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That there are "whales" that power a large chunk of in game spending truly suprised me. That the gaming industry uses the same word for these big spenders as Ca
by aresant 15y ago
That there are "whales" that power a large chunk of in game spending truly suprised me. That the gaming industry uses the same word for these big spenders as Casinos, given the criticisms around social gaming being akin to gambling is disturbing.
- asmithmd1 15y agoWho are these people? "we limit whales. When we were getting guys that were spending $20,000 a day in our game. (Editor’s note: Yes, we were incredulous about this figure too. But we double-checked with A Thinking Ape by e-mail on this and they said $20,000, as in real – not virtual – currency.)"
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- CaveTech 15y agoThese people do exist. I used to play MMO's a lot more than I'd like to admit, and during the time I probably went through ~5k selling game items for real money and vice versa and personally dealt with some "whales". I can think of about 20 people who I knew from in game who spent sums in the range of 10-20k. I'm sure there's people who spent much more but I didn't ever talk to them directly.
- asmithmd1 15y agoI can understand spending that over the life of a game - but $20k every day? If they played 100 times a year - playing just twice a week - that would be over $2M per year. That is probably more than Charlie Sheen spends on hookers - I am sorry but I just can't believe it. What could they possibly be spending it on?
- signalsignal 15y agoI would assume for items which have a resale value that this is a form of money laundering.
- sbov 15y agoNote that this isn't specific to iOS. Back 3 years ago when I went to a lot of social network conferences a common theme among companies that monetized through virtual goods talked about said whales too. Really, its less the social gaming, and more a feature of multiplayer. I know multiplayer is social, but people don't usually label things like WoW, battlefield 3, diablo 2, etc, a "social game" - social games usually refer to multiplayer games with thin gameplay. However, I have seen a few indie WoW-like MMOs with virtual goods that also have whales, which tends to make me believe its more an aspect of multiplayer+virtual goods.