[derefr]

I don't deny that these people do exist. My point was that they—surprisingly!—don't pay the salaries of the devs at these game studios. The whales do. The studios can afford to keep the profit from the whales and lose the profit from the addicted middle-class.

And many of these studios are going this way! Even back when I was at the company I referred to (~2012), they were already building profiling logic into their backend to try to find the people spending "out of their range" and, effectively, stage interventions for them. They don't want these customers. They aren't their core demographic, any more than they're the core demographic of casinos, or than alcoholics are the core demographic of bars. And like a bar, they'd really rather "cut them off."

[gruez]

>And like a bar, they'd really rather "cut them off."

why? absent any legal requirements (which bars and casinos may have), isn't it better from a business perspective to get some money off them before they go bankrupt?

[AnthonyMouse]

> absent any legal requirements (which bars and casinos may have), isn't it better from a business perspective to get some money off them before they go bankrupt?

Not necessarily.

Suppose your customer has $500/month in disposable income. Then you want $500/month from them. $1000/month is bad. It means they're borrowing money, and every dollar they borrow they not only have to pay back, they have to pay interest on -- at the crazy high rates that people with bad self control have to pay. All of which comes out of the $500/month you could have had from them going forward.