On the Subject of "Whales"

So against my better judgment, I decided to make this topic after I've seen the term being used a few times regarding the latest mount license pack being released. I'm kind of hoping there will be a somewhat civil, thought-provoking discussion on the matter but I'm not getting my hopes up.

My concern about the term is not so much the definition itself but where the limit it, i.e. how much do you have to spend and/or in what time frame before you're considered a "whale". I honestly hazard even using the term personally because nine times out of ten when I see it used on the forums it seems to be used in a kind of "us vs. them" mindset, where the so-called "whales" are labeled as such because they spend any amount of money on the game. It would be one thing if we were talking about people who have a spending problem but it seems to me that isn't the case.

Furthermore, and to expand on the previous point, this "us vs. them" mentality seems to manifest in the form of "people who spend microtransactions on the game vs. people who don't". The latter group could probably include people who farm gold to convert into gems, which brings me to another trend I see: that, for some reason, gold to gem conversion isn't "dirty" like buying gems with real money is for some reason.

I dunno. I'm probably thinking way too hard on something that really could just be nothing more than people bothered by what other people do with their money and/or time and them feeling the urge to let everyone know what they think (like what I'm doing now, heh). In any event, I find this interesting from both a linguistic standpoint because language is always changing and from a sociological standpoint because (at least based on my observations) social interactions on the internet are drastically different due to the nature of anonymity and aliases.

That's my thoughts on the matter. What are your thoughts when it comes to "whales" and when the term gets used in discussions about microtransactions?

My honest opinion: What possible reason is there for me to care what someone else spends on the game?

I'm thinking about fishing... I never heard that term before...

I’m torn. It greatly annoys me that Anet have started pricing things in the Gemstore to be clearly aimed towards them, yet at the same time they are the tiny minority that keeps the game afloat.

I wish Anet had the confidence in their mount skins that average players would find them worth buying (thus relying on selling many reasonably priced skins, rather than just a few overpriced ones to whales), but apparently they don’t and decided to go whaling.

Tl; dr - Angry at Anet, grateful towards the whales themselves.

"Whales" don't get any stat/gear advantage for money so I don't care if they buy items to be shinier and fancier than others.

I buy gems with gold so I’m buying gems that whales sell to me. Whales fund the game in a way that some cannot and others will not.

THANK YOU WHALES!

And to those who say prices are too high for some items. The reason they are high is because ANet has found that low priced individual items don’t sell well enough to pay the bills. “What our data shows is that higher-priced flashy individual items can work, and lower-average-price-per-item bundles can work, but lower-priced individual items generally don’t generate meaningful revenue to support the game.“

Hi,

As I wrote in my previous response, it’s been a wonderful challenge to support all Living World and Live content development for a game of this size, for five years and counting, purely through the sale of optional microtransactions. We laid out our guiding principles for GW2 microtransactions in March 2012 and we've held true to them ever since. My motivation is to continue to stay true to those principles while also continuing to fund Live content development. I recently apologized for our missteps with the Mount Adoption License. Still, mount skins are purely cosmetic, thus in many ways an ideal embodiment of our goal to support the game with optional microtransactions.

Most of us have two relationships with the GW2 gem store. One relationship is that of a customer: we purchase things when we want them for ourselves and agree with how they’re bundled and priced. Another relationship is that of an interested party: we know that ArenaNet funds Live development through the sale of gems for cash, and we enjoy playing new content like today’s release, so we hope that the gem store does well enough to keep supporting content development. We might say, “I wouldn’t buy that!”, but if enough people buy it that it supports ongoing Live development, we’re still happy.

Mount skins are style items, and style items have some unique challenges. They’re subject to individual taste, so except for the very flashiest items, individual style items will have limited sales. Also, GW2 isn’t setup to support an enjoyable experience of browsing through a large catalog of style items, so players tend not to do that. What our data shows is that higher-priced flashy individual items can work, and lower-average-price-per-item bundles can work, but lower-priced individual items generally don’t generate meaningful revenue to support the game. And the whole point of these items is to support the game.

