It's the typical extremely biased mobile game (Frostpunk clone in this case), where the imbalance can only be fixed by spending a lot of money.

It's counterintuitive but the article almost reads like a promotion piece. The game is so good it can get you to spend that much money. But most gamers wouldn't fall for this would they? Maybe some of them try. If a few people hear of the game and play it because of the shocking title and curiosity that's a win.

It's not a bad game, I played for about a year in a relatively well run clan. Never spent any money on it though.

All I'm seeing is all the games with the obnoxious full screen popup ads in other apps.

Not just such a guy exists. The business model of these games almost totally rely on these people to be profitable. When you spend any time thinking about this at all it's totally unethical. It would be trivial for them to put a simple spend cap in. Sorry, no matter how into this game you are you can't spend more than $1,000 in a year, or $100 in a day. That would make them tonnes of money and prevent most people making life changing mistakes. But they don't do that because their entire business plan relies on getting hundreds of thousands out of these players.

> Outside apps for accessing useful services or doing work, everything seems designed to addict, manipulate, or drain bank accounts: most games, social media doom-scrollers, payday loan in your pocket apps, crypto and stock trading apps that are built like casino games on purpose, and now sports betting.

You just described the work of a better half of this forum, don't expect much sympathies. Of course most will say they don't / didn't work on the evil part like it somehow actually matters.

Also speedrunning through life like that, the only life we will ever get. "killing time" = killing yourself

The online gambling industry sees people spend huge amounts of time and effort on regulations and their requirements.

F2P games need the same regulation, if not more given that kids are targeted.

> need to get self-regulated by the app stores...

Self regulation for industries does not work. On the more serious side we have Boeing, which is allowed to self regulate. We see the results.

Mobile game industry have conferences, and these conferences have talks, panels and tracks for monetization and loyalty.

Do you believe that an industry hell bent on monetization can self regulate?

Of course, not all industry players are bad. There are better, ethical brands. On the other hand, industry is so big now, The Tragedy of Commons applies to it. If some studios refrain themselves from abusing players, at least one other studio will.

I feel like we’re in an era of dark monetization patterns. This “whale” monetization reminds me of online advertising where if you aren’t paying you’re the product.

It isn’t quite the same but it’s something like, “if you aren’t paying, you’re incentivizing whales.”

Underneath all the darkness a business has to make money. People are voting with time and money that the whale strategy is optimal just like they vote with time and money that advertising is optimal.

I don’t know what to do about this all. It seems like it’s just a shitty fact of human nature.

A lot of "strange" economic situations ultimately boil down to whale hunting being the primary monetization model for a space. For example:

Vegas is notorious for this: especially in the past, for a person with a healthy relationship with gambling, Vegas was a really cheap vacation. Getting there's cheap relative to getting anywhere else in North America, hotel rooms were like half what you'd pay for an equivalent room elsewhere, and a lot of the entertainment was not terribly expensive. Turns out a couple of people dropping millions justifies losing money on a lot of guests.

There are a lot of mobile games that are ad supported. What are they advertising? Other mobile games. That seems weird, you don't normally see places advertising their competitors. Then you realize that the first game effectively is acting as part of the funnel for games more optimized for separating whales from large amounts of money. Your sudoku app probably doesn't have the ability to convince people to give them $10,000, but an ad here and there might push users towards base-builders and the ilk that can.

I suspect most advertising is a whale hunting game. There's no world where I go and buy a new car because I saw a YouTube ad for one. But if showing a 10 cent ad to 100,000 people causes 1 person buy the advertiser's truck with a $10,000+ margin versus their competitors', they're in the black.

I love this idea. I think it would be useful for all app categories, not just games.

Except both apple and Google earn a cut on revenue so they don't have any interest in stopping the money flow.

> like "the top 1% players of this game spent an average on $5,000 on it last year"

The top 1% don’t spend nearly that much. The number of people spending eye-popping amounts is relatively small. You have to get deep into the long tail before it gets into the hundreds or thousands.

Posting these numbers might have the opposite effect: Players who spend a lot of money want to be at the top of leaderboards. If they saw what the 1% were spending they might convince themselves that not only is it okay to spend that much, but that they need to spend even more.

I think what would help is that any F2P game was mandated to never cost more than $x/year to be listed in the app store, and possibly have different tiers that a game could decide to be in ($10/$100/$1000) based on the maximum yearly spend. The game also should prominently display the total spend per year, and lifetime, every time it is launched.

Although I do not like F2P for all the dark patterns (which have infiltrated non-F2P as well unfortunately) if it was capped to a reasonable maximum amount a year, with no player to player trading at all, and no multiple accounts for the same store account, it might could be made to not be as predatory while still keeping it financially sustainable for the companies that produce the games.

So a statistic only for whales? Whale players have a tendency to spend no matter the game.

> A bigger mistake was thinking that there was "a type of person". (Or maybe there is and I'm in denial!)

It's the second one. Only 3.5% of players spend anything on freemium games. A significantly smaller fraction of players spend over $100.

It doesn't have to be either-or. We can expect grown adults to control their behavior, while at the same time deciding as a society that there are some industries/products that are harmful enough, and without any beneficial effects to offset that harm, that we just don't want them around tempting people who might have a weakness for them.

We already do that with lots of things, from hard drugs to prostitution to owning your own nuclear weapons. Some of us may disagree with some of those laws, but unless you're the most extreme libertarian who ever doffed a fedora, there's probably something that you'd say shouldn't be accessible to every random adult capable of poking at a phone.