13 ms·

Was listening to Ben Evan's podcast earlier today and he had a stat from the Apple / Epic trial that shook me a bit - in a given month in 2016 something like 0.

• dvt 5y ago
  > This is basically addicts gambling. A bit tangential, but there is some serious cognitive dissonance here on HN (and more broadly in the tech world in general). When Apple/Google does this -- facilitates some kind of arguably degenerate behavior -- it's "evil." But when OnlyFans does it -- sex addicts, lonely guys, social weirdos that need friends collectively spend millions of dollars on parasocial fake OnlyFans relationships -- this "empowers sex workers."
  • makeva 5y ago
    I think you are making a connection that I can't find. Care to elaborate?
    • hengri 5y ago
      Could be that HN is more inclined to use OF than play mobile games heh
  • jjulius 5y ago
    FWIW, I've seen many discussions about how OF's biggest spenders are people like that in many OF-related threads on HN.
  • paulddraper 5y ago
    I've seen equal criticism of both.
  • mattnewton 5y ago
    Lots of different people on HN, I don’t know that the same people have both those beliefs, it could just be the people with the strongest beliefs express those on each topic
  • patmcc 5y ago
    It's both, of course - the app stores empower developers, OnlyFans empowers sex workers, both take advantage of a small subset of consumers. Just like there are whales playing Genshin Impact, with a whole lot of people paying nothing/a tiny amount, there are lots of people ogling Amouranth for free on Twitch/youtube/whatever, with a tiny percentage spending way too much on OnlyFans.
  • fragmede 5y ago
    It's almost as if one of those is a relatively small platform whos creators are almost exclusively young women, and the others are two of the largest, richest conglomerates in the world, who's creators are software development houses, (software development is a well-paying career) and that there's some sort of difference between the two groups. Hm.
    • EvilEy3 5y ago
      Except two of the largest, richest conglomerates also provide value outside of the said degenerate activities.
      • stouset 5y ago
        What exactly makes consumption of porn—or, alternatively, compensating women for the production of porn—a “degenerate activity”?
        • thegrimmest 5y ago
          Id's say "degenerate" is a catch-all for any activity which produces a supernormal stimulus, far in excess of what our Neolithic biology would be prepared for. Excess food, drugs, sexual novelty, and gambling all fall into this category.
          • stouset 5y ago
            You could certainly describe excess consumption of food, drugs, and/or sexual novelty as degenerate behavior. But GP appears to simply be referring to either consumption of or payment for pornography as a degenerate activity.
            • thegrimmest 5y ago
              The argument is any modern pronography represents an excess in sexual novelty compared to the baseline.
  • rootsudo 5y ago
    Agree 100% -- So, how do you control optics? Large marketing dept? Positive PR? Buy positivity? or has the world really changed?
  • pixelatedindex 5y ago
    The difference is who this money goes to. In the gambling/iOS whales scenario many people are paying one big mega Corp. At least the social weirdos are paying the content creator directly.
  • tolmasky 5y ago
    Although it may seem counter-intuitive, the fact that the behavior on OnlyFans is so transparently "degenerate" makes it somewhat immune to that sort of criticism. Everyone knows what people go there for. The problem with Apple is that it holds up the AppStore as a pinnacle of morality (many of their AppStore rules are specifically around creating the perception of a moral store, such as no porn), and Apple the company itself portrays itself as a moral company, but then at the end of the day they are making the majority of the AppStore's money on a vice like any other (often times on children, as many of these games are geared towards that audience). A candy store that secretly sells cigarettes will always receive more criticism than a bar.
    • dvt 5y ago
      > A candy store that secretly sells cigarettes will always receive more criticism than a bar You make a great point that I didn't really think of! Apple definitely tries to massage their optics. Could also be why Apple's store is also more criticized than Google's, even though there's a lot more garbage on the Play Store.
      • ethbr0 5y ago
        The HN umbrage also seems to stem from the fact that Apple uses those optics to justify their monopoly over the App Store. We need absolute control over our platform -> so that we can control the user experience -> so that we can make the iPhone ecosystem a more private, secure, safe, high quality place If it turns out the reason they need absolute control is so that Apple can milk whales in the same way Zynga did... well, IMHO people are entitled to call hypocrite angrily.
        • thegrimmest 5y ago
          I personally think the fact that Apple built their platform literally from the ground up is more than sufficient justification for them to maintain as much control over it as they please. Shouldn't we all just say "Hey, thanks Apple for advancing the state of the art so tremendously far" and leave it there?
