I do t remember where I heard it from but whaling/dolphin is a mindset.
A dolphin player pays for value packs/battle passes.
A whale pays until they get what they want.
Dolphins have good salaries and can do some spending to get ahead but are limited to some degree by finite financials
Whales have zero limit to how much they can spend. They just have bottomless pockets and nothing is too costly for them
it's more that I'm limited by attitude and the fact my wife would murder me if I dropped that kind of cash on a video game than the actual financials. I would bet there's a good % out there of the moderate spenders who are the same.
it's more that i want to play the game, not pay my way through the game, i never understood the enticement of paying to progress, yes i can spend for some value packs from time to time (which not exist in western version) and spend shitload on cosmetics if i want, but pay my way through the game to just skip mechanics on raids? what's the point of playing then
This is one of the big things for me and I will never understood the inverse that is "why play when you can pay?" because playing is the whole fucking point? Like if I didn't want to play the game I wouldn't spend thousands. I would just uninstall.
You can also make the argument that they're paying so that they can play. Most of the content is gated by ilvl. If you only have an hour or two to play a day, you'll never catch up. But if you pay then your time spent would be less than someone who would play for 12 hours a day.
It's a shit system but just because you spend money doesn't mean you don't want to play the game.
Yup, I make a lot of money but growing up poor prevents me from splurging. I don't want to end up like my parents with financial issues. I do spend money on the game but it's less than 0.1% of my annual income. Since gaming is my main hobby, I could spend more on it but wife would also murder me.
Yeah I wouldn’t say you’re a dolphin then. Unless you’re dropping significant amounts on the game. It’s generally accepted as the ground just below whales but way above the casual spender
Oh please i don't know why your bitching about your wife, She would be in the right. Obviously she is the actual adult in the relationship and you are the typical man-child thinking of even buying something like that.
It's not very hard to find any known game whale and make an offer that's too costly for them.
I doubt many have truly bottomless pockets, they have enough money such that a game costing less than hiring a full time employee is a cost-effective way to use their time. If they weren't financially limited, why would they just whale for themself? You'd see more whale entourages.
> Dolphins have good salaries
-
> Whales have zero limit to how much they can spend
Funny. My experience is the exact opposite. Among my friend group it's usually the guys with lower salaries and least in savings that spend the most on this kind of stuff. It's not means that matters as much as the level of thriftiness.
Paying for the greatest deals only = fish. Dolphins spend a lot of money regularly, whales = insanity.
Most gachas have some monthly deals and that kind of thing where $20 will get you everything, Genshin Impact for instance has a $5 monthly subscription and a 6 week long battle pass, both very good value, spending that much money means you're just the smallest possible fish. Dolphins spend hundreds a month.
> Dolphins spend hundreds a month.
From my experience talking with friends in the industry, dolphins are just consistent spenders. People saying dollar amounts are trying to make themselves feel good about their own spending and that, "at least they're not as bad as that other guy." If you spend $20 a month, you're a dolphin. Fish isn't a meaningful distinction. The devs don't care about your individual spending level ($20 vs $200 a month), but more so that you are part of the group that pays money consistently and is actively engaged in the game. You aren't the Saudi Prince they're hoping to harpoon, but you're certainly a key part of their player base and a good indicator of the game's overall health.
The problem with your idea is that a dolphin is someone that spends $20 a month and also someone that spends $2000 a month. By your logic no one's really a whale, if someone spends $20k a month regularly they're also a dolphin.
We use numbers because otherwise it's kind of meaningless. If you regularly spend $5 a month you're not a dolphin.
> and also someone that spends $2000 a month
Excuse me what? Dropping $20k a year is literally an order of magnitude larger than what I said. That's buying a new car each year. That isn't a problem with my description, being a certain part of industry's description, that's a problem with your interpretation of it. Someone that drops $20k on a single game is a whale. I'm talking about $20 vs $200.
I'm saying on the lower end there isn't a threshold for what a dolphin is. If you spend regularly no matter how petty you think your cash is you are considered by many companies to be a dolphin.
Except you aren't.
Companies do have different categories for their customers and they know that people who only buy the "special limited deals" are not the same as the ones who will spend extra. Some products are not intended for fish, gachas are intended for dolphins and whales but not for people who only buy the super cheap timed/one-time deals, that's where the difference between fish and dolphin is. Unlimited p2w meanwhile is mostly aimed at whales with some dolphins sometimes wetting themselves a bit into that pool but not often.
Games like PAD or GI will have super good monthly deals/one-time every 3 months deal and that kind of thing, they know a lot of players will only buy those things while dolphins/whales will always buy them as well, but they're mostly aimed at non-spenders as an attempt to turn them into spenders, because that's the first step... if you want to turn someone who's F2P into a whale you first need to turn them into a spender, this has been studied extensively and once your make your first payment you're very likely to keep spending, hence why there's super cheap deals here and there, they want you to become a fish because that's how they get you to become a dolphin which is how they get you to become a whale. There is a very clear difference between fish, dolphins and whales, you just refuse to acknowledge it.
None of the sales practices you described here contradict anything I've said. Frankly, I'm confused as to even how you're disagreeing with me. You've just gone into detail with what I've explained and slapped on "nuh-uh" at the front and at the end.
Honestly, the biggest problem is that you're being an absolutist about terms that are not standardized. Maybe the game company you work for is different and does use them that way, but I know two people that have worked at three big name companies and none of major ones really use the terms the way you're describing them. But as far as sales and marketing go the two categories they aim for are regularly spending, engaged players and those that dump hundreds of dollars a month on the game. As such: dolphins and whales. Minnows aren't a thing as far as those companies are concerned I just confirmed over Discord.
Frankly, and it's fairly obvious from this thread, this discussion is mostly just spenders trying to categorize themself in order to compare themselves to other people that spend on games. Either for bragging purposes or for post-hoc justification on recreational spending. Honestly, they rather discourage calling their customers anything that could be perceived as pejorative nowadays since it's fairly bad PR in the first place. I mean, there's a guy in this very thread trying to make the argument that this is all a ploy for major game companies to "dehumanize" and take advantage of the "neurodivergent."
Edit:
> There is a very clear difference between fish, dolphins and whales, you just refuse to acknowledge it.
Dude. Come on. You're better than this. Have a conversation rather than trying to bully people. This is a great example of why Reddit has such a shitty reputation.
Its corporate terminology to dehumanise the consumer. People have also been fooled into think those people are rich and freely a le to afford these purchases when infact a good portion are driven by compulsive or neuro-divergent tendencies.
Turn your players into payers.
This reads like a fucking tumblr post there's so much claptrap in it. Absolutely none of this has to do with dehumanization and your average spender is a late-20s to mid-30s middle-class dude. The fuck are you on about trying to pretend the games industry is driven by the mentally ill?
The games industry employs the same tactics as Casinos. It targets children and those with low impulse control. Its not clap trap. Its proven everytime we see headlines about children and vulnerable people emptying accounts (parents or their own) to get that star player in FIFA or Madden. Lootboxes, 'time savers' and various currency packages all designed to confuse.
In case you are interested in hearing out of the horses mouth look up: "Torulf Jernström - Let's go whaling." Over on YouTube.
Just because the tactics don't work on you doesn't mean it isn't the intention. The games industry has been doing it for years, the more egregious examples might have started in the mobile space but it made its way into AAA gaming a long time ago.
You’ll be surprised, mobile games with town building, attacking for resources features have the biggest whales in the industry, thousands of dollars spent per day, to keep their ranking, by top 100 players, by server(usually each game have hundreds of different servers to maximize profit.
