As I understand it, "whales" tend to be less "poor gullible fools maxing out their credit cards" and more "extraordinarily wealthy people that enjoy wasting amounts that seem ridiculous to us but are truly nothing but a drop in the bucket to them." The term "oil prince" is trotted out sometimes, and people like that really do exist: I don't remember his name, but there is a very real "oil prince" who likes to go on twitch.tv and shower random (mostly female) streamers with thousands of dollars. It is an utterly bizarre experience seeing screenshots of these events, where, say, a teenaged girl is playing a game in her parent's kitchen with a webcam trained on her, the caption is something like, "wow, $person just donated $20,000 to me! thanks!", and the entire family is in the background with their mouths agape in shock.
I hate these glorified slot machines, I hate the companies that make them, and I do think it's unethical to prey upon children and regular people with bad judgment, but my guess is that the average "whale" is far too wealthy to deserve your sympathy. As a different example of the same idea, do you feel bad for the celebrities that spend hundreds of dollars for a drink at an exclusive club?
I spent over $400 on a certain free-to-play stronghold-building game, over a few weeks, after intending to spend only about $5 or so testing it.
It was very interesting to introspect on the self-rationalization, etc, all the while understanding that I was BS'ing myself and also understanding the tricks they were using. It was addiction, pure and simple.
Now, part of the reason I didn't stop sooner was that I can afford that, although it's not a good use of my funds. That was actually built into the rationalizations: Oh, if I'd taken the car to work today I'd have spent $20 on parking, and $15 on lunch, so I'll just take the subway and bring my lunch tomorrow ...
Would you do that again? (If $400 is a non negligible amount of money for you).
Or would you rather avoid temptation by not installing such games in the first place?
I run one. When I've done cursory searches on our whales, I find people who appear (at least from LinkedIn/Facebook) to have great jobs. I don't get the impression the large guys can't afford it, generally speaking. I am sure it happens.
I trust that what you are saying is accurate for your company. (And, thanks for saying it. That's one data point I hadn't heard before.) It is at variance with things I have heard about other companies. I am, unfortunately, not able to elaborate.
Good article that got passed around in my office on Friday. People who are 'gamers' and by extension people who make games tend to look at "whales" as gullible stupid people but a lot of us tend to exhibit the same behaviour about other things all while congratulating ourselves for not pay 5 bucks to support a game we've played for 50 hours.
That said I think there is a really really fine line you have to walk to keep your IAPs "ethical" and it's very temping (and profitable) to fall on the Candy Crush side of things.
Oh, Candy Crush does this too? (I have honestly never played it so i don't know). Well apparently there was a little exploit to bypass the wait (without paying). My GF told me about it (yes, she's addicted). You can just change you local clock and the game thinks a day has passed and tada! free lives.
Do you mean him searching for open-source information about his customers that his customers voluntarily put on the web, or him saying it to us?
If someone spent $30,000 on my digital cards, I'd look him up so that I could sleep at night and not worry that his kids are going hungry because of this.
(I'm not someone who sells these kinds of things, so I'm fully aware this is largely armchair quarterbacking.)
It depends on the business, but in general I give a supplier my information so that they can supply me with the goods I request; inform me about that process; and invoice me.
Using that information for other reasons without informing me is a clear, unambiguous, invasion of my privacy. It's probably not legal in the UK.
Tl:dr yes, it's creepy. Especially in the context of a game dev.
There are CRM plugins that do it for you automatically when you view records. At the low-end, when I go into Mailchimp, there's a pay plugin (that I don't use) that puts up social information. If anyone emails me, Rapportive brings up their social profile to the right of the email.
My question is: why is it unsavory when a game developer tries to get a customer to pay more, but not for any other startup? If Amazon improves its recommendation service, or another etailer a/b tests checkout flows, they're a genius. When a game developer does it, they're evil.
My theory is that a lot of it is back-rationalization. People just have a gut reaction against it and search for any reason they can find to argue that it's bad.
The main reason it's different for game developers is that in most instances, in-app purchases will undermine the integrity of the game more significantly than for other kinds of apps. Indeed that is the main point of the OP ("There is no game here.")
If you add a rule to chess where you can pay cash to put a taken piece back on the board, you don't have chess anymore. Additionally, consider that videogames are often escapist entertainment that people play specifically to get away from real-life financial pressures or wealth-based status sorting.
There are all kinds of ethical ways to get your most dedicated customers to "pay more" (what's the MBA-speak term for "trying to get everyone to pay exactly as much as they're comfortable with"? I can't remember). There are pre-order bonuses, special editions, purely cosmetic items that don't change the gameplay, mission packs, "mission pack sequels," actual sequels, "pay what you want," donations...
It gets "unsavory" when you're focusing more on designing the perfect skinner box than actually creating a game. I think games are all about the feelings and mental states you get into when you play them. An action game gets your adrenaline pumping, competitive ones especially so. Strategy games require incredibly deep thought to stay one step ahead of the enemy. Puzzle games really stretch your brain to the limits of logic (or maybe they're just bullshit). From my experience, the games that people malign when they talk about mobile games and "social games," on the other hand, promote nothing but anxiety, and use it as a tool to wedge themselves into your subconscious so that you will fork over more cash into their creator's pockets. See the common practice of games based around waiting for something to happen, and bugging you with an alert whenever it does. I don't think very well of people that create things (I won't dignify them by calling them games) that do nothing but prey on anxiety, compulsion, and our attractions to flashing lights.
It's the difference between creating something that people will pay $50 to experience, and creating something that is engineered to repeatedly exploit our basest negative emotions. These games are in some senses worse than heroin, because at least heroin is fun while it lasts.
Jonathan Blow does the topic far more justice than I can at the moment (what am I doing, it's way too late to be drink posting on HN...) in his talk "Video Games and the Human Condition"[1], if you're interested. It's nearly two hours long, but I believe it's very much worth your time.
As for "why do other startups not get shit for this," I think there's a big difference between A/B testing different versions of your game's site to see which version results in more "conversions" or whatever it's called, and designing your entire "game" around frisking people at every turn and being the best darn frisker you can. Not to mention the ones obviously marketed to children, which reasonable people agree is one step removed from turning up at your local elementary school with a trenchcoat full of free samples.
(I have no idea who you are or what games you make, so don't take these comments personally, this is just my general opinion of the mobile games I've tried. If it (or especially Jonathan Blow's talk, because he's much more eloquent than tired, drunken me) rings close to home, however, it might not be a bad idea to download a pack of the 1000+ NES games and try a few at random for a reminder of what playing a real game is like)
I think these games are more targeting "addiction-forming" (which is MBA speak for what any sane person calls "drugs").
The same sort of thing happened so mid-90s pay-per-second or pay-for-items games on what we now call dumbphones (ie. java games). They were regulated, essentially demanding up-front information about what they charge and an option to disable it on the telco contract (effectively giving parents a way to disable it for kids, and everyone a way to disable it for themselves), and their market completely dried up. This happened after several high-profile court cases where the telco was preventing from charging large amounts to kids (think $30k-40k). You can't find them anymore at all.
As far as I'm aware those things are still going, the one I remember was Jamster (though they use different names in different countries, so it was originally Jamba):
I hate these glorified slot machines, I hate the companies that make them, and I do think it's unethical to prey upon children and regular people with bad judgment, but my guess is that the average "whale" is far too wealthy to deserve your sympathy. As a different example of the same idea, do you feel bad for the celebrities that spend hundreds of dollars for a drink at an exclusive club?