A lot of "strange" economic situations ultimately boil down to whale hunting being the primary monetization model for a space. For example:
Vegas is notorious for this: especially in the past, for a person with a healthy relationship with gambling, Vegas was a really cheap vacation. Getting there's cheap relative to getting anywhere else in North America, hotel rooms were like half what you'd pay for an equivalent room elsewhere, and a lot of the entertainment was not terribly expensive. Turns out a couple of people dropping millions justifies losing money on a lot of guests.
There are a lot of mobile games that are ad supported. What are they advertising? Other mobile games. That seems weird, you don't normally see places advertising their competitors. Then you realize that the first game effectively is acting as part of the funnel for games more optimized for separating whales from large amounts of money. Your sudoku app probably doesn't have the ability to convince people to give them $10,000, but an ad here and there might push users towards base-builders and the ilk that can.
I suspect most advertising is a whale hunting game. There's no world where I go and buy a new car because I saw a YouTube ad for one. But if showing a 10 cent ad to 100,000 people causes 1 person buy the advertiser's truck with a $10,000+ margin versus their competitors', they're in the black.
I feel like we’re in an era of dark monetization patterns. This “whale” monetization reminds me of online advertising where if you aren’t paying you’re the product.
It isn’t quite the same but it’s something like, “if you aren’t paying, you’re incentivizing whales.”
Underneath all the darkness a business has to make money. People are voting with time and money that the whale strategy is optimal just like they vote with time and money that advertising is optimal.
I don’t know what to do about this all. It seems like it’s just a shitty fact of human nature.
Everybody in mobile gaming and gambling industries acknowledges that “whales” are mentally sick people with addiction issues, but if you don’t capture and monetize whales, your competitor will. Your game dev studio will dwindle over years until investors drain it dry, while your competitor builds private kindergartens and schools for their employees’ children in their third worldwide campus location.
Vegas is notorious for this: especially in the past, for a person with a healthy relationship with gambling, Vegas was a really cheap vacation. Getting there's cheap relative to getting anywhere else in North America, hotel rooms were like half what you'd pay for an equivalent room elsewhere, and a lot of the entertainment was not terribly expensive. Turns out a couple of people dropping millions justifies losing money on a lot of guests.
There are a lot of mobile games that are ad supported. What are they advertising? Other mobile games. That seems weird, you don't normally see places advertising their competitors. Then you realize that the first game effectively is acting as part of the funnel for games more optimized for separating whales from large amounts of money. Your sudoku app probably doesn't have the ability to convince people to give them $10,000, but an ad here and there might push users towards base-builders and the ilk that can.
I suspect most advertising is a whale hunting game. There's no world where I go and buy a new car because I saw a YouTube ad for one. But if showing a 10 cent ad to 100,000 people causes 1 person buy the advertiser's truck with a $10,000+ margin versus their competitors', they're in the black.