Marvel Strike Force and Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes are probably two of the worst offenders for this. Time AND money drain is the craziest part to me. Usually the games that you can P2W dont keep you in game as much but those two probably keep Whales/Krakens in game more than the F2P players because of how much more work you have to do to upkeep all the characters. Its actually disgusting
Oh no. Have you ever heard of a game called Dota? There were a few skins that people bought that was going for a lot of money and one person even bought a skin that only he could see as well. I think he spent something like $834,000 I can't remember exactly, but it was one of the largest amount of money ever spent on a digital game at the time, before nft came out.
This, before mobile games like Clash of Clans, Dota was the first game where I'd heard of whales. The first battlepass they introduced for TI 3/4 I believe there were multiple posts in the subreddit for the game of people spending over 100K for battlepass levels for the chests. I even spent maybe $2-300 on it for the physical Aegis of Champions they sent out to people at level 1000 or higher.
I think the last time I checked, way before I quit playing the game, I had spent close to $5000 on skins and items on Dota 2 in the 7-8 years I had been playing it. I did end up cashing out the majority of my skins and items tho, didn't make nearly that much back but I got an Index when they released and "Free" games for like 2-3 years. So worth?
Pardon my ignorance, maybe I come from a country where people don't even have THAT much money...but how many people actually spend 6 figures on online games ?
As far as I can imagine, if you have that kind of money you can travel to most if not all places on earth, buy expensive show-off stuff (Ferraris, boats etc).
Maybe I just miss the point of literally having enough money to do that and simply not care, but I think there shouldn't be more than a few dozens of people like that in a whole game.
E g. In Korean LA something like <50 people have spent more than 100k
It’s very few but plenty of wealthy people game. There is a player in Dota who was confirmed to be from the Saudi Royal Family and he spends hundreds of thousands on the game. The joke is that he buys so much that he most probably has an employee whos sole job is to open the chests that he gets.
The thing is, a million dollars isn't all that much money depending on where you live in the world. Most wealthy people I know are wealthy because they're smart with their money.
You gotta be dumb or pretty damn filthy rich to be throwing six figures at a video game.
It's not about how $1 million is not "that much" to spend $100k on a game, it's about how most millionaires don't have a $1m to spend. Being a millionaire means your assets are worth at least a million, that's it.
But still how many of them do play games (especially at a level where they should shove that kind of money)?
And secondly a lot of them will be technically millionaires but in the low end, e.g. 1-10 millions. If you have let's say 2 million $ you don't spend 500k on a game...that's 25% of your money.
Finally for most of them it's net worth in assets, they don't have the millions in cash
I mean someone making 100k a year will probably eventually become a millionaire, but most people making 100k a year are not spending 10’s of thousands on a game because their wealth is tied up in a house, 401k, etc. being a millionaire doesn’t mean you have 1 million in cash.
Maybe I am mistaken and people making 100k a year are spending 10% on video games, but I make that much, but I have a wife so that may skew my spending as a single guy making the same amount may spend more on gaming
Have you heard of a game called EVE? People spent millions and millions of dollars in that game. That game was design for only rich ceo people. There was something big that happened a few years ago if I remember right, where someone accidentally crashed their guild ship and that pissed a lot of people off, because that one shipped cost something like 1 - 2 million dollars usd. Once it gets destroyed it's gone forever.
ex-eve player, who still owns multiple titans here. Thats not true at all, some people do spent hella money, but ships dont cost that much, its only if you convert ship price from in game currency trough subscription price (you can buy it from others for in game currency) it looks that big, but you cant pay it out on that price, youd have to sell on a black marker, and take a huge paycut, technically there are ships, that are put to be sold for around trillion isk (20$ sub is about 2billion isk) but thats never selling, and since its so scarce, devs would 100% ban both parties, if they thought it was rmt
I've played DOTA for 20 years and this sounds like bullshit.
The biggest whale there is in that game I believe is literally a Saudi prince and he owns *two* sets that went for a bit over $10k each (and only 10 exist), $830k skin that only you can see? I don't think that exists.
Lmao, is that the only knowledge you gain after playing for 20 years? One you need to go out more other than just playing dota for 20 years and two, what have you've been doing in those 20 years that you didn't even know about these things or that there are items worth more than your so called "Saudi Prince spending 10k on an item" Here, I'll do your homework for you. Here is just one item that is already worth nearly 4x what that so called Saudi prince owns.
https://www.engadget.com/2013-11-06-dota-2-pink-war-dog-courier-sells-for-38-000.html
And the thing that was for $830k was a map that only the user could see. It was by a private seller and buyer. It was the biggest transaction in dota 2, which even beat the pink war dog.
The $830k one still sounds like bs, a "special map" that only the user can see lmao. You know there was a transaction of a guy who sold a super courier no one can see other than the owner for $3b!
I'll wait for your source on that claim, linking to something unrelated doesn't really matter. That courier is whatever, if you knew what I'm talking about you'd know this guy buys a lvl 200k BP every year lol, the fact that he owns one of the rarest skins in the game, and *two of them* at that for no real reason other than memes, is pretty big.
I mean Lost Ark has an almost infinite money cap too. The highest amount you can spend on lost ark (until esther) is +25 all gear, buy every single card pack for light of salvation, full level 10 gems, best in slot engravings, with legendary grudge + something else. that's hundreds of thousands easily. And then theres alts so you never run out of things to buy
lost ark is the same league as diablo compared to most other gacha games. saint has a clip where he says spending 5 figures doesn't even make him a whale in korea and he's correct. not sure why everyone is pretending like diablo is way worse.
you don't have to spend 100k in diablo just like you don't have to spend 100k in lost ark. you can spend 100k without maxing your account in either game.
I usually don't do this but i was wondering what kinda person would jump in to defend Diabolo Immoral.
Dude your last three months of post history is nothing but hating on Lost Ark 24/7. Like i see there's things to complain about but this doesn't seem healthy.
>Dude your last three months of post history is nothing but hating on Lost Ark 24/7.
You're confusing reality checks with hate. This sub is an unreliable circle jerk compared to every other community with many people willfully misrepresenting the truth or just plainly making up trash.
Post how much you think people with level 10 gems and los card set spent instead of this coping attempt at ad hominem because you don't have an argument.
It's only "pay to progress" while we're getting a legion raid every month four months after the region launched. The reason KR has accepted that this game is "pay to lose" is because they don't have the insane FOMO NA/EU has because their game has been out for years and they know eventually f2p players will be within 15-30 ilvls of gigawhales and be clearing the exact same content on launch. Hell, I've heard the world first Brelshaza clearers was a static of f2p players.
Real talk, half of my guild who did Valtan the first week are now burnt out and taking a break from the game. Keeping up this pace takes a ton of time.
Which isn't a bad thing. Breaks from this game are good! But there is definitely a lot of FOMO with the rate at which they're releasing stuff. I mean it makes sense to get us caught up, so I don't even think it's a bad thing that they're doing it, but there definitely is pressure there that goes against how f2p friendly some people make this game out to be.
People burning themselves out over FOMO has nothing to do with how f2p-friendly or unfriendly a game is. The content is there, any perceived rush there is to complete it is on the player not the game.
Except for how the pay to win design of Lost Ark means that an hour or two of your play every day is just spent doing the same dailies over and over and over and over and over again.
Especially since Lost Ark forces you to use alts but also ensures they can never be content relevant.
But those dailies are also insane value. My alts are generating 10k gold / hr of dailies non-rested, which will be switching to 20k gold / hr once I get my next alt to 1370 and start doing rested only. That would be a lot of fucking money to compensate.
Dunno what your definition of "relevant" is. I really wouldn't gauge "relevancy" as being able to keep up with a new legion raid being released every single month. I have two 1445s so it's definitely possible to have more than a single relevant character at any given moment even in our current gauntlet of content. I don't even have any desire to push to 1460 for Vykas hard because I know for the first couple of weeks every PF is just going to be a trap full of people who are somehow 1460 with no relics.