GW2 is a content-rich online world with no monthly fee, so it’s a great overall value, with microtransactions doing the heavy lifting of funding continued development of the game. It shouldn’t also be our goal to have the lowest-priced microtransactions. In that case, the only logical outcome would be that we could afford to make less content than other developers, and I think that’s not what any of us are looking for. I love our current pace of content development and I hope we can support it for a long time to come.

We’re all in this together. It’s obvious in your posts that you’re thoughtful and motivated to see the game do well. You balance between loving the game and not always agreeing with how gem store items are bundled or priced. That’s fair. We have a commerce team that lives that dilemma every day. We’re all doing our best for the long-term health of the game.

Thank you all for your passion, and again, thank you for your continued support of Live development.

~ MO

Well if fashion is "winning" in GW2 then the whales "win" the game. But the money they spend supports the game. Or we could all pay a sub fee with no cash shop. I know where I stand.

I think you're absolutely right about the 'us vs. them' mentality, and I'd add that it goes both ways. This is more noticeable for me I think because I tend to flick between the GW2 and Elder Scrolls Online forum. ESO started out as a traditional subscription based game and then went to buy-to-play and as a result I notice a much stronger sense criticism in the opposite direction on their forum - there it's usually directed at those who don't spend money on the game, in particular those who don't pay the, now optional, subscription fee (sometimes regardless of how much they may spend in other ways). Whereas, as you noted, on the GW2 forum it's more likely to be directed at those who do spend extra on the game.

I suspect it's due at least partially to a kind of 'buyers remorse'...or whatever the opposite is for people who don't buy. There are pros and cons to both positions both for the player and the game - if you buy things then you get the thing and you give the developer money to keep developing the game. If you don't buy it then you save your money for something else, and if enough people don't buy it (especially if they don't buy a particular type of thing) then it may send a message that they need to look at other means to make their money, which may be more acceptable to players.

A lot of people are going to be torn between those two positions and may feel guilt whichever they choose, and may therefore worry (maybe subconsciously) that other people are going to judge them for it. So they try to combat that by justifying their position, which often includes criticism of people who make the opposite decision - the one they decided is wrong. It's surprisingly difficult, even when making a conscious effort, to disagree with a decision without sounding like you're criticising the people who made it, and it's probably impossible if they're already feeling defensive because they're not completely sure of it themselves and feel like they're going to be criticised for it.

I think you also have to bear in mind that microtransactions are still relatively new and depending on how they're handled they can be a major change to how games are sold, and even made. I think GW2 is a pretty minor example but there have been cases of games where you're basically paying full price for the bare minimum of the game they can get away with and then have to buy everything else, stuff that would normally have been included in the initial purchase, separately. (Sims is a prime example of this, where they deliberately left features out of the sequels so they could be sold in later expansion packs.) Or, particularly in MMOs, games where you have to pay extra just to progress. A friend was trying to get me to play a game she likes recently but I decided against it when I found out either you pay a subscription or almost every in-game purchase, including essential items you can't play without, requires a combination of in-game gold and real money. So there's a lot of negativity attached to the idea - especially from people who remember when you just had to buy a game and then you could play all of it, and get every item, without paying extra. (Although some of them may also remember the days when the standard model was to pay for each life, or for minutes of play time...and you had to walk to the arcade to do it...up hill both ways, in the snow...)

I don't think you'll ever get anyone to agree on a clear definition of who is and is not a whale or how much you have to spend to qualify because it's different for each person and includes a lot of factors which have nothing to do with the game.

For example a friend of mine once assured me that £100 really isn't a lot of money to spend on a pair of jeans...but she earns almost 4 times what I do so she can afford to spend more on almost anything. Also she's a lot less likely to damage her jeans. On the other hand she thinks I'm utterly mad for spending £70 (or more!) to go and see a band perform live when I already have their CD and I can listed to their music whenever I like. I can't get her to understand that hearing the songs live is nothing like hearing a recording and there's so much more to a concert than simply hearing the music. It just doesn't interest her, so she doesn't get it, just like I don't get her willingness to spend so much on clothes.