  • vineyardmike 5y ago
    > sex addicts, lonely guys, social weirdos that need friends collectively spend millions of dollars on parasocial fake OnlyFans relationships Wow this an extremely hostile take on OF. What a vapid, overly opinionated and negative view of sexuality. Do you really think that P0rn is used for lonely social weirdos that need friends? Is that a genuine take on the purpose?
    • aaaaaaaaaaab 5y ago
      Yes. Mostly yes.
    • dvt 5y ago
      > Wow this an extremely hostile take on OF. There's dozens of studies on parasocial relationships and how unhealthy they can be[1]; dozens of studies on how heavy porn consumption lowers libido and is overall not great for you[2]; and dozens of surveys on how my generation (millenials) and younger (zoomers) are more lonely, having less sex, having less friends, and less happy than previous generations. [1] https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3131&context=gradschool_theses https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5039517/#:~:text=A%202015%20study%20on%20high,less%20than%20once%20a%20week https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5039517/#:~:tex...).
      • stouset 5y ago
        > and dozens of surveys on how my generation (millenials) and younger (zoomers) are more lonely, having less sex, having less friends, and less happy than previous generations There is no causation link here. There are plenty of other massive social upheavals going on that are likely tied into this. The pandemic. Political acrimony. Impending impact of climate change. Helicopter parenting. Economic difficulties and uncertainty for younger generations. Facebook and other social media. Celebrity obsession. Abuse of addictive patterns in gaming apps. We’ve created a world where people’s real life prospects are dwindling and yet there’s cheap, easy, and unlimited access to virtual dopamine generators. While porn is certainly a contributor, I don’t see any evidence that it’s an outsized one or that it deserves to be singled out from the myriad ways we’ve ruined things for future generations. Also and more directly to the point, GP was addressing GGP categorizing porn consumers as “sex addicts, lonely guys, social weirdos”. The vast majority of the western world—including women—consume some amount of pornography. They just do it overwhelmingly in private, which is why such a stigma exists. Paying for it is not necessarily indicative of it being a problem for these people, in the same way that paying for music or other media isn’t. It’s just a changing of the norm to one that is frankly an extreme improvement for the women who do this as a profession.
  • deelowe 5y ago
    OF isn't manipulating their customer base. It's pretty clear what you're getting into when you go to their site.
    • spoonjim 5y ago
      Right but they depend on their degenerate “whales” just like anyone. There’s a big difference between going to the strip club a couple times a year with your buddies and being the guy who shows up at 11am on Tuesday with his paycheck but the strip club is happy to take all of the addict’s money.
      • deelowe 5y ago
        I guess I need more data before fully forming an opinion then. I don't care about whales who intentionally seek out certain things to blow all their money. My concern is folks getting tricked into those situations via manipulative techniques.
        • spoonjim 5y ago
          What's a manipulative technique? Is getting a guy more and more sexually aroused to separate him from his money a manipulative technique?
          • deelowe 5y ago
            I don't know precisely, but maybe we can start with building entire research teams who specialize in brain chemistry to have them create complicated engagement strategies which are inserted into "free" apps targeted at kids.
      • misnome 5y ago
        I mean, this applies to literally anything people do for leisure
      • watwut 5y ago
        I never seen degenerate to be used for mobile gaming whales. Why so much hate toward customers of OF? But like, going to strip bar with guy friends is no better in anything.
  • spoonjim 5y ago
    I think you might be under the influence of a biased set of observations. Most average Americans do not hold women who show their boobs on the Internet in high regard, and use words significantly more coarse than “sex workers” to describe them. But it’s just a subset of course of the bigger problem of the “Twitter take” often being light years away from the “average take.”
    • gowld 5y ago
      Most average Americans are hypocritical mysogynists who enjoy porn but disrespect the creators.
      • spoonjim 5y ago
        Agree.
  • johnnyanmac 5y ago
    TBF, I've heard opinions all over the spectrum for OF. Many supportive, many not so much. Sex work is pretty much as controversial as usual. Also, the idea of OF isn't that one dude spends thouands to a million dollar coporation, it's that thousands, maybe millions, spend like $10 to see curated boobs, which mostly goes to a single creator (at most. a dozen people managing their social media). I'm not a vehemently against mobile games as many parts of the internet, but it is a different dynamic altogether.