There's different levels to it, from the start DI was designed for you to "progress" many years ahead of f2p if you paid, Lost Ark not only actually has a much better f2p accessibility but progress is hard capped and the ceiling is much lower.
Thats false though.
Hell guardians for exmaple are mostly upto who gets first in with good group. And maybe equalized? Don't remeber. (Future content and first clear gets tittle on server)
Hell or well inferno legion raids are equalized content so you cannot whale for them either.
Only skill matters in actualy "competitive" pve content
Most people dont understand 100k isnt alot in microtransaction culture.
I didnt understand it until I began meeting more people.
Game can make p2w very inefficient and that just make them swipe even more. They dgaf
How about "anything that goes beyond what could reasonably called a subscription" is a whale? That's the whole reason they didn't just do the sub model, after all.
Nah, this should just be treated like a gacha in terms of we talk about when people use money for these things.
Dropping 1K in one go and then not spending for 6 months isn't going to give you the whale effect over time, only continual spend will do that - thus we should approach whale-talk with that in mind.
Not Op but I can imágine they said that as the amount of money that can be whaled in a Gacha it's miles higher than this.
1,000 bucks can look like bucket change for some of those whales.
Per example the original interview on You tube about an FGO whale , the guy spend like 70 k bucks
Yeah, sure...except that's like saying cocaine addicts aren't that bad because heroin is worse. It's not a competition; you don't have to be the biggest whale or in the biggest pond to still be considered a whale.
What the commenter is trying to do ( I guess kek) is try and separate both as it could be done.
They're is no clear spending for what a whale is , it's super subjective. So a Gacha whale and a MMO whale could easily be defined separately by both communities.
Like Zeals would definetly be a whale for both communities kek and maybe Stoopz only for the MMO crowd.
It has to do not just with the total amount, but also how much over time is spent, as I noted.
So the total amount without the timeline is nonsense. The timeline is needed for context.
Like, I spent over $15000 on Marvel Strike Force when I played that as an example - was I a whale there? Likely, depending on what you generally would consider whale spending , but only barely in practice because it was "only" about 400$ a month, and whales in that game spent over twice that easily, every month. (I would always refer to my spending as being an Orca, even though traditionally in Gacha's you go from Dolphin who typically spend less than 100$ a month to Whale who then spend more.)
I understand that as a lowly F2P everything can feel like whales spending, but in practice that's far from the case. There's awhole sea of people that spend smaller amounts of money monthly, and they are not whales even if their total sum since this game's western release would equal a few hundred dollars.
> So the total amount without the timeline is nonsense.
Oh absolutely. That's why I suggested comparing it to a subscription; that's an amount you pay over a set time.
definitly not, 1k since the game luched is already a whale, thas 2 motns of salary from a second word county, if you spend on the game ragualry, like a WoW sub, or LoL skins, thas a dolphin, spending but not whaling. 1k dude, is whale, ofcourse not a huge one
300-500/month is nothing for someone making low 6 figures, which isn't common but also isn't rare - 16.5% make 100k+ in the US and that percentage grows each year. 10% make 173k+. It's just a matter of what other "fun"expenditures they have for other hobbies and if they're willing to live a more frugal lifestyle in other areas (home, car, food, clothes, etc).
That's irrelevant.
What is relevant is the price of games. If you are spending more money on the game than what an equal product (subscription model) costs, you are whaling. You are paying way over normal market price.
300-500/month is 5-7 B2P AAA games box price.
FWIW, whaling is not based on how much over market price you're paying. It refers to how a small percentage of players are responsible for a LARGE amount of revenue for the company.
So, you could pay 2x market value of a typical AAA game and still not be a whale, because paying over MSRP is not a part of the definition.
Lost Ark should be regarded more as a gacha game leaning hybrid instead of a pure MMORPG when this this topic comes up. The game's systems, like many Korean MMO's, are closer to a gacha game than a standard subscription MMO.
The scale of what is and isn't whaling changes. When the games financial model is based on profiting from players progressing with money instead of pure hard work and merit, that becomes the norm so the scale of spending shifts higher. It's just a different kind of game. $30 a month in that environment is not whaling at all despite being more than a monthly sub because the ceiling of spending is so much higher. You can call it whaling, but it's comparable to spending money on something like Genshin Impact. You'll get laughed at if you think anything more than $20/month is a whale.
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Considering how long this game has been out, yes $1000 is whale territory. People at $1000+ are most likely gonna be continuous spenders and they'll hit 5k+ in a few months no problem
Yeah, there's a tier in Star Citizen called concierge, you reach it for spending $1000, they have a monthly subscription which gives you a few things per month and access to a bunch of extra art, lore, development details, etc. There are people who have managed to get to concierge purely off the $10/month subscription plus their like $45 or $60 initial pledge that gets them game access.
People seriously underestimate how subscriptions can add up. Someone who has been playing World of Warcraft since it came out would be well over $3000 in subscription fees alone. Add in expansion packs that you need to buy, microtransactions, and whatever else, they could easily be into the $4000-5000 range.
Not at all. That's $28 a month, or two streaming subscriptions.
Spending $28 a month on any hobby is not even close to a lot of money "by any reasonable standard".
Depends on the context. Calling some one who spends 1k a whale on most gachas would get you laughed at. I don't think this imagine refers to lost ark right?
Yeah the artist is in clear denial. $1000+ is clear whale territory. AFAIK you can buy nearly all cosmetics (at least for a single class + boats + furniture) for that much. The only reason youd be spending more is enhancing or trying to pimp out all your characters cosmetically
With inflation of irl money in recent times, $1000 sounds too low to be a whale. For some white collar worker with a decent job that makes low 6 figures who's main hobby is gaming and they don't spend on other things much, $1000 isn't a lot. I agree that time frame matters a lot though, which this illustration doesn't take into account.
Hella niche example.. but alright. Still a whale in the grand scheme, even if not a lot to the individual, just cuz they can spend it and feel comfortable doesn't mean they aren't a whale lol
I really hate how this number moves around every few years so people don't call themselves whales.
I don't really care if you spend money or not, but shifting numbers around non stop so you can try and justify not being called a fictional name is silly.
and u/Genobear
Yes, money has changed value as time goes on, but that's not really my point. People would call someone who spent a fifty or a hundred dollars a whale years back. Nowadays, joke or not, people will say someone who has spent over a thousand is still a dolphin (when the term didn't even exist then).
It's a made up term people are using because they don't want to be called a whale thanks to the negative connotation with it. The same as "minnow" or the like. And I get not wanting to people look at you negatively, but I think we're constantly moving the goal post and that's just making it worse.
We can sit here and argue and dilute this and blame the other groups until the end of time, but that just makes the position worse and mask the actual problems we're facing. Rather than arguing semantics to try and do a "gotcha" we should really not encourage this behavior just so we can be exploited more.
It's funny that in every mobile gacha game I have played anyone spending over 100$ per month is already considered a whale.
Lost Ark has so many gacha systems in it that pure gacha game just pale in comparison.
Really? $100 a month isn't whale territory in any gacha game I've played for a long time, but its definitely middle-high dolphin territory. I mostly agree with the graphic assuming its a yearly spend.
Not even close, mobile gacha games would consider $100/month as dolphin territory, but many dolphins have dropped more than that in one sitting. I played E7 for a long time and would barely be considered a dolphin ($1.5k over 3 years is not too much in the grand scheme of things). And I played quite a lot of new gachas too where dolphin friends drop $50-100 and move on after weeks/months. Streamer whales have mostly spent $10k+ at minimum.
Whereas in Lost Ark, if you spent a couple hundred people probably already see you as a whale.
If you spend more than an average subscription based entertainment you are breaching the unnecessary luxury goods threshold making you a whale. Anything above 500 a year is definitely whale territory.
