this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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Many game companies specifically target vulnerable people, who end up spending their entire pay check every month, and are called Whales.
I'm on a game, Whiteout Survival, you've probably never heard of it. I haven't spent a penny, but I was curious about how much one obscure "upgrade" cost. Mind you, there are hundreds of purchases in the game.
It was $100 US, and it said 29,000 had been sold... in the last WEEK!
2.9 million dollars a week for NOTHING. And that's just that one obscure item, far from their biggest seller.
And that's just in one game you've never heard of.
I knew multiple people who spent several ten thousands USD in State of Survival. A fucking mobile game.
A buddy of mine spent several thousand on Marvel Heroes. He wouldn’t go out to lunch with us, and finally I asked him what was going on. He eventually told me, we had a “dude…we are adults and can’t be doing that shit. Imagine the hookers and drugs you could have bought!”
He quit, but still tells me he thinks about it and is immediately filled with regret.
One time I nearly cut a job due to being asked to make something gambling related, but when I worked on an addictive mobile game I simply didn't realize what I was doing. Honestly, I couldn't have known unless I had asked about their monetization strategy before they brought new people on to implement it. And at that point the game was as good as done. I remember walking through Barcelona and seeing all these kids on their phones in the park and not playing or having fun, it felt surreal. I bawled my eyes out and didn't return to the job. You know I genuinely just wanted to give people some fun in this world.
The issue with mobile games is that nobody is prepared to pay even 5 euros for a game. So for mobile game developers it is business as usual to do it this way.
It’s crazy to me how we went from buying a complete game for $50, and now we get an enshitified, half completed mobile game for free but people spend hundreds of dollars playing it.
And it’s nowhere near as good.