few months, because Assassin's Creed Origin was so successful - to add such Free2Play mechanics now also to Far Cry 5, The Crew 2 and other games?! There are still several great publisher like Bethesda that release boxed games for 99% core gamers, with proper & great hours long single player gameplay, and NO greedy crap.
- Noos 9y ago
  To be fair, this happened because games themselves couldn't raise their prices with the times. They've actually decreased in price from the SNES days; Final Fantasy 3 cost $80, for one. meanwhile the cost of everything has increased. Games can't work well at a base price of $100, so they try to pass the costs along piecemeal. Something has to give.
  - frik 9y ago
    In reality games cost already $160 not $69!! Gold premium pre-order special edition version plus season pass or seperate DLCs means $160 or even more. On top of $160 you really think it's fair that one should pay even more for microtransactions and lootboxes!? Only whales are happy with that. The big mass of gamers is getting angry and is looking for pitchforks. There are publishers that release e.g. Witcher 3 with no DRM, and free DLCs for $60 and got very rich doing so. Or Grand Theft Auto V which is very successful already if you just count the singleplayer sales. It's all about the video game and its quality.

knieveltech 9y ago

You denounce the logical conclusion of the system you claim to support.

stillhere 9y ago

This already exists. One example is luxury brands. A middle class person might infrequently buy something from a luxury clothing boutique as a gift whereas Ivanka Trump might shop for clothes there regularly. I'd wager that the more expensive a good or service is, the more important it is that the business cozy up to the the wealthier customers (the whales).

neolefty 9y ago

Interesting. I feel both ways about it. On the one hand, if those scraps are enough to live on (and educate my children and so on), it's fine with me because it's enough. On the other hand, the economy as a whole is so much healthier with vigorous participation by the 99%. But maybe that's all a fallacy -- if the economy truly becomes driven by the 1%, then maybe there can't be enough for the 99%?

whatshisface 9y ago
I doubt we will ever see productivity concentrated in the aristocrat class: people are too lazy, and after a couple of generations it falls down between either a society that encourages rent or a family that isn't rich anymore. However, if when you say "the economy becomes driven by the 1%" you mean "the economy reaches a point where it is funded entirely by the 1%," then I have an interesting thought experiment for you: You may not know this, but I am the richest man in the world. All economic activity is technically mine, carried out by stewards of my capital. However, I have decided that the most humanitarian approach to this massive responsibility is to let things run their course - I am comfortable on a meager living, so I take no interest. It's not like someone is going to replace me: after all, everyone in the world simply manages my funds, and does their best to earn the right to manage more. Now, my brother on the other hand - he's a notorious criminal. He owns nothing rightfully, but his famous heists have resulted in a 3% annual decrease in the value of every bank account in the world; and even worse, the multitude of shots fired in the ensuing high-speed chases have done the same to essentially every asset. Congress has decided to close the loopholes my brother has been using to escape justice, but they're fine with me.
- mulmen 9y ago
  I don't follow. Why shouldn't the government lock up a criminal that does so much damage? And what does it have to do with you? Does it matter that he is your brother? Are we supposed to judge you by his actions? Are you saying we are lucky to have a benevolent dictator such as yourself?
  - whatshisface 9y ago
    I've essentially presented the argument that gets you from either historical materialism or utilitarianism to communism/socialism. Here's the rest, laid out more explicitly: .1 If my brother and I were one person, it would go from illegal to legal but nobody's balance sheets would change. .2A (use this one if you like historical materialism) Laws and ethical notions are constructed because of balance sheets. Why, then, don't we change the law so that the apparently arbitrary distinction goes away? .2B (use this one if you like utilitarianism) There's no basis for law beyond utility, and it's obvious that both cases have the same result. Therefore, there's no basis for a legal distinction. I've never figured how to get out of this argument, except by making private property a fundamental right. That sounds a lot like objectivism, though.
mulmen 9y ago
If that's the case why would the 99% allow such an economy to be built?
- AlexandrB 9y ago
  > If that's the case why would the 99% allow such an economy to be built? Allow? I'm pretty sure they don't need to allow anything. Media is becoming more potent at manipulating public opinion and the politician with the most donations can afford the best media. Whether his/her actual policies are in the material interest of the 99% voter is irrelevant. Just note how much of the most recent election hinged on social signifiers instead of economic policy.
  - mulmen 9y ago
    If the 99% don't have any power why would manipulating their opinions be worthwhile?
r00fus 9y ago
> On the one hand, if those scraps are enough to live on (and educate my children and so on), it's fine with me because it's enough. That's a pretty sad state of affairs though. Constant "revenue optimization" means it's almost guaranteed that scraps will be less as time goes by. I mean, rich folks can always want more, no? The issue isn't with "we have scraps" but the 1% focusing on the 1% and that if you don't have an economic voice, you will eventually lose all of your remaining scraps and your rights (e.g. Native Americans, Palestinians, etc). Now you just have to add in privatized military and drone/AI based policing and it starts to look a lot like dystopia.

olalonde 9y ago

Another perspective is that the 1% is subsidising the 99%. This is something anti-ad people often fail to consider.