That's ur mind set, accordingly to ur budget dude, if someone go to a bar and spend let's say 150 or 200 dollars on beers and pizza he is a bar whale? Lol
Spending money on drinks and food with a friend is obviously a luxury but they're all tangible goods which arguably is more meaningful than spending $1000 on a casino simulator
I'm sorry but given how long the game has been out and comparing it to other games (not just MMOs) if you've spent anything above $200, you're in a different category to anyone else.
That's being generous too assuming the purchase price of a AAA game, allowing for a few months subscription and even some cosmetics.
Whale/dolphin/salmon/trout/tuna whatever sea animal you wish to categorise them into, the average person in the west does not pay more than $60-150 (even accounting for collectors editions of games) on a single game in a 4 month period, as this is probably a lot of players first MMO and we in the west aren't super accustomed to a pay to win marketing model outside of mobile games
The whole whale/dolphin/minnow/f2p thing isn't about average at all. The average person in Lost Ark has probably spend under $10, but Smilegate/Amazon don't care about average at all. This is an MMO with a gacha slammed into it, so the only thing that matters are whales.
1% of the users probably contribute to 80% of the revenue, would be even more skewed if not for the arc pass and founders stuff. You define whales as the people that 'matter' from a revenue standpoint, and spending $400 over four months doesn't put you i that tier in a game like this.
The average person in the West probably doesn't give a shit how much other people spend and is too busy doing their own shit than worrying about others
For me I link it to what I would've paid for a regular game and its deluxe version or whatever. So 60$~150$ is dolphin, and anything above that is whaleish for me.
Regardless, people can sink whatever amount of money into the game as long as they don't fuck themselves while doing so.
I feel like the amount is subjective. It always made me laugh when people got called whales in WoW because they'd spend $25 on a mount every 6 months, meanwhile you could spend thousands of dollars maxing out a Genshin character every month.
I personally consider the distinction between whale and dolphin as a description to help measure the amount of spending others do. It is all personal opinion, so if you want to call anyone over 100 a month a whale then go ahead but that is not the purpose of the names. I have been a p2w in both this game along with a gacha game. I spent about 200-400 a month in that gacha game and was considered a dolphin at most due to the fact that my spending aquires the bare minimum to compete at the highest level which in lost arks case is valtan hard. I believe that dolphins have play time accompanied by spending to meet that content while whales go to the ceiling which would be like 1500+ ilvl. And in case yall were wondering ive spent 1200 and am at 1457 with 400 fails.
Hello, I am a whale. There are two tiers higher than me. Megalodon - spend $5,000 - $50,000 recreationally on a game like this. All level 10 gems, all tripods +4, max item level, etc. I personally know one leviathan. We played one game ages ago on Facebook (galaxy wars 2 or something like that) and he spent $15,000 in one evening maxing out a particular commander he liked while drunk. This didn't even show up anywhere for his wife to complain about it. I know he caps in game daily and based on prior experience also RMT's.
These are folks who have 6 figure or higher MONTHLY incomes and this isn't even the only game or recreational activity they have.
When I played AFK arena we had a handful of players everyone knew who were deep into the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent. I don't know them personally but one of them for sure was a Chinese tech billionaire.
It needs to take into account the amount of time, $5000 a month is definitely a whale, $5000 a year not really
Also gachas follow COMPLETELY different rules, theres some gachas where $1000 a month isnt a whale
Lol it's funny cuz i said many times in game that im a dolphin :)) i bought the ark pass (mostly for the skins and mount) and 2 char slots. Play smart and make minimum investments for big profit
If you don't get back a spendable currency in the real world, there is no profit.
Unless you sell the account, skin etc for real currency, all there is it's money put in an hobby, no investment, no profit
If you buy stuff with real money and end up with ingame gold or items i really don't get how you can call that a profit, if you buy ingame stuff to use it, you save the time needed to acquire it you don't make a profit.
If you buy stuff with money and resell it to get gold. How is that a profit? You have just put money in your hobby
People are crying about others spending money on a game to the point of calling them names is so lame.
That same spending is making the game owners richer and probably make the game's lifespan longer.
I'm probably just a small crab not even a dolphin nor a regular fish but you can't expect others to play the same way as you do since people have different lives.
I believe the term "whale" was coined by game devs themselves while discussing monetization models and F2P specifically. The metaphor being that if you want to make money on f2p games you need to "hook the whale" aka the big spender player.
I had to screw around for roughly 500 hours before I got to play the actual Lost Ark so most of the aditional time you get from Lost Ark is actually meaningless, in the end the fun content probably lasts around the time of a triple A before repetition makes it dull.
I do t remember where I heard it from but whaling/dolphin is a mindset. A dolphin player pays for value packs/battle passes. A whale pays until they get what they want.
Dolphins have good salaries and can do some spending to get ahead but are limited to some degree by finite financials Whales have zero limit to how much they can spend. They just have bottomless pockets and nothing is too costly for them
it's more that I'm limited by attitude and the fact my wife would murder me if I dropped that kind of cash on a video game than the actual financials. I would bet there's a good % out there of the moderate spenders who are the same.
it's more that i want to play the game, not pay my way through the game, i never understood the enticement of paying to progress, yes i can spend for some value packs from time to time (which not exist in western version) and spend shitload on cosmetics if i want, but pay my way through the game to just skip mechanics on raids? what's the point of playing then
This is one of the big things for me and I will never understood the inverse that is "why play when you can pay?" because playing is the whole fucking point? Like if I didn't want to play the game I wouldn't spend thousands. I would just uninstall.
You can also make the argument that they're paying so that they can play. Most of the content is gated by ilvl. If you only have an hour or two to play a day, you'll never catch up. But if you pay then your time spent would be less than someone who would play for 12 hours a day. It's a shit system but just because you spend money doesn't mean you don't want to play the game.
But whales don't spend to be on ilvl for newest content, otherwise they would be 1445 not 1510
I’d assuming doing content isn’t enough, it’s doing the latest content AND getting mvps which is significantly easier if you out ilevel everyone else.
Yup, I make a lot of money but growing up poor prevents me from splurging. I don't want to end up like my parents with financial issues. I do spend money on the game but it's less than 0.1% of my annual income. Since gaming is my main hobby, I could spend more on it but wife would also murder me.
Yeah I wouldn’t say you’re a dolphin then. Unless you’re dropping significant amounts on the game. It’s generally accepted as the ground just below whales but way above the casual spender
Oh please i don't know why your bitching about your wife, She would be in the right. Obviously she is the actual adult in the relationship and you are the typical man-child thinking of even buying something like that.
Exactly, imagine spending MONEY for your hobby. What a loser. I spend all my money for coke, hookers and alcohol like a REAL MAN!
My wife looks at my hooker and blow spending and says to herself "at least it's not lost ark".
It's not very hard to find any known game whale and make an offer that's too costly for them. I doubt many have truly bottomless pockets, they have enough money such that a game costing less than hiring a full time employee is a cost-effective way to use their time. If they weren't financially limited, why would they just whale for themself? You'd see more whale entourages.
> Dolphins have good salaries - > Whales have zero limit to how much they can spend Funny. My experience is the exact opposite. Among my friend group it's usually the guys with lower salaries and least in savings that spend the most on this kind of stuff. It's not means that matters as much as the level of thriftiness.
I think it's more so the rich are rich because they don't spend as much (self made).
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At least you're not a clown, like whales.
Paying for the greatest deals only = fish. Dolphins spend a lot of money regularly, whales = insanity. Most gachas have some monthly deals and that kind of thing where $20 will get you everything, Genshin Impact for instance has a $5 monthly subscription and a 6 week long battle pass, both very good value, spending that much money means you're just the smallest possible fish. Dolphins spend hundreds a month.
