4 ms·

I just gave in and spent $2 on a minecraft extension that my kids wanted. The whales here are a segment of the kids/teens (and their parents)

tristor 4y ago
$2 spent does not make you a "whale". I don't have any great links off-hand, but in-depth analysis has been done on this topic with other cash-shop games and the reality is that the majority of revenue comes from a very small proportion of the user base. It's beyond Pareto. I have also been a "whale" in my past playing a Korean cash-shop MMO, where I spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $10k over 2 years, compared to the average person spending roughly what a subscription to WoW would cost ($15/mo, or $360 over the same time period). "Whales" spend an order of magnitude or more than the average user in the user base. In Roblox it's obvious from this article how this plays out. People betting $10k USD per pull in a virtual casino, or laundering money, or giving hundreds of USD to children for sexual acts, are spending massively more than parents enabling their children to spend $5/mo on in-game items. Because from the perspective of the companies the revenue is recognized when the in-game currency is purchased, not when it is utilized. E.g. if you buy $10k USD worth of Robux, it doesn't matter to them whether you buy the equivalent amount of in-game items or not, they've already gotten your money and turned over to you the virtual/in-tangible item you paid for. Mobile games in particular manipulate people who are susceptible to this paradigm, which is one reason I personally don't play these games, because I know that I am susceptible to this form of manipulation. I have online gaming friends that I am aware of who spent tens of thousands of dollars on mobile games, the gacha game genre (Genshin Impact for example) is particularly onerous here. Roblox is taking this mechanism, applying it to children, and using it to empower adults to commercialize the sexual exploitation of those children in a secondary and tertiary market built on their platform. This is pretty blatant.
mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
I'm sure lots of parents would reluctantly spend 2$ on an in-game purchase here and there, but that's not really a whale. To be a whale we're talking tens or even hundreds of dollars per day. Think of people getting addicted to those time restricted pay2win clicker games and impulsively buying in-game currency in dribs and drabs until they've spent a pathological amount of money. GP is arguing that for Roblox, the whales are the pedophiles. Indeed pedophiles tend to be prone to addiction to predation or to hoarding porn. And they will similarly end up with out of control spending to groom more and more kids.

tristor 4y ago

$2 spent does not make you a "whale". I don't have any great links off-hand, but in-depth analysis has been done on this topic with other cash-shop games and the reality is that the majority of revenue comes from a very small proportion of the user base. It's beyond Pareto. I have also been a "whale" in my past playing a Korean cash-shop MMO, where I spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $10k over 2 years, compared to the average person spending roughly what a subscription to WoW would cost ($15/mo, or $360 over the same time period). "Whales" spend an order of magnitude or more than the average user in the user base. In Roblox it's obvious from this article how this plays out. People betting $10k USD per pull in a virtual casino, or laundering money, or giving hundreds of USD to children for sexual acts, are spending massively more than parents enabling their children to spend $5/mo on in-game items. Because from the perspective of the companies the revenue is recognized when the in-game currency is purchased, not when it is utilized. E.g. if you buy $10k USD worth of Robux, it doesn't matter to them whether you buy the equivalent amount of in-game items or not, they've already gotten your money and turned over to you the virtual/in-tangible item you paid for. Mobile games in particular manipulate people who are susceptible to this paradigm, which is one reason I personally don't play these games, because I know that I am susceptible to this form of manipulation. I have online gaming friends that I am aware of who spent tens of thousands of dollars on mobile games, the gacha game genre (Genshin Impact for example) is particularly onerous here. Roblox is taking this mechanism, applying it to children, and using it to empower adults to commercialize the sexual exploitation of those children in a secondary and tertiary market built on their platform. This is pretty blatant.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago

I'm sure lots of parents would reluctantly spend 2$ on an in-game purchase here and there, but that's not really a whale. To be a whale we're talking tens or even hundreds of dollars per day. Think of people getting addicted to those time restricted pay2win clicker games and impulsively buying in-game currency in dribs and drabs until they've spent a pathological amount of money. GP is arguing that for Roblox, the whales are the pedophiles. Indeed pedophiles tend to be prone to addiction to predation or to hoarding porn. And they will similarly end up with out of control spending to groom more and more kids.