CaptSpify 9y ago
Or rather: It's that our economic models are so poor, that we need to use poor monetization techniques to make up for it.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

mulmen 9y ago

Yeah I don't take such a generous view of it. In my opinion a person can work hard and make money in the millions in a lifetime. That can be done by penny pinching and good old fashioned hard work and bootstraps. But a billion dollars? Ten billion? You can't get there without stepping on someones neck. The fact we even have elites means someone's getting screwed. Eat the rich.

xtreme 9y ago
Assuming this not a sarcastic comment, whose necks did the "Bitcoin billionaires" step on?
- tomlor 9y ago
  The people buying Bitcoins now?
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  The environment, if the reports of the electricity usage of BTC are accurate.
  - smt88 9y ago
    This is very similar to mineral mining in the physical world: a small number of people create immense wealth while leaving huge costs of environmental destruction to the rest of us.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  There is a good chance that they will be stepping on the necks of the people who are buying Bitcoin now. Bitcoin is still a zero sum game.
- googletazer 9y ago
  Its more along the lines of - whose tea and coffee did they pour salt in? Its incredible that for a tech related site like HackerNews so many here are salty about people getting wealthy off technology.
9y ago

matz1 9y ago

But there are seemingly many area where you can be the 1%. The difficulty is finding that area where you can be the 1%.

dpweb 9y ago

Most people don't mind the elites having tons of money, which is one of the reasons why they do. There is not a ton of outrage about inequality. Orthodox capitalism would say its just. But, capitalism is to serve the well being of society, not the other way around, and it is possible to preserve the idea of a person compensated according to their contribution/work while maintaining a certain level of fairness for all. That fairness can be measured by the inequality/wealth gap. Its been growing worldwide since 1980, except for Russia, nowhere faster than in the US. This is not a political argument its a fact. Also, much of the political debate falls short. Its already accepted that govt should redistribute, to compensate for capital inherent advantage over labor, after all the us income tax is a progressive tax. For instance, taxing incomes higher than cap gains results in increased inequality. Sure you can argue that's a hypothesis, but as far as hypotheses go, it doesn't boggle the mind. Whats the plan? Lower corp rates, leave middle income rates essentially unchanged. Add in the new economy where people are less needed. Expect more inequality for the time being. Btw, UBI is a lousy approach to solve this. You don't compensate people to not work. That brings inflation which is very bad. You correct for the imbalances of the rich feeding off the lower income groups in the tax code.

eddieplan9 9y ago

Interestingly, the IRS has a WI80 of 22.6, higher than all the industry averages listed in the article except gaming: the 1% pays 50% of the income taxes, and the top 20% pays 85% [1] [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/13/top-1-pay-nearly-half-of-federal-income-taxes.html https://www.cnbc.com/2015/04/13/top-1-pay-nearly-half-of-fed...

jhayward 9y ago
What do you conclude from that, and what do you conclude from studying, say, 1950, when the top federal income tax rate was over 90%? My point in asking is this: quoting statistics such as the above is often a 'push poll' type situation, trying to suggest a particular conclusion, often by idealogues. Interpreting that information requires a whole lot of other information and the conclusions to be drawn are not what one might initially assume.

justrobert 9y ago

The mobile space is built around whales. A recent mobile linage game came out, and it is the ultimate gacha (spend to gamble for random chance of results) game. Those that spent at least $5000 were at the top in no time. To be in the top 500 you had to spend over $200. It is sad to see the industry this way, but there are people willing to pay so the market exists.

BearGoesChirp 9y ago

As long as the rest of people are spending money, some part of the industry will still target them. In video games, for all the games that chase the whales, there are still many games that don't. As long as there is money to be made, someone will go chasing it. While I have concerns about chasing whales, this is not one of them.

AlexandrB 9y ago

> This is one thing I'm terrified of going forward: industries being built by the 1% for the 1% and to Hell what the rest of us proles want. That's an interesting hidden pitfall of increasing income inequality and wealth concentration. Companies like Coca Cola got huge because their target market was basically every American - rich or poor. If income inequality continues to rise a more profitable strategy might be selling very expensive beverages to the wealthy instead, leaving the poor underserved. This is already happening with prestige, "health" beverages like cold-pressed juice and Kombucha.

tikhonj 9y ago

I think the games in question are actually the opposite of that: they are played by millions and millions of people, often for free, but financed by a small, rich minority. It is super aggressive price discrimination, which actually benefits the 99%—we get something cheaper (or even free with F2P games) because other people are willing to pay so much. In a very real sense, the F2P business model only really works if the game is popular amount non-paying customers—otherwise, what would motivate whales to get into it in the first place? A whale-based system pretty much guarantees a product that's as widely accessible as possible. Of course, it has its own massive ethical issues; I am no fan of the practice. (Not least because the people spending the most money aren't always the ones who can afford to spend that much!) But it does neatly invert the dynamic and uses the top 1% of spenders to finance something primarily enjoyed by the 99% who spend little to nothing.

