Now despite the fact that I dislike whales, I couldn't help to want to know more about this concept. It turns out that is a recurrent phenomenon that spins around social gaming where this users determined as 'whale' users are the ones that significantly spend a lot of money, and when I say a lot it means that for some free-to-play games only the top 10 users are the ones that represent a 50% profit for the company, just to put an example.
Now I'm not very good at talking about strategies when it comes to marketing or any economic related topics, and neither am a person who would spend money on any social or free-to-play games, but while doing some research I came across a talk by Jared Psigoda done for the Game Developers Conference 2012. The session is called "$100,000 Whales - An introduction to Chinese Browser Game Design" and as explanatory as the title can be, this session that lasts for nearly an hour by the CEO of Reality Square Games is so interesting that anyone interested in game developing or design should really watch.
Now we all now how much of a power nation China is, but when it comes to news for videogames I can only find either American or Japanese products. In this talk you can clearly see, with statistics, the reason why China it's its own market and when he points out the difference in numbers, not only of users, but on servers and general user behaviour, I couldn't imagine there was such a big difference in the design of a video game.
I can't come to details as the examples are something I can't come up to pronounce, but it certainly opened my eyes to a whole new conceptualization of a game mechanic, and different approaches that a game company can take. To be honest, I feel now that any game company that releases one game and it's happy about just publishing looks nothing in comparison to the shark companies in China.
Certainly scary, but worth keeping a notion of this concepts as even as game designers we can contribute to make a game successfully.
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