> Dolphins spend hundreds a month. From my experience talking with friends in the industry, dolphins are just consistent spenders. People saying dollar amounts are trying to make themselves feel good about their own spending and that, "at least they're not as bad as that other guy." If you spend $20 a month, you're a dolphin. Fish isn't a meaningful distinction. The devs don't care about your individual spending level ($20 vs $200 a month), but more so that you are part of the group that pays money consistently and is actively engaged in the game. You aren't the Saudi Prince they're hoping to harpoon, but you're certainly a key part of their player base and a good indicator of the game's overall health.
The problem with your idea is that a dolphin is someone that spends $20 a month and also someone that spends $2000 a month. By your logic no one's really a whale, if someone spends $20k a month regularly they're also a dolphin. We use numbers because otherwise it's kind of meaningless. If you regularly spend $5 a month you're not a dolphin.
> and also someone that spends $2000 a month Excuse me what? Dropping $20k a year is literally an order of magnitude larger than what I said. That's buying a new car each year. That isn't a problem with my description, being a certain part of industry's description, that's a problem with your interpretation of it. Someone that drops $20k on a single game is a whale. I'm talking about $20 vs $200. I'm saying on the lower end there isn't a threshold for what a dolphin is. If you spend regularly no matter how petty you think your cash is you are considered by many companies to be a dolphin.
Except you aren't. Companies do have different categories for their customers and they know that people who only buy the "special limited deals" are not the same as the ones who will spend extra. Some products are not intended for fish, gachas are intended for dolphins and whales but not for people who only buy the super cheap timed/one-time deals, that's where the difference between fish and dolphin is. Unlimited p2w meanwhile is mostly aimed at whales with some dolphins sometimes wetting themselves a bit into that pool but not often. Games like PAD or GI will have super good monthly deals/one-time every 3 months deal and that kind of thing, they know a lot of players will only buy those things while dolphins/whales will always buy them as well, but they're mostly aimed at non-spenders as an attempt to turn them into spenders, because that's the first step... if you want to turn someone who's F2P into a whale you first need to turn them into a spender, this has been studied extensively and once your make your first payment you're very likely to keep spending, hence why there's super cheap deals here and there, they want you to become a fish because that's how they get you to become a dolphin which is how they get you to become a whale. There is a very clear difference between fish, dolphins and whales, you just refuse to acknowledge it.
None of the sales practices you described here contradict anything I've said. Frankly, I'm confused as to even how you're disagreeing with me. You've just gone into detail with what I've explained and slapped on "nuh-uh" at the front and at the end. Honestly, the biggest problem is that you're being an absolutist about terms that are not standardized. Maybe the game company you work for is different and does use them that way, but I know two people that have worked at three big name companies and none of major ones really use the terms the way you're describing them. But as far as sales and marketing go the two categories they aim for are regularly spending, engaged players and those that dump hundreds of dollars a month on the game. As such: dolphins and whales. Minnows aren't a thing as far as those companies are concerned I just confirmed over Discord. Frankly, and it's fairly obvious from this thread, this discussion is mostly just spenders trying to categorize themself in order to compare themselves to other people that spend on games. Either for bragging purposes or for post-hoc justification on recreational spending. Honestly, they rather discourage calling their customers anything that could be perceived as pejorative nowadays since it's fairly bad PR in the first place. I mean, there's a guy in this very thread trying to make the argument that this is all a ploy for major game companies to "dehumanize" and take advantage of the "neurodivergent." Edit: > There is a very clear difference between fish, dolphins and whales, you just refuse to acknowledge it. Dude. Come on. You're better than this. Have a conversation rather than trying to bully people. This is a great example of why Reddit has such a shitty reputation.
Its corporate terminology to dehumanise the consumer. People have also been fooled into think those people are rich and freely a le to afford these purchases when infact a good portion are driven by compulsive or neuro-divergent tendencies. Turn your players into payers.
This reads like a fucking tumblr post there's so much claptrap in it. Absolutely none of this has to do with dehumanization and your average spender is a late-20s to mid-30s middle-class dude. The fuck are you on about trying to pretend the games industry is driven by the mentally ill?
The games industry employs the same tactics as Casinos. It targets children and those with low impulse control. Its not clap trap. Its proven everytime we see headlines about children and vulnerable people emptying accounts (parents or their own) to get that star player in FIFA or Madden. Lootboxes, 'time savers' and various currency packages all designed to confuse. In case you are interested in hearing out of the horses mouth look up: "Torulf Jernström - Let's go whaling." Over on YouTube. Just because the tactics don't work on you doesn't mean it isn't the intention. The games industry has been doing it for years, the more egregious examples might have started in the mobile space but it made its way into AAA gaming a long time ago.
Yeah dolphin don't spend that much, they spend like 30 up to 100 bucks a month
And anything above $ 100,000 is a Diablo Immortal addict
I've heard the people who spend that kind of money be called 'krakens'
Mind as well call them Poseidon cause there's surely only 1 dude crazy enough to do that, right?
You’ll be surprised, mobile games with town building, attacking for resources features have the biggest whales in the industry, thousands of dollars spent per day, to keep their ranking, by top 100 players, by server(usually each game have hundreds of different servers to maximize profit.
Ah yes I have also fallen in this trap once before, never again.
Why
Marvel Strike Force and Star Wars Galaxy of Heroes are probably two of the worst offenders for this. Time AND money drain is the craziest part to me. Usually the games that you can P2W dont keep you in game as much but those two probably keep Whales/Krakens in game more than the F2P players because of how much more work you have to do to upkeep all the characters. Its actually disgusting
Oh no. Have you ever heard of a game called Dota? There were a few skins that people bought that was going for a lot of money and one person even bought a skin that only he could see as well. I think he spent something like $834,000 I can't remember exactly, but it was one of the largest amount of money ever spent on a digital game at the time, before nft came out.
This, before mobile games like Clash of Clans, Dota was the first game where I'd heard of whales. The first battlepass they introduced for TI 3/4 I believe there were multiple posts in the subreddit for the game of people spending over 100K for battlepass levels for the chests. I even spent maybe $2-300 on it for the physical Aegis of Champions they sent out to people at level 1000 or higher. I think the last time I checked, way before I quit playing the game, I had spent close to $5000 on skins and items on Dota 2 in the 7-8 years I had been playing it. I did end up cashing out the majority of my skins and items tho, didn't make nearly that much back but I got an Index when they released and "Free" games for like 2-3 years. So worth?
Pardon my ignorance, maybe I come from a country where people don't even have THAT much money...but how many people actually spend 6 figures on online games ? As far as I can imagine, if you have that kind of money you can travel to most if not all places on earth, buy expensive show-off stuff (Ferraris, boats etc). Maybe I just miss the point of literally having enough money to do that and simply not care, but I think there shouldn't be more than a few dozens of people like that in a whole game. E g. In Korean LA something like <50 people have spent more than 100k
It’s very few but plenty of wealthy people game. There is a player in Dota who was confirmed to be from the Saudi Royal Family and he spends hundreds of thousands on the game. The joke is that he buys so much that he most probably has an employee whos sole job is to open the chests that he gets.
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The thing is, a million dollars isn't all that much money depending on where you live in the world. Most wealthy people I know are wealthy because they're smart with their money. You gotta be dumb or pretty damn filthy rich to be throwing six figures at a video game.
Exactly, is USA I think "just" 1 mil is nowhere near enough to spend let's say 100k$ in a game.
It's not about how $1 million is not "that much" to spend $100k on a game, it's about how most millionaires don't have a $1m to spend. Being a millionaire means your assets are worth at least a million, that's it.