  • watwut 5y ago
    > sex addicts, lonely guys, social weirdos AFAIK, all kind of guys use and pay for porn. Not just social weirdos.
  • SCdF 5y ago
    Supporting people using OF is about supporting a safe place for sex workers, your tangent seems as you say, tangential. Para-social relationships are potentially troubling, but have nothing specifically to do with OF: they exist on YT, Twitch, insta etc.
• Mindwipe 5y ago
  > Which really did look like it was trying to avoid that. How? Apple literally did everything it could to incentivise this behaviour. It blocked upgrade pricing to incentivise in-app micropayments. It relentlessly promoted lootbox filled games ahead of discrete experiences with sensible pricing. The layout of the store was totally biased against titles without this structure. Apple 100% steered towards a whale economy in the app store, and didn't give the slightest toss about the human misery that resulted in because it made their monthly results look a bit better.
  • nvrspyx 5y ago
    I don't know why you're downvoted. It really does seem like Apple not only facilitated this, but continues to implicitly encourage it.
• kevingadd 5y ago
  I don't think the App Store looked like it was trying to prevent this. It favored low-priced titles from a very early point which led to the race to the bottom where eventually everything was 0.99, and then eventually everything was "Free" and loaded with microtransactions. They only later on added an indicator so you could tell it was "Free*" and not Free. And why would they prevent it? When a gambler spends $450, Apple gets $135.
• ec109685 5y ago
  It's those addicts that would be willing to use an alternative payment mechanism if that was made easy and there was some benefit to them. That might be why Apple is so strident here given that 54% of App Store revenue could easily vanish. Also, the number was .5%: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/7/8/app-store https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2021/7/8/app-store I'm also not sure if "addict" is the right term. If someone likes to go to a high end restaurant once a week, they'd likely be spending far more than $450 a quarter on food. Do we call them addicts even though they probably only represent .5% of the population as well? We only live once, so who are we to question how people spend their money?
  • treeman79 5y ago
    If people make there own money. Then fine whatever. If the set of gamblers has a large crossover with the set of people on welfare. Then people paying taxes have a right to be grouchy. Like watching a who Person is always out of money and gets a lot of hand outs; blow all the money on scratchers. I have a family member whom I only buy food for because every dollar I give them goes straight to scratchers. She once won big. 150 out of the 100 dollars I gave her. she then proceed to buy our kids expensive crap. Umm that was so you had food for week.
    • grogenaut 5y ago
      .5% is half of the 1% who can easily afford an expenditure like this for fun. Or if you don't go to bars 2 days a week the same for top 10% earners. I think your fitting your own narritive to these numbers with no data.
  • diebeforei485 5y ago
    High end restaurants don't use casino-style tricks (random rewards or non-rewards) to get you hooked.
    • void_mint 5y ago
      Are all businesses to be compared to high end restaurants?
• ohples 5y ago
  Its worse then gambling. When you gamble at a Casino, atleast there a chance you can win money (albit rare). With the mobile gaming pay to play inapp purchases, you never win that money back.
  • Macha 5y ago
    And even if you do win the "prize", if the casino shuts down, say goodbye to your hard won PNGs.
• ocdtrekkie 5y ago
  So pay-to-win gets a lot of bad rap, and it's not entirely unearned... but I've really come to appreciate the value of microtransactions if you're a busy working individual. In the traditional multiplayer space, the players with the best stuff and most progression are lifers. Those real addicts: The people who are online all day every day, whenever you sign in. A lot of them are kids, and I used to be one back in the day. But as a full-time employee with a wife and a kid, I can't ever compete with that. Pay-to-win games give people who work good jobs a way to compete: If I know that an item it'll take me three weeks to grind out will cost me $20 to buy outright... I make more money working in real life, so why not buy it in-game instead of wasting my time grinding.
  • eropple 5y ago
    I mean--it used to be that you bought the game and you got the stuff and you had to ladder up within the context of a single game in order to get to the good stuff. Why should grinding be rewarding at all, except to put players on an external addiction loop rather than one based on the moment-to-moment fun of the game? Counter-Strike was never my game, but during the course of a match you could ladder your way up to an AK (absolutely reasonable for most gameplay) within the first couple rounds and it was pretty difficult not to be able to get an AWP at least for a while if you wanted to. I played FireArms Half-Life and The Opera instead, where you built your loadout and everybody had access to everything, save for in FAHL specific skills that laddered up throughout a match themselves.
