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.
And what you describe also shows why the typical SC white knight defense of "Its not pay to win, there is nothing to win" is pure guff, because P2W means a lot more than just paying to gain a competitive advantage over others.