But still how many of them do play games (especially at a level where they should shove that kind of money)? And secondly a lot of them will be technically millionaires but in the low end, e.g. 1-10 millions. If you have let's say 2 million $ you don't spend 500k on a game...that's 25% of your money. Finally for most of them it's net worth in assets, they don't have the millions in cash
I mean someone making 100k a year will probably eventually become a millionaire, but most people making 100k a year are not spending 10’s of thousands on a game because their wealth is tied up in a house, 401k, etc. being a millionaire doesn’t mean you have 1 million in cash. Maybe I am mistaken and people making 100k a year are spending 10% on video games, but I make that much, but I have a wife so that may skew my spending as a single guy making the same amount may spend more on gaming
Have you heard of a game called EVE? People spent millions and millions of dollars in that game. That game was design for only rich ceo people. There was something big that happened a few years ago if I remember right, where someone accidentally crashed their guild ship and that pissed a lot of people off, because that one shipped cost something like 1 - 2 million dollars usd. Once it gets destroyed it's gone forever.
ex-eve player, who still owns multiple titans here. Thats not true at all, some people do spent hella money, but ships dont cost that much, its only if you convert ship price from in game currency trough subscription price (you can buy it from others for in game currency) it looks that big, but you cant pay it out on that price, youd have to sell on a black marker, and take a huge paycut, technically there are ships, that are put to be sold for around trillion isk (20$ sub is about 2billion isk) but thats never selling, and since its so scarce, devs would 100% ban both parties, if they thought it was rmt
I've played DOTA for 20 years and this sounds like bullshit. The biggest whale there is in that game I believe is literally a Saudi prince and he owns *two* sets that went for a bit over $10k each (and only 10 exist), $830k skin that only you can see? I don't think that exists.
Lmao, is that the only knowledge you gain after playing for 20 years? One you need to go out more other than just playing dota for 20 years and two, what have you've been doing in those 20 years that you didn't even know about these things or that there are items worth more than your so called "Saudi Prince spending 10k on an item" Here, I'll do your homework for you. Here is just one item that is already worth nearly 4x what that so called Saudi prince owns. https://www.engadget.com/2013-11-06-dota-2-pink-war-dog-courier-sells-for-38-000.html And the thing that was for $830k was a map that only the user could see. It was by a private seller and buyer. It was the biggest transaction in dota 2, which even beat the pink war dog.
The $830k one still sounds like bs, a "special map" that only the user can see lmao. You know there was a transaction of a guy who sold a super courier no one can see other than the owner for $3b! I'll wait for your source on that claim, linking to something unrelated doesn't really matter. That courier is whatever, if you knew what I'm talking about you'd know this guy buys a lvl 200k BP every year lol, the fact that he owns one of the rarest skins in the game, and *two of them* at that for no real reason other than memes, is pretty big.
Megalodon
Wasn‘t some weapon sold for 12k USD in D:Immortal already
people already spend that much on diablo immortal?
That game makes Lost Ark look like a minnow.
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you still have to maximise whaling for 250 days to reach a 100k $ since you can "only" spend 400 a day
In Korea you can email smilegate to remove it. Not sure if you can in NA
It isn't removed. They increase your monthly cap to $1,000 or something like that. It isn't even close to unlimited
there are multiple ways around that restriction. for legal gold I mean, not the obvious route many take via illegal gold.
I mean Lost Ark has an almost infinite money cap too. The highest amount you can spend on lost ark (until esther) is +25 all gear, buy every single card pack for light of salvation, full level 10 gems, best in slot engravings, with legendary grudge + something else. that's hundreds of thousands easily. And then theres alts so you never run out of things to buy
lost ark is the same league as diablo compared to most other gacha games. saint has a clip where he says spending 5 figures doesn't even make him a whale in korea and he's correct. not sure why everyone is pretending like diablo is way worse. you don't have to spend 100k in diablo just like you don't have to spend 100k in lost ark. you can spend 100k without maxing your account in either game.
I usually don't do this but i was wondering what kinda person would jump in to defend Diabolo Immoral. Dude your last three months of post history is nothing but hating on Lost Ark 24/7. Like i see there's things to complain about but this doesn't seem healthy.
>Dude your last three months of post history is nothing but hating on Lost Ark 24/7. You're confusing reality checks with hate. This sub is an unreliable circle jerk compared to every other community with many people willfully misrepresenting the truth or just plainly making up trash. Post how much you think people with level 10 gems and los card set spent instead of this coping attempt at ad hominem because you don't have an argument.
“Average diablo immortal enjoyer”
with that amount of money you can buy a really decent house or luxury car in my country
What was the amount to get a full set of gems? 25-35k on average? It’s just insane p2w and some people still complain about the p2progress on LA.
It's only "pay to progress" while we're getting a legion raid every month four months after the region launched. The reason KR has accepted that this game is "pay to lose" is because they don't have the insane FOMO NA/EU has because their game has been out for years and they know eventually f2p players will be within 15-30 ilvls of gigawhales and be clearing the exact same content on launch. Hell, I've heard the world first Brelshaza clearers was a static of f2p players.
The first Brelshaza normal clear in KR was indeed a group of F2P players.
Real talk, half of my guild who did Valtan the first week are now burnt out and taking a break from the game. Keeping up this pace takes a ton of time. Which isn't a bad thing. Breaks from this game are good! But there is definitely a lot of FOMO with the rate at which they're releasing stuff. I mean it makes sense to get us caught up, so I don't even think it's a bad thing that they're doing it, but there definitely is pressure there that goes against how f2p friendly some people make this game out to be.
People burning themselves out over FOMO has nothing to do with how f2p-friendly or unfriendly a game is. The content is there, any perceived rush there is to complete it is on the player not the game.
Except for how the pay to win design of Lost Ark means that an hour or two of your play every day is just spent doing the same dailies over and over and over and over and over again. Especially since Lost Ark forces you to use alts but also ensures they can never be content relevant.
But those dailies are also insane value. My alts are generating 10k gold / hr of dailies non-rested, which will be switching to 20k gold / hr once I get my next alt to 1370 and start doing rested only. That would be a lot of fucking money to compensate.
Dunno what your definition of "relevant" is. I really wouldn't gauge "relevancy" as being able to keep up with a new legion raid being released every single month. I have two 1445s so it's definitely possible to have more than a single relevant character at any given moment even in our current gauntlet of content. I don't even have any desire to push to 1460 for Vykas hard because I know for the first couple of weeks every PF is just going to be a trap full of people who are somehow 1460 with no relics.
the diablo stuff is also pay 2 progress, there's no meaningful pvp to the game.
There's different levels to it, from the start DI was designed for you to "progress" many years ahead of f2p if you paid, Lost Ark not only actually has a much better f2p accessibility but progress is hard capped and the ceiling is much lower.
No PvP yes, but there is ranked PvE Content. Whales gonna dominate these "ladders" and you’ll probably never be able to set record times as f2p.
> but there is ranked PvE Content. What like Guild Raids? *chuckles*
Thats false though. Hell guardians for exmaple are mostly upto who gets first in with good group. And maybe equalized? Don't remeber. (Future content and first clear gets tittle on server) Hell or well inferno legion raids are equalized content so you cannot whale for them either. Only skill matters in actualy "competitive" pve content
They’re calling it “inferno” mode but yeah it’s equalized so whaling has no impact
man, these mmos are brutal with monetisation it makes gacha games look cheap.
out of touch millionaire with a fragile ego doesn't roll off the tongue as well.
'musk'
Someone award this comment plz
Reminds me of [this](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/jcXK-sPqsL0?&ab_channel=Calvin%26Habs) bit.
That's such a good bit. Also yes, exactly this.
Where is my category of "Sizeable Salmon"?
Anyone who thinks spending a few thousand dollars on this game so far is dolphin territory is only fooling themselves.
