When I was younger I had both aesthetic disgust and strong moral intuitions against monetization being driven by whales. These days, am far less sure of both.

One of the claims which Kongegate’s CEO made, repeatedly, in presentations is that they actually got their whales on the phone and they were simply professionals who liked to spend money on their hobby. That has become increasingly plausible to me as I’ve grown older and have more money than time.

I spent $X00 on Genshin in something like 6 weeks. I quit because of the time “commitment” and because I had gotten through most of the interesting bits, but if I had kept up habits, I would have played less than typical American watches TV and spent $X,000 a year. Which… does not strike me as unreasonable for what would have been my main hobby, given comparables like e.g. golf.

It’s a great game in a lot of ways. I don’t regret either time played or money spent. (The first one would have been untrue in a year, hence stopping.)

While some whales are definitely high-earning professionals who can afford it, not all of them are. I'd be curious to see research on what the split is. It's hard not to notice, however, that gacha games heavily rely on the same kind of skinner-box gambling systems as actual gambling uses with little of the regulation around payouts, transparency, and age restrictions. People who have problems with gambling, report having problems with gacha as well. See also this video of some testimonials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S-DGTBZU14

> That has become increasingly plausible to me as I’ve grown older and have more money than time.

Indeed.

I'd rather spend $60 on a 20h game I love than spend $0.01 on a game that doesn't require it. I don't understand whales, but I definitely don't understand people paying for cosmetic things in a game either.

I find paying for cosmetic things in a video game disgusting. They used to be a reward for playing and enjoying the game, something that would be part of the experience, allowing you to customize your play. Now I'm supposed to pay $15 to make my gun a different color?

Some people say it's to "pay for server costs blah blah blah" but one look at Epic or EA's balance sheet will show you how bullshit that is

This view doesn't make much sense to me. Epic's game is free. Non loot box, Non pay to win, purely aesthetic optional purchases feels like the least offensive monetization scheme possible. You say you used to be able to unlock the content in game, but that was predicated on your paying money to buy the game already.

Server costs and ongoing dev costs are totally a thing, but I'm not sure why it's so problematic that they make a profit on top of that.

In college I would pirate everything and think paying for in game items was stupid. Now I will happily spend $1-5 for a few hours of fun in a well balanced game, e.g. hearthstone. But when I tried to get into Genshin Impact I quickly gave up after realizing I would have to spend at least $50 if not hundreds to roll a good team, or just stick with a completely f2p grind (which I don’t have time for anymore).

Isn't Hearthstone one of the most spendy games, though? I haven't touched it in a few years, but back then, if you wanted to have a deck with any sort of competitiveness, you'd have to spend €50-100 or more on packs every extension (2x/year).

In my experience gacha games will sometimes hold events where you're guaranteed to get something useful for $15 or so, but otherwise you're getting maybe a single digit chance of getting something useful for ~$20 payments. Some games require you to get duplicates of to make them maximally good, so it's more like go big or go home. If you're truly spending "a few dollars" here and there you're pretty much just throwing money into a fire, even conditioned on you thinking that the possible winnings are potentially useful.

Another way to phrase this is that free in game currency for F2P players often represents several hundred dollars of the equivalents you can purchase with actual cash. So if you want to have twice as much resources/units/weapons/whatever as a F2P player you need to be spending a lot of money. A few bucks won't move the needle at all.

$60/20 hours is $3 for an hour of entertainment. That's pretty great.

It's like the slots in Vegas; gambling itself is addictive.

> Whales on the other hand I will never understand.

There are always underground account transfer markets for these kind of games. It becomes an investment if you know what you are doing.

To be honest 60 dollars for 20 hours is great value in my opinion.