  • idle_zealot 5y ago
    > If I know that an item it'll take me three weeks to grind out will cost me $20 to buy outright... Why do you think that desirable item takes 3 weeks of grinding to acquire? Pay2win is bad because it incentivizes developers to make their game an annoying slog, then turn around and sell the player a solution to the problem they just created. They’re not helping you by giving you the option to pay to skip part of their game; they’re the ones responsible for the grind you’re trying to avoid.
  • Macha 5y ago
    How traditionally are we talking? Traditionally, many genres of games haven't had progression for someone to have the most of. That guy who played a billion hours of Quake, or Halo 3, or Starcraft 2 doesn't have anything you don't have. Hell even the likes of League of Legends, it doesn't take that much IP to buy any one champion the free way, and you can't buy power for that champion. I guess you could say you're paying to win by buying the strongest champion in that patch with cash each time, but honestly if you really have that little play time you're probably hurting your performance more than helping it by champion hopping that much.
• adamc 5y ago
  Came to say exactly that. It is abusive, particularly of younger players.
• void_mint 5y ago
  > Even in IOS App Store. Chuckled. "Even in". The app store is derived around squeezing whales. Apple is the best at facilitating gambling addicts dumping cash into IAP in the world. "Even in" I guess speaks to their public image.
• dec0dedab0de 5y ago
  Addiction is a real problem, but I don't think the absolute dollar amount is a good way to tell. There are some people that don't even notice $450 a month. While there are also quite a few people that spending $20 a month would be detrimental to their life.
  • Viliam1234 5y ago
    I was also thinking: what if those people are perhaps kids of super rich parents, for whom spending $450 on mobile games is nothing compared with their other expenses? How do we distinguish addicts who cannot resist spending money they can't afford to spend, from genuinely super rich people for whom any number smaller than thousand is effectively zero?
• mattknox 5y ago
  I felt that way too, but I have mostly changed my mind. My wife, who has a FT job, a purse company, and 2 kids, plays a SHOCKING amount of Maple Story. She never pays money, but at a reasonable-for-her time value of money, I'm sure she'd be well into 10s of $K/year of cost. Is that malfeasance on the developer's part? I dunno. I'd generally prefer she play less, but she is an extremely functional adult, and she gets to make her own choices. Thought experiment: if she spent 10X less time but $2K/year on the game, would that be more or less troubling? If she took that trade, she'd be an addict by your lights, but she'd be spending 10-30 min rather than 3-5h/day, and I'd be THRILLED. It's interesting to me that we are generally totally fine with something that sucks up (or alternatively, makes enjoyable) all or more-than-all of someone's free time, but we get upset when it takes even trivial amounts of their money.
  • novok 5y ago
    Does your wife sleep?
  • gowld 5y ago
    > if she spent 10X less time but $2K/year on the game, Does that matter? Is it a meaningful option? If she made that trade, she'd have free time, and there are a milion more addicting options (plenty of which are free!), so the steady state would likely be the same time spent on similar whatever, plus the $2K/year. Or, if she finds a better hobby (yay), no need to pay $2K/yr!
    • johnnyanmac 5y ago
      >Does that matter? Is it a meaningful option? depends on how you value time. Which seems to change based on age. At 14 it wouldn't matter, I'm happy spending hours grinding. Now at 27, it's much more ambivalent. >she'd have free time, and there are a milion more addicting options (plenty of which are free!), so the steady state would likely be the same time spent on similar whateve maybe, maybe not. I've had friends who quit big mmo's just play other MMO's. Some just moved to a new MMO, some moved to new hobbies. Sometimes even more expensive (oh boy, I'm SO glad I'm not a car junkie. Geez, the money and time spent on parts... not to mention the danger. ), some "productive" and even profitable (e.g. I helped give some tips to a friend learning to program and said he quit Lol, which I remember him playing pretty heavily even before college). Too broad to assume.
• sholladay 5y ago
  I spent a bit more than $100 on in-app purchases this week, simply because the apps I wanted to use were pretty limited out of the box. They are “free” unless you want the full experience. I don’t like that it is SaaS’d and gamified. Heck, I almost uninstalled Tetris when I found out they wanted a subscription to permanently remove ads, which I’ll never do for such a simple game. But my point is that it’s normal these days to spend $15-$30 per app, which isn’t necessarily unreasonable, it’s just done after download. The industry has essentially shifted to an unlimited free trial model. Though, the devil is in the details and it’s more devious than that.
