> "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.