It's the same with items in games. Some people aren't interested in some/all of them so they don't think they're worth any amount of money and anything people do spend is therefore too much. Other people love them and would spend more than they actually cost if they had to. And some like some items and not others.

Then we get into what I call 'mental gymnastics' (because you're twisting yourself around to make it happen). For example I bought the Ultimate Edition of both HoT and PoF because it worked out cheaper. How could spending more possibly be cheaper? Because I buy gems periodically anyway and I knew I could trust myself not to spend them on things I wouldn't normally buy just because they were there. So I basically bought 4,000 gems at full price and got the Deluxe editions of the expansions for just over the price of the Standard versions. So am I whale for buying the most expensive packs, or am I being cheap by spending less overall? Or both?

Some of it comes down to how people value their time. I remember having a chat with a consultant surgeon once about how he would use a painter/decorator for even relatively small jobs, because despite the jobs being well within his capability, that financial cost was less than he deemed the equivalent of his time.

As long as this applies only to cosmetics and items of convenience, I'm perfectly content. It fits with GW's longstanding approach of being welcoming to all players, irrespective of how many hours a day they can pump into the game.

I’m wondering how much money must be spent to be called that. Either way my problem is the term itself. Something about being called a whale makes me angry, and it’s annoying to use it even if I don’t qualify as one. If we want to use a large beast that represents the large effect made by those people, can’t we use dragon?

@Fenom.9457 said:I’m wondering how much money must be spent to be called that. Either way my problem is the term itself. Something about being called a whale makes me angry, and it’s annoying to use it even if I don’t qualify as one. If we want to use a large beast that represents the large effect made by those people, can’t we use dragon?

I think it is called whale because of how much the developers get out of one, single player. Think back to the days of actual whaling and just how much raw “stuff” one would get out of a single killed whale.

I haven't really come across the term much but it's always seemed an odd term to me, what does a "whale" have to do with spending money? Surely just "big spenders", "high rollers" or something like that would be more logical.

Anyway if people have the money to spare and choose to spend it on gems / gems to gold then I don't see why anyone should see that as an issue, after all it's their money they can do what they wish with it, and crucially it's supporting the game by making it financially viable for Anet to keep it going. Plus none of the items give big spenders better stats, so there's no pay to win issues, so there's not really any reason why anyone should be concerned by what they spend. In addition with gold to gems everyone else who can't afford to spend/doesn't want to spend, still has the option of saving for everything via in game currency, so nobody is really losing out on anything.

So while I personally don't like the amount of over the top, ridiculously oversized, flashy, glowing, souped up particle effect loaded skins around, if there weren't big spenders around putting money into the store each month to dress up like an illuminated Christmas tree on acid, then I'm pretty sure the game wouldn't survive. So I'm thankful to the "whales" / "big spenders" / "high rollers", or whatever other label anyone decides to use, they keep the game going.

@"Fenom.9457" said:I’m wondering how much money must be spent to be called that. Either way my problem is the term itself. Something about being called a whale makes me angry, and it’s annoying to use it even if I don’t qualify as one. If we want to use a large beast that represents the large effect made by those people, can’t we use dragon?

Thia varies from game to game.

"Today, the idea of a “whale” carries a different weight for each company. 5th Planet Games, a developer of social games for both casual and hardcore audiences, starts classifying its players as whales when they spend $100 or more a month. That’s a big jump from whales on Facebook, for instance, where social gamers could drop $25 per month to meet the same qualification."

https://www.google.ie/amp/s/venturebeat.com/2013/03/14/whales-and-why-social-gamers-are-just-gamers/amp/

I'll start with an example. I don't think it would surprise anyone if it turns out that 90% of the RL cash spent on gems in GW2 comes from just 10% of the players (maybe it's 90% is bought by 1%, or 5%; the principle is the same). Then as a practical matter, ANet's monetization team will consider that 10% to be the whales. Who is in it, and how much they spend might vary from month to month or year to year. It might be US$100/month today and US$300/month in December.