• patorjk 5y ago
  A couple of years ago, when I was playing Pokemon Go daily, I showed up to a raid with my son. I started chatting with some of the other people there and one guy mentioned that his monthly budget for the game was $100. Another guy chimed in to concur. It was kind of eye opening. I had been wondering how the game could be free, and it was at that moment that I realized that the game was mostly paid for by hard core players who were spending to level up faster and get rarer Pokemon (through buying incubators for eggs and such). Pokemon Go doesn't really have a gambling aspect to it though, so I can't fault it in that area, nor am I really sure their model is a problem - since the people spending the money are choosing to do so for their own entertainment. It does feel a bit odd though, and ultimately it did hurt the experience of the game (since you do better if you pay more).
  • ddlutz 5y ago
    I argue it has a hidden gambling aspect with raids. Most of the desirable pokemon comes from raids, and of course you want desirable stats. There are about 3 levels of gambling here that get people hooked in: 1. Catching the pokemon at all. There is only a probability with each throw that the ball catches the pokemon 2. Getting good stats. It's easy to get mediocre stats from the raid pokemon, which are randomly generated and not known unitl catch time. 3. Getting a shiny. It's something like a 5% chance from a raid that the pokemon will be shiny. And of course you don't know until after you spend your raid pass. Niantic gives you only 1 free raid pass a day, so in order to get more chances at shinies and good stat pokemon you need to spend money.
    • patorjk 5y ago
      These are really good points, I'd forgotten about the shinnies and the stats. I was always less concerned with stats because I would usually get one that was good enough. However, I knew people that had to get the latest shiny when it came out. Some of the shinnies would only appear in eggs too, so you would need to hatch a lot to have a good chance of getting one. Thinking about it more, the game definitely does seem to have some hidden gambling aspects in it.
      • 5y ago
• somehnacct3757 5y ago
  As someone who used to build f2p games, it's not addicts gambling. It's very rich people who don't even think about the sums of money a f2p game is designed around. At $BigF2PCo we even set up a wire payment system for these players and direct chat with customer support and the development team. They expect a white glove level of service. Game addicts can exist at any monetization level. Governments have been passing laws to further regulate f2p and protect those players. Total money spent is not a reliable way to identify them.
  • jungturk 5y ago
    While not to that extent - I play Hearthstone (poorly) via the app store but have enough disposable income to buy packs to get the good cards when they're released so that I can play the game and enjoy it. Now this only adds up to dozens of dollars per release, but I suppose that puts me above $150/year, which feels to me like a reasonable level of support for the company to continue to offer a product I want.
• duped 5y ago
  It reminds me more of alcohol purchases where the top 10% of drinkers (aka alcoholics) account for more than half of all alcohol sales in the United States.
• SCdF 5y ago
  These stats are similar to but much more extreme than alcohol, where the vast majority (~90%) of sales go to a tiny minority (~10%) of "consumers", aka alcoholics. I wonder how many industries have the facade of normality but are propped up by this kind of ugly secret.
• teaearlgraycold 5y ago
  Wouldn't that count things like ordering coffee in an app? I spend perhaps far too much money on coffee ordered through my iPhone. That's an in-app purchase, right?
  • jay_kyburz 5y ago
    Are Apple taking 30% of your coffee purchase? Wow.
    • teaearlgraycold 5y ago
      I would guess in this case it's just normal merchant fees (no larger than 5%). But I don't know how this all breaks down. It's not like they take 30% when you use Apple Pay at a store. Ordering coffee in an app seems more like an extension of that.
• bullfightonmars 5y ago
  This isn’t just from gaming apps and gambling though. I purchase all of my media via the itunes, pay for streaming subscriptions, icloud, and sometimes subscribe to premium productivity apps. In my household this has approached $300/mo at the highest, but is typically around $80-100/mo. That is all without a single in app purchase in a game.
• bentlegen 5y ago
  My father died recently in his early 80s, and I took possession of his iPhone and audited its contents. He had several active subscriptions to official-sounding apps like “Find my iPhone Pro+”, some of which charged $200+ a year. I think this is where some of those numbers come from. There is a whole industry of knockoff apps designed to deceive the tech-illiterate, and Apple seems like they don’t give a shit - even when these apps seem to be violating Apple’s trademarks - perhaps because at the end of the day they take home 30% of that. Aside, as long as these apps continue to operate on the app store and grift seniors, I will never buy Apple’s “this walled garden is to protect users” argument.
