A Man Who Has Spent $70k Playing a Mobile Game [video] (2018) | Hacker News Reader

A Man Who Has Spent $70k Playing a Mobile Game [video] (2018)

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12 pointsBluestein9 comments

That's nothing.

In the community of the mobile game Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes you are not even a proper whale if you have not spent six figures.

Unsurprisingly the game has generated over a billion dollars of revenue by now.

"‘Genshin Impact’ Is Making A Billion Dollars Every Six Months On Mobile Alone" (https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2022/05/05/genshin-im...)

It's astonishing that these games haven't been regulated the same way gambling is yet.

Genshin has 50-60 million monthly average users. That works out to something like $40 per player per year on average. Most players are F2P or just buy the $10 battle passes, rather than spending hundreds of dollars on the gatcha system.

The average is meaningless in F2P. If you look around online, it's well established in the games development industry that 70-90% of players in F2P games never spend anything and, of the small percentage who do, only a few percent of that 10-30% constitute the majority of revenue. It is absolutely all about whales and their gambling addiction.

... or tobacco, given the addictive component.-

What I don't understand is why. Like, I get the skinner box gambling etc involved. But if you're willing to drop six figures on a game, you could pay an indie to make a game literally just for you, however you want, with whatever star wars characters or lore or pick your universe.

Classic build vs. buy dilemma: Six figures (i.e. up to USD $999,999) doesn't buy that much man-hours split between coding, game design, music and sound effects, artwork, voice acting, etc. It certainly doesn't cover those plus licensing for a franchise like Star Wars or, in this case, the Nasuverse. Nor does it guarantee that the end result is something that the buyer would like, as demonstrated by many Kickstarter disappointments.

True. But it be "populated" by only you, or a few.-

There's a social component here.-

PS. Also, keep in mind this is cumulative. I am sure there's a bareky perceptible - and, I am sure calculated to death - threshold below which the spending is kept, as per gameplay, so as to boil you to death ever so gradually, like a helpless frog.-

> six figures

Six figures!

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