bsder 9y ago
Clash of Clans used to have an enormous Arabic contingent with the high-end upgrades. I once calculated what it took to have a fully upgraded base within a week (New Level 11--if I remember correctly ...) and it was something like over a million dollars. And there were multiple fully upgraded bases within a week. Now that's a whale. o_O!
- dummyfunnytoo 9y ago
  I'm not sure about Clash but there are often game mechanics that kick in to heavily multiply your rewards. Spending $X gets you Y in game value but spending $2X gets you 5Y. And then it can compound with follow up offers targeted at the player/whale which may not be generally available. So I don't doubt your figures but there's probably a "one week whale" trajectory that's built into it to give quick gratification for something like $250,000. Still seems outrageous but they can discount digital goods differently than retailers can.
brandmeyer 9y ago
> but financed by a small rich minority I'm not at all convinced of this. Considering that much the properties of the game that land such whales are based on triggering addictive behavior, it seems much more likely that the whales' income profile is similar to that of a lotto ticker purchaser in the US: relatively poor people.

elihu 9y ago

Are the whales actually the elites? > "But Zynga’s big spenders really live up to their reputations. Customers in the top 20 percent spent an average of $571 in 2016, and customers in the top 1 percent spent more than $4,000 each! (This means, at Zynga, WI80=30x and WI99=49x.)" I don't play Farmville and maybe I just don't get it, but I can't imagine normal people spending that kind of money on an online game (even if they are rich), unless there's some kind of addiction involved. If someone told me that the top 1% of slot machine players (by amount spent) spent an average of $4,000 each per year, I wouldn't say "boy, they must be loaded to be able to afford that kind of cash", I would say "I think they have a gambling problem and many of them are probably spending money they can't afford." Zynga isn't necessarily responsible for their users financial decisions, but it's kind of a different situation if they're catering to the elite vs exploiting psychology to extract money from people who make make poor financial decisions. I don't know anything about Zynga's practices and don't have an opinion one way or another, but I found the dollar amounts kind of surprising and potentially alarming.

Retra 9y ago
It's not hard to imagine spending that kind of money. Lots of people spend comparable amounts on alcohol, sporting events, concerts, tools, car mods, computers, collectables, board games, clothes, jewelry, gambling, whatever. > exploiting psychology to extract money from people who make make poor financial decisions. I've no love for Zynga and their shitty practices, but you could make the same criticism of people who have children. People will spend whatever they've got to be happy. $4000 per year is not an alarming amount unless you're ruining lives to pay it.
- retsibsi 9y ago
  There is a big difference between feeding an addiction and spending money on things that make you happy.
  - roarktoohey 9y ago
    Is there?

frik 9y ago

Not too long ago there were casinos and gambling for whales, there were offline board/card games, there were video games. Then Facebook with FarmVille (2011) came along, and introduced Free2Play aka Pay2Win to everyone. You had to spam friends (exponential scale) with requests to advance OR pay real money - this was for whales. Since FarmVille (2011) we saw a whole sub-market of Free2Play (most are Pay2Win after a few hours) gambling games, that is based on gamification, gambling and other casino elements and relies on "addicted players" aka whales. In 2017 this Free2Play crap swooped over to full prized boxed video games for PS4/XBox/Switch/PC. Bad greedy publisher like Warner Bros, Electronic Arts and Ubisoft risked bad PR and shy away decade long core gamers to earn more from 1% whales - Assassin's Creed Origins, Middle-earth: Shadow of War, Star Wars Battlefront 2, Need for Speed Payback - known for Free2Play/Pay2Win elements like microtransactions and loot boxes. It saddens one, reading between the lines the PR news from Ubisoft yesterday, they are pushing back all three mayor releases a few months, because Assassin's Creed Origin was so successful - to add such Free2Play mechanics now also to Far Cry 5, The Crew 2 and other games?! There are still several great publisher like Bethesda that release boxed games for 99% core gamers, with proper & great hours long single player gameplay, and NO greedy crap.

Noos 9y ago
To be fair, this happened because games themselves couldn't raise their prices with the times. They've actually decreased in price from the SNES days; Final Fantasy 3 cost $80, for one. meanwhile the cost of everything has increased. Games can't work well at a base price of $100, so they try to pass the costs along piecemeal. Something has to give.
- frik 9y ago
  In reality games cost already $160 not $69!! Gold premium pre-order special edition version plus season pass or seperate DLCs means $160 or even more. On top of $160 you really think it's fair that one should pay even more for microtransactions and lootboxes!? Only whales are happy with that. The big mass of gamers is getting angry and is looking for pitchforks. There are publishers that release e.g. Witcher 3 with no DRM, and free DLCs for $60 and got very rich doing so. Or Grand Theft Auto V which is very successful already if you just count the singleplayer sales. It's all about the video game and its quality.