  • tshaddox 5y ago
    This is exactly why I tend to profoundly disagree with a lot of people in tech who very strongly advocate that Apple should be less restrictive in what software can be in the App Store and what software can be installed on iPhones.
  • finfinfin 5y ago
    It’s especially infuriating because it seems like that’s an easy problem to solve. It’s unreasonable to allow subscriptions above $50 a year. And if developers do insist on a higher price, then Apple could audit them.
    • mdoms 5y ago
      My Netflix subscription is upwards of $200/year and that's one of the cheaper ones. MotoGP Videopass is something north of $300, Microsoft Gamepass is somewhere in the triple figures. I don't own an iPhone so none of mine go through Apple but my point is there are any number of legitimate subscriptions well above your arbitrary figure.
      • finfinfin 5y ago
        Valid point. I think higher price subscriptions could be manually reviewed by Apple to prevent abuse.
• rahimnathwani 5y ago
  In a given quarter, 0.5% had spent 450 USD or more (i.e. an average of 150+ per month). (Note - this is isn't necessarily the same 0.5% each quarter, so it doesn't mean that 0.5% of app store users are spending at least 1800 per year.)
• rapind 5y ago
  In gaming they are called “whales” and they are actively targeted. https://youtu.be/xNjI03CGkb4 https://youtu.be/xNjI03CGkb4
• easygenes 5y ago
  With the design of the search and the choice of titles that they push on the App Store editorially, I don't think it looks like they're trying to avoid gambling-type behavior at all. If they were responsible about it they would allow you to set preferences to filter out titles which have IAP. Also it would be granular; you could configure so you can see or not: 1) Titles which have one-time IAP for permanent feature unlocks. 2) Titles which have set-price recurring subscription IAP. 3) These are the evil ones (not universally so, but unbridled they are. I agree with the general conclusion of Kongregate's CEO as summarized in the article linked for this overarching discussion.) These should even have some sort of account lock-out that's harder to override available: Titles which have some sort of endless in-app currency. For those last ones, it would also be responsible of them to have it so you can setup with an account-level monthly budget which has, say, a 24-hour minimum cooldown to override. Otherwise, yes, they are basically encouraging addiction just like casinos and probably ought to be regulated as such since they're not self-policing at all.
  • easygenes 5y ago
    Also, I think there's something to be said for scale and context when it comes to regulation of this sort of marketing. Another poster here put it quite succinctly saying, I'm paraphrasing, "You don't expect them selling guns at the candy store." So the App Store is something which a large subset of the global population has shoved in it's face, just for having a phone; which society expects of them. It's not people seeking out a "gambling-type" experience. There's a greater onus of care to be a responsible player. I guess then they'd sell less of the self-help and counseling apps on the store too though.
  • easygenes 5y ago
    Another thing which would be a responsible play by Apple: For those unlimited-in-app-currency purchases, have a no-questions-asked automatic refund process which is available for 30 days after purchase and causes the app to be either permanently removed from your library or made unavailable for reinstall for a minimum of 90 days (and perhaps all other apps with unlimited in-app currency). This would show Apple's commitment to avoiding encouraging regrettable addictive behavior on their platform.
  • 5y ago
• crossroadsguy 5y ago
  A friend worked for a company that has games where you farm in villas and say words to friends. He said in those games sometimes for months product managers would be focused on certain users (often 1-3 users) rather than the larger audience. He said there was an old lady who was somehow spending 5 digits dollars a month on their platform and he was kinda the dedicated developer for to her for quite some time. Features were built keeping just that user or few users in mind. Specific plot changes were added, resource changes - sometimes across games where this user would play. He said pricing of purchases were also changed for that specific customer compared to others. (This is the gist. It’s been some time so I don’t recall exact details)
  • thevagrant 5y ago
    Honest question. Is that legal? To follow a particular user around and ramp up prices targeting them? It seems unethical. I wonder if certain juridictions have laws that companies are breaking here.
    • colinmhayes 5y ago
      Price discrimination is a legitimate and important part of any business.
• alasdair_ 5y ago
  Addicts, or simply that 0.05% of iphone users are likely multimillionaires and this is just normal spending for them.
• deleted 5y ago
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