The monetizers know that that particular group has different spending habits. They can see whether they spend on BL keys or convenience items or skins. And, it turns out for GW2, as for nearly every other game (or similar product), the high spenders are will to spend higher for the cosmetics. You can only buy so many Salvage-o-Matics, but you can buy ALL the SHINY THINGS. Thus it only makes sense to spend more energy making the shiniest things possible that are of interest to the high spenders.

If ANet were trying to suck all possible bucks from each of us, they wouldn't continue to offer any lower priced items at all. They'd stick with the low-cost-, high value items like MountFits. Instead, they do a bit of both.

I stopped buying gems around HoT release. Now I'm paying for expansion releases only. So, compared to me, a whale is anyone who spends any amount of gems between expansions. I like whales. They allow me to play content for almost free. We need more whales. We should encourage whales to spend even more. Not to mention that GW2 monetization system if more than fair compared to their competition. I dare to say it's socialist state working as intended. Thanks to gems2gold and gold2gems wealth is redistributed between those who have money and those who have time with no impact on player individual performance, skill or power level. The only other game being that fair to customers is Path of Exile.

There's always a market for every segment of the population. How much of a market is another thing.

Are there really any Whales in GW2? Besides buying achievements, raids or fractals, you can't really pay to win here, can you? In the MMORPG I've played before GW2, there were people that spend 1.000+ EUR per week (!); I'd think that you'd qualify as whale if you spend 100+ EUR per week though.

Grinding gold to trade for Gems isn't that hard if there's something I really want.

@Raizel.8175 said:Are there really any Whales in GW2? Besides buying achievements, raids or fractals, you can't really pay to win here, can you? In the MMORPG I've played before GW2, there were people that spend 1.000+ EUR per week (!); I'd think that you'd qualify as whale if you spend 100+ EUR per week though.

There are people who spend 100's if not thousands on blkeys...niche items (Those 10kG infusions) etc.

Never underestimate the allure of Shiiiiinnnneeeyyy.

@"killermanjaro.5670" said:I haven't really come across the term much but it's always seemed an odd term to me, what does a "whale" have to do with spending money? Surely just "big spenders", "high rollers" or something like that would be more logical.

Because it's part of a wider analogy. If you make your money from catching sea creatures you could go out with a boat and a net and catch 1,000 small fish a day. Or you could go out and spend a few days catching 1 whale. At first that seems like a bad move because you get a lot fewer catches. But you can actually make more money from that one whale than all the thousands of little fish put together.

Same with games. Microtransactions started off as just that - very cheap purchases intended to encourage impulse buying where the profit would come from selling thousands of copies of the items. And in some games that's still how it works. Pokemon Go for example sells items for between £0.63 and £1.58 (not counting bundles of items which can be up to £10) and they make a huge amount of money doing it.

But a lot of games, particularly MMOs, have found that they can make more money by persuading a small number of players to spend far more money, just like the whalers catching their whales.

Of course commercial whaling was eventually outlawed because of the damage it was doing to the oceans while fishing could be sustainably managed. It remains to be seen whether the analogy will carry through that far.

Commercial whaling is still in practice in several countries, as well as among certain indigenous peoples

I still think there should be some special title or infusion (maybe of floating gold coins or money signs) for those that have spent a certain amount of money on this game. That’d be an easy way to find the whales.

@Rysdude.3824 said:I still think there should be some special title or infusion (maybe of floating gold coins or money signs) for those that have spent a certain amount of money on this game. That’d be an easy way to find the whales.

Why do we need to know who's spending lots of money on the game? Why is this somehow important?

@OrbitalButt.5708 said:

@Rysdude.3824 said:I still think there should be some special title or infusion (maybe of floating gold coins or money signs) for those that have spent a certain amount of money on this game. That’d be an easy way to find the whales.

We don’t