Please explain this "whale" term. I trust you to give me a fair and honest answer.
While I remain very interested in Star Citizen (no thanks to this thread but rather watching streamers actually enjoy the game), I'm like you in that I already feel the burden of enjoying too many games as it is. Right now Steam is updating Stellaris, which I'm sure is a wonderful game (I bought it after all), but I never play it because I'm too immersed in my other space games (and a couple not-space games). Each of these games is a full-time commitment with years potential enjoyable immersive play, so adding yet
another game to this already too big list (SC) feels... premature.
So I'm likely to return to my tried and true life approach of delayed satisfaction, where I wait a good long time for things to "age well" before investing in those things. For example, my first Playstations (3 and 4) were both Slims, which IMO are way better than OG PSn's. I didn't try Skyrim until years after first launch, when it was much more polished and thus enjoyable experience. I only recently jumped into the X Universe franchise (though this is more due to ignorance than choice), so I blissfully skipped over all the growing pains associated with those games. The point is, while part of me REALLY wants to experience SC for myself, prudence and experience is telling me to wait, wait, wait. And while I'm not an early adopter, I won't mock those who are because their "willingness" to invest in a game early is what allows a company to improve the game over time for my eventual enjoyment.
I blame Obsidian Ant and Drew Wager (in a good, friendly way, as I like both these guys very much) for feeding my SC FOMO
They need to start playing some X4 Foundations or Space Engineers instead of Star Citizen!!!
A “whale” is a term used in “Free to Play” (F2P) games used to describe players who sink hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars into a game. It’s derived from the “ecosystem” of F2P games in general and “Pay to Win” (P2W) games in particular. The free players are the content of the “minnows” who occasionally drop a few dollars of the game, the “minnows” are the content of the “fish,” and so on up to the “whales” who are the primary source of income for the game runner.
For example, a few years ago I was hooked on F2P (more accurately, pay to continue) mostly single-player “gatcha” (Japanese version of loot boxes) game, to the point where I changed my sleep schedule
slightly to take full advantage of “bonus” health gained while I slept. I never paid a cent to continue, or on the “gatchas” except… after a year I decided they’d truly earned $40 dollars from me. After all, an hour a day of fun challenges, number-crunching, and interesting short stories, added up to nearly 400 hours of game play, which is more much more entertainment than AAA games I’d played.
I would not, in any way, considered a whale, even though I spent a little money on a free to play game.
By the the time the game went into
actual maintenance mode, my best team of characters (who could be called upon to reinforce other players teams in the single-player campaign) was close to the top 10% of the player base. The top 5% teams consisted of fully developed characters who could not be recruited through the main game, only by opening “gatchas”. When I crunched the numbers, in order to have fully developed those characters, they had to have spent thousands of dollars just for a
decent chance of getting the one they needed. Keep in mind this was not a PvP game. You didn’t compete at all with other players, or even cooperate with them directly. The main motivation for developing a character was to unlock or continue their usually heartwarming short story.
Those players are whales.
In the case of Star Citizen, the role of “free players” as the base of the proverbial food chain are the basic package buyers: the $45 (on sale) or $60 “starter ships” that are, in my limited experience, so bad at getting players started that players either volunteer (or are hired) to be crew for other players, or are willing to drop a couple hundred dollars for one the game’s
true starter ships, that are worthy of the name.
Asking for money, or borrowing another player’s ship, because you’re an ”Elite Refugee” works as well.
At any rate, once you’ve spent about a thousand dollars, you get “High Admiral” status (IIRC) and can now see the
expensive ships and game packages, including the fabulous $20,000+ Legatus package. Back when CIG was still promising to have thousands of player in a single instance, there was quite a bit of speculation by the “uber whales” to have battles with multiple capital ships crewed by scores (if not hundreds) of F2P players.