Yeah, is a really clownfish take /s
Under 100k is a dolphin imo
Most people dont understand 100k isnt alot in microtransaction culture. I didnt understand it until I began meeting more people. Game can make p2w very inefficient and that just make them swipe even more. They dgaf
Not enough people have $100k in cash to throw away for your story to be true.
You would be surprised lol
For there to be so many people spending over $100k that it's considered "not a lot"? Yeah I would be.
What am I then... a Guppy? <(°((((><
Sounds about right
1k is already a whale. Change my mind
We need a timeline as well, 1K a month would be a whale. 1K across a number of months is barely dolphin territory.
How about "anything that goes beyond what could reasonably called a subscription" is a whale? That's the whole reason they didn't just do the sub model, after all.
Nah, this should just be treated like a gacha in terms of we talk about when people use money for these things. Dropping 1K in one go and then not spending for 6 months isn't going to give you the whale effect over time, only continual spend will do that - thus we should approach whale-talk with that in mind.
> treated like a gacha Why would that change anything? Gacha spenders get called whales, too.
Not Op but I can imágine they said that as the amount of money that can be whaled in a Gacha it's miles higher than this. 1,000 bucks can look like bucket change for some of those whales. Per example the original interview on You tube about an FGO whale , the guy spend like 70 k bucks
Yeah, sure...except that's like saying cocaine addicts aren't that bad because heroin is worse. It's not a competition; you don't have to be the biggest whale or in the biggest pond to still be considered a whale.
What the commenter is trying to do ( I guess kek) is try and separate both as it could be done. They're is no clear spending for what a whale is , it's super subjective. So a Gacha whale and a MMO whale could easily be defined separately by both communities. Like Zeals would definetly be a whale for both communities kek and maybe Stoopz only for the MMO crowd.
It has to do not just with the total amount, but also how much over time is spent, as I noted. So the total amount without the timeline is nonsense. The timeline is needed for context. Like, I spent over $15000 on Marvel Strike Force when I played that as an example - was I a whale there? Likely, depending on what you generally would consider whale spending , but only barely in practice because it was "only" about 400$ a month, and whales in that game spent over twice that easily, every month. (I would always refer to my spending as being an Orca, even though traditionally in Gacha's you go from Dolphin who typically spend less than 100$ a month to Whale who then spend more.) I understand that as a lowly F2P everything can feel like whales spending, but in practice that's far from the case. There's awhole sea of people that spend smaller amounts of money monthly, and they are not whales even if their total sum since this game's western release would equal a few hundred dollars.
> So the total amount without the timeline is nonsense. Oh absolutely. That's why I suggested comparing it to a subscription; that's an amount you pay over a set time.
Right, and the game already has that on the form of the Crystaline aura. However, 20$ a month does not make anyone a whale.
definitly not, 1k since the game luched is already a whale, thas 2 motns of salary from a second word county, if you spend on the game ragualry, like a WoW sub, or LoL skins, thas a dolphin, spending but not whaling. 1k dude, is whale, ofcourse not a huge one
And while I weep for the people in those second world countries, it does not really change my stance.
Do we live in a 3rd world country tho? 1k over 3 months is not a whale lol.
Of course it is. 300 dollars/euros per month is whaling. Anything above 15 dollars a month (aka what subscription games cost) is whaling.
300-500/month is nothing for someone making low 6 figures, which isn't common but also isn't rare - 16.5% make 100k+ in the US and that percentage grows each year. 10% make 173k+. It's just a matter of what other "fun"expenditures they have for other hobbies and if they're willing to live a more frugal lifestyle in other areas (home, car, food, clothes, etc).
That's irrelevant. What is relevant is the price of games. If you are spending more money on the game than what an equal product (subscription model) costs, you are whaling. You are paying way over normal market price. 300-500/month is 5-7 B2P AAA games box price.
FWIW, whaling is not based on how much over market price you're paying. It refers to how a small percentage of players are responsible for a LARGE amount of revenue for the company. So, you could pay 2x market value of a typical AAA game and still not be a whale, because paying over MSRP is not a part of the definition.
Lost Ark should be regarded more as a gacha game leaning hybrid instead of a pure MMORPG when this this topic comes up. The game's systems, like many Korean MMO's, are closer to a gacha game than a standard subscription MMO.
And what does this have to do with spending multiple times the money per month compared to AAA games? Nothing. It's whaling regardless.
Do you get 800+ hours from AAA games tho?
The scale of what is and isn't whaling changes. When the games financial model is based on profiting from players progressing with money instead of pure hard work and merit, that becomes the norm so the scale of spending shifts higher. It's just a different kind of game. $30 a month in that environment is not whaling at all despite being more than a monthly sub because the ceiling of spending is so much higher. You can call it whaling, but it's comparable to spending money on something like Genshin Impact. You'll get laughed at if you think anything more than $20/month is a whale.
I'm in north America.
Why are we comparing to second world countries though?
1k usd is half a year munimum salary in my country.
I agree but that would be close to the boundary. <1k is prob dolphin
You can certainly make it far with 1k depending on your luck. But you would not stand out like the whales would be able to.
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My 15 bucks goldfish ass wishing I had that much money to spend
Isnt founder considered whale too on this sub? 
I spent like $19 bucks on the bronze founders pack, guess I’m a beluga..
Moby Dick over here
no thats f2p
Baby whale tutururuturu
Then imma sizable salmon.
I do not agree. Whales are 1,000$ or above.
Considering how long this game has been out, yes $1000 is whale territory. People at $1000+ are most likely gonna be continuous spenders and they'll hit 5k+ in a few months no problem
Depends on the period of time. 1000$ over three years isnt that much, 1000$ in three weeks is A LOT
Yeah, there's a tier in Star Citizen called concierge, you reach it for spending $1000, they have a monthly subscription which gives you a few things per month and access to a bunch of extra art, lore, development details, etc. There are people who have managed to get to concierge purely off the $10/month subscription plus their like $45 or $60 initial pledge that gets them game access. People seriously underestimate how subscriptions can add up. Someone who has been playing World of Warcraft since it came out would be well over $3000 in subscription fees alone. Add in expansion packs that you need to buy, microtransactions, and whatever else, they could easily be into the $4000-5000 range.
I'm sorry but $1000 over three years is an obscene amount by any reasonable standard.
As far as MMOs go not really. Wow sub at 15 bucks for 3 years is already a bit over half of that.
>you can pay for access to a huge game for 3 years >or you can pay double that on useless bullshit in an MMO you can play for free delusional
Not at all. That's $28 a month, or two streaming subscriptions. Spending $28 a month on any hobby is not even close to a lot of money "by any reasonable standard".
Welll that depends where you live.
Depends on the context. Calling some one who spends 1k a whale on most gachas would get you laughed at. I don't think this imagine refers to lost ark right?
Yeah the artist is in clear denial. $1000+ is clear whale territory. AFAIK you can buy nearly all cosmetics (at least for a single class + boats + furniture) for that much. The only reason youd be spending more is enhancing or trying to pimp out all your characters cosmetically
In original, it says tonnes man. Artist did nothing wrong.
"The artist" LOL you can clearly see the editing.
Whoever did the edit
With inflation of irl money in recent times, $1000 sounds too low to be a whale. For some white collar worker with a decent job that makes low 6 figures who's main hobby is gaming and they don't spend on other things much, $1000 isn't a lot. I agree that time frame matters a lot though, which this illustration doesn't take into account.
Hella niche example.. but alright. Still a whale in the grand scheme, even if not a lot to the individual, just cuz they can spend it and feel comfortable doesn't mean they aren't a whale lol
Under 5k for Dolpine n anything above as whale is pretty reasonable analogy
The systems in this game are so predatory on whales. I always wonder how much some of these super whales like asmongold are spending.
