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Comment by greggman | Hacker News Reader

it concerns me how many of my friends in free to play game dev are okay with exploting whales for profit.

I go back and forth on this, because there seems to be material disagreement on whether whales are, in fact, a) folks with problems or b) folks with hobbies which are, relative to a single video game, expensive.

There is a good presentation from the CEO of Kongregate talking about this here: https://www.slideshare.net/emily_greer/dont-call-them-whales...

I share your moral intuitions about exploiting whales if whales are, in fact, little old ladies suffering from social isolation or teenagers with undiagnosed depression. But the F2P companies say that they've done the research and come to the conclusion that most of their whales are gainfully employed professionals.

That sounds... not intrinsically implausible to me? I enjoy video games, quite a bit. Games, books, and hating on Bitcoin are my hobbies, and hating on Bitcoin is cheap. I have probably sustained $100 a month on video games for ten years now, and that would frequently be concentrated on a single game for an extended while (e.g. LoL for 2 years), likely resulting in me easily hitting their whale lists.

I feel like if I'm a central example of a whale that it isn't unethical to sell me things that I like? It's not a material amount of money given my financial situation. It compares very favorably to the time commitment for my main hobby, which causes _much_ more friction than the money does. (The primary reason I don't play LoL anymore is an unpauseable 40 minute game doesn't play well with having young children.) Most external observers would categorize me under Either A Responsible Adult Or At Least Fakes It Decently Most Of The Time. Similarly well-adjusted people in my social class spend similar amounts of money on things which are not morally different than Evelynn skins, for example Hamilton tickets.

Right, but I don’t think 100/mo is quite what is considered a whale.

Just as in casino gambling, where I believe the term came from, a whale is someone who throws a few hundred to several thousand into a game in a month, possibly in a large number of smaller transactions so they don’t even realize their running total. It’s the people for whom the “10’000 rubies for 49.99” in-app currency chests are meant for.

Side story, I shortly worked for a big game company that dived into mobile games, and learnt from the market team that the most bought packages where the cheapest and the most expensive ones. The intermediary ones were nearing 0 sales.

So they kept adding new packages at higher prices until it reached about 120$ IIRC. All intermediary packages are just there to make the "best value" (read highest price) package more enticing.

I agree that a $100/month is probably on the low end for the whale category. But, I think his broader point is that there’s at least some evidence that the whales in question are, in fact, people with disposable income (i.e. middle class or better; often professionals) for whom pay-to-play games are a substitute for other equally expensive IRL hobbies that are not uncommon among people in that social strata (like, say, golf, tennis, or skiing).

I think a good benchmark is how you feel about the spending afterwards. There are many stories about people having regrets after spending a lot on addictive Candy Crush type games and swearing off them, but still relapsing to spend again and again.

I think the poster girl from the slides of 40-year old californian MMO player is artificially nice, because $7.5k for a typical Californian isn't much and the social aspect makes you think there's a human connection involved. But this is just the good-for-pr end of the whale spectrum.

(Of course the most artificial part is that she's getting paid by the industry)

It concerns me that Apple and Google are happy to take 30% of all the gambling exploitation on the markets. And looking at AppAnnie, they appear to be the largest grossing segments of their app store profits, or "increeased services growth", as Tim Cook might put it during a quarterly call.

All this while being incredibly censorious of their stores otherwise, to the point of bragging about their store curation. Political commentary is out. But gambling mechanisms aimed at children is OK. Hell, outright name your app "Big Fish Casino" or "Slotomania".

I wouldn't be surprised if some of those devs as well as other gamers just think that it's buyers fault for improperly spending money, and that it makes perfect sense as corporations exist for the maximization of profit.

It's true some responsibility does lie in the person with the wallet. But it just strikes me as odd that none of these companies are really held accountable for exploiting human behavior, specifically by gaming communities.

It's a sad fact of human nature that it's really easy for us to compromise our morals when the only person hurt by doing so is an anonymous stranger on the other side of the Internet.

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