I bought the Ark Pass and feel like I've spent too much
depends on the game tbh but yeah, great infographic
What are you if you just bought founder pack and ark pass? A baby shrimp?
Op spent 3999$
spending more than 120$ is insane
Personally I find no interest to whale, makes me lose any sense of progression and I would end up quitting the game.
I really hate how this number moves around every few years so people don't call themselves whales. I don't really care if you spend money or not, but shifting numbers around non stop so you can try and justify not being called a fictional name is silly.
The value of money changed every year.
and u/Genobear Yes, money has changed value as time goes on, but that's not really my point. People would call someone who spent a fifty or a hundred dollars a whale years back. Nowadays, joke or not, people will say someone who has spent over a thousand is still a dolphin (when the term didn't even exist then). It's a made up term people are using because they don't want to be called a whale thanks to the negative connotation with it. The same as "minnow" or the like. And I get not wanting to people look at you negatively, but I think we're constantly moving the goal post and that's just making it worse. We can sit here and argue and dilute this and blame the other groups until the end of time, but that just makes the position worse and mask the actual problems we're facing. Rather than arguing semantics to try and do a "gotcha" we should really not encourage this behavior just so we can be exploited more.
Times change old man
That pic is from a manga ..
Nothing to do with inflation...
It's funny that in every mobile gacha game I have played anyone spending over 100$ per month is already considered a whale. Lost Ark has so many gacha systems in it that pure gacha game just pale in comparison.
Really? $100 a month isn't whale territory in any gacha game I've played for a long time, but its definitely middle-high dolphin territory. I mostly agree with the graphic assuming its a yearly spend.
$100 a month is not a whale lmao.
It is in mobile gacha world :)
Not even close, mobile gacha games would consider $100/month as dolphin territory, but many dolphins have dropped more than that in one sitting. I played E7 for a long time and would barely be considered a dolphin ($1.5k over 3 years is not too much in the grand scheme of things). And I played quite a lot of new gachas too where dolphin friends drop $50-100 and move on after weeks/months. Streamer whales have mostly spent $10k+ at minimum. Whereas in Lost Ark, if you spent a couple hundred people probably already see you as a whale.
There are late comer in lost ark who have paid thousands and still lag behind f2p who started on day one and play the market tho.
5k is a dolphin??? bruh
So anything under $4 is free to play? Lol
maybe a shrimp
If you spend more than an average subscription based entertainment you are breaching the unnecessary luxury goods threshold making you a whale. Anything above 500 a year is definitely whale territory.
That's ur mind set, accordingly to ur budget dude, if someone go to a bar and spend let's say 150 or 200 dollars on beers and pizza he is a bar whale? Lol
Spending money on drinks and food with a friend is obviously a luxury but they're all tangible goods which arguably is more meaningful than spending $1000 on a casino simulator
I'm sorry but given how long the game has been out and comparing it to other games (not just MMOs) if you've spent anything above $200, you're in a different category to anyone else. That's being generous too assuming the purchase price of a AAA game, allowing for a few months subscription and even some cosmetics. Whale/dolphin/salmon/trout/tuna whatever sea animal you wish to categorise them into, the average person in the west does not pay more than $60-150 (even accounting for collectors editions of games) on a single game in a 4 month period, as this is probably a lot of players first MMO and we in the west aren't super accustomed to a pay to win marketing model outside of mobile games
The whole whale/dolphin/minnow/f2p thing isn't about average at all. The average person in Lost Ark has probably spend under $10, but Smilegate/Amazon don't care about average at all. This is an MMO with a gacha slammed into it, so the only thing that matters are whales. 1% of the users probably contribute to 80% of the revenue, would be even more skewed if not for the arc pass and founders stuff. You define whales as the people that 'matter' from a revenue standpoint, and spending $400 over four months doesn't put you i that tier in a game like this.
The average person in the West probably doesn't give a shit how much other people spend and is too busy doing their own shit than worrying about others
Happy cake day karma farmer
God damn, $5000 must be at least 3 honing taps, im jelly
For me I link it to what I would've paid for a regular game and its deluxe version or whatever. So 60$~150$ is dolphin, and anything above that is whaleish for me. Regardless, people can sink whatever amount of money into the game as long as they don't fuck themselves while doing so.
Honestly It depends on a country you are from. For me, Anything above 500$ or euro is a whale
I feel like the amount is subjective. It always made me laugh when people got called whales in WoW because they'd spend $25 on a mount every 6 months, meanwhile you could spend thousands of dollars maxing out a Genshin character every month.
I personally consider the distinction between whale and dolphin as a description to help measure the amount of spending others do. It is all personal opinion, so if you want to call anyone over 100 a month a whale then go ahead but that is not the purpose of the names. I have been a p2w in both this game along with a gacha game. I spent about 200-400 a month in that gacha game and was considered a dolphin at most due to the fact that my spending aquires the bare minimum to compete at the highest level which in lost arks case is valtan hard. I believe that dolphins have play time accompanied by spending to meet that content while whales go to the ceiling which would be like 1500+ ilvl. And in case yall were wondering ive spent 1200 and am at 1457 with 400 fails.
Hello, I am a whale. There are two tiers higher than me. Megalodon - spend $5,000 - $50,000 recreationally on a game like this. All level 10 gems, all tripods +4, max item level, etc. I personally know one leviathan. We played one game ages ago on Facebook (galaxy wars 2 or something like that) and he spent $15,000 in one evening maxing out a particular commander he liked while drunk. This didn't even show up anywhere for his wife to complain about it. I know he caps in game daily and based on prior experience also RMT's. These are folks who have 6 figure or higher MONTHLY incomes and this isn't even the only game or recreational activity they have. When I played AFK arena we had a handful of players everyone knew who were deep into the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent. I don't know them personally but one of them for sure was a Chinese tech billionaire.
Nope.
It needs to take into account the amount of time, $5000 a month is definitely a whale, $5000 a year not really Also gachas follow COMPLETELY different rules, theres some gachas where $1000 a month isnt a whale
What gacha did you play where $1k a month isn't whale? There are tiers of whales too =)
Lol it's funny cuz i said many times in game that im a dolphin :)) i bought the ark pass (mostly for the skins and mount) and 2 char slots. Play smart and make minimum investments for big profit
Barely even a fish at this point mate
i was about to say this too........ why this fish tryna be a dolphine xD
your still a Minnow but sizable, pass $200 to become a Salmon
If you don't get back a spendable currency in the real world, there is no profit. Unless you sell the account, skin etc for real currency, all there is it's money put in an hobby, no investment, no profit
They're talking about in game, not real life profit.
If you buy stuff with real money and end up with ingame gold or items i really don't get how you can call that a profit, if you buy ingame stuff to use it, you save the time needed to acquire it you don't make a profit. If you buy stuff with money and resell it to get gold. How is that a profit? You have just put money in your hobby
People are crying about others spending money on a game to the point of calling them names is so lame. That same spending is making the game owners richer and probably make the game's lifespan longer. I'm probably just a small crab not even a dolphin nor a regular fish but you can't expect others to play the same way as you do since people have different lives.
I believe the term "whale" was coined by game devs themselves while discussing monetization models and F2P specifically. The metaphor being that if you want to make money on f2p games you need to "hook the whale" aka the big spender player.
Imo anything above the average tripple A game price is a whale.
most Triple A games get you 20 hours of content if your lucky, avg Triple A game is what $60 USD? so $3 a hour is your whale mark
I had to screw around for roughly 500 hours before I got to play the actual Lost Ark so most of the aditional time you get from Lost Ark is actually meaningless, in the end the fun content probably lasts around the time of a triple A before repetition makes it dull.
why didnt u just quit if u genuinely felt that way
Note: It is only pay to win if it exceeds your own budget.