Whale

Fig. 1: A typical whale of the type this article is about

Fig. 2: A typical whale of the type this article isn't about

"I spared no expenses."

– John Hammond, Jurassic Park

"Don't ask questions, just consume product. And then get excited for next product."

– Jay Bauman, The Nerd Crew

Whales (infraorder: Cetacea) are some of the most majestic mammals on planet Earth. Despite their watery habitat, they require to breathe at the surface and do not possess gills. They count as one of the largest animals to ever exist, as well as one of the smartest, and many types have become very endangered species due mainly to overhunting. They have occasionally appeared as real world creature encounters in /tg/ related games like D&D or Pathfinder. But we could only wish this here article was only about them.

Whales, also known as Money-hoes, Consoomers, Addicts, Extra-spenders, "Superfans", EA's moneypit, the FOMO crowd, "Our dear and very faithful fanbase", are a fringe of consumers and, unfortunately, tabletop players who possess too much money for their own good. Although they vary in many ways, Whales are easily identifiable by their habit of buying shit that they shouldn't buy, but still do because, as they usually try to justify themselves;

• They can.
• It's their well hard-earned money. (no)
• And they can stop doing this at any time.
• The company will die without financial help.

In reality, they lose tons of money and are the victims of dangerous business practices and offers that more often than not border on what could considered scams. Companies like EA, Activision-Blizzard or Games Workshop profit off of those Whales when it comes to their shadiest practices. You name them; microtransactions, cosmetics, shit-deals, scams, lootboxes... This has an effect of making what practically everyone agrees sucks ass and complains about to work (read; bad games and bad offers), because Whales don't care about how they spend their money. This has a tendency of making a lot of peeps really mad, since they can't really stop them from spending like maniacs.

Why are whales like this?

A big part of this is what's known as the Skinner Box. In the 1950s, prof. B.F. Skinner ran some tests on pigeons using two types of test boxes. One had a button which if pushed dispensed a treat from a chute, the other a button which dispensed treats randomly. Birds locked in the first type simply pecked until they were full, but those in the second type kept pecking constantly. They also developed quirks, if one looked over their shoulder before a peck that released a treat they'd do it again before each peck. You get the same sort of responses with rats, along with humans. The casino industry is built on this.

Most Whales are descendants from people who suffer from shopping sprees. And they themselves have a certain mentality that pushes them to act this way. For one thing; most whales live in economically comfortable social spaces, or have always lived in conditions where they were permitted to obtain anything that they wished to have. That, or they had receive a form of trauma from a life from which they were refused a lot of things. This turned into an obsession with possessing things for the sake of possessing them, or be the talk of the town for a while.

We now live in a world in which there are sales constantly. In the heydays of shopping, such things happened once in a blue moon, so to temporarily boost sales to promote "luxury" items at a "fair" price. Now, what do we have? Black Friday, Summer Sales, Winter Sales, Fall Sales, Valentine's day Sales, Halloween Sales, Nth Anniversary Sales, coupons, reductions, packs, etc. Many people have been living in an environment that tells them to watch out for those reductions. But at the same time, they become easy victims to the scummiest of shit; like corpos augmenting prices just a little bit and then put everything on sale to make you think that you're in front of a good deal. And capitalism being what it is means that they have become very, very good at manipulating people's desires and making people believe that happiness can best be found through material goods.

Another common factor for this is the infamous Fear of Missing Out, or FOMO. This made a lot of companies' money, because people with this kind of syndrome hate a timer being set on an item they wish to have. So to bait them into buying quick and fast, they say put a time-limit on a set of items (which in most cases, they could sell at any time), and say; "Oh, there's a timer on that product! Better buy it now or else it's gone! Well, it could possibly come back, but who knows? Maybe it won't!".

This makes the Whale goes absolutely insane. But since they have the money and it works, companies get away with shitty practices that ruining all kinds of gaming. Something /tg/ and /v/ can both agree on. If you need any proof of this, just look at all the bullshit that GW pulled and worked, or the entirety of EA's career.

How does that affect hobbies and pop-culture, you may ask?

Everything is now made and produced to be consumable. Or at least, to fit a certain idea of narration and story-writing that goes directly into satisfying a specific niche of people. No Whales are alike, but they some groups share similarities in their taste for certain things. So to ensure that things are bought on the spot, franchises are tailor-suited into including certain tropes, designs or references that had an appeal in the past (or in the present), and try to sell many products around it until it turns into a fad. What do you think Funko Pops are? Do you think the people buying them actually enjoy the licenses represented? Bloody Hell no, it's just that feeling like you're a part of a greater community through the art of possessing merch makes Whales feel better about themselves.

See it this way; Whales weren't always like that. They actually enjoyed something at one point, and perhaps they still do. So say a company releases something related to what they once enjoyed, but the end result is catastrophically bad? Whales would still give it a shot, given how they see not supporting their brand as treason. This little "try" turns into a $500 investment. Ironically, in their attempt to "just try" something, they made the product profitable. Which leads to even more terrible shit to be produced because Whales will always support them. May they be blinded by nostalgia or have a very, very skewed vision of their relationship with the company.

Now it might sound like that Whales actually do not enjoy what they actually buy. But most of them do. Just like the most unstable shoppers, they have an interest in buying what they do buy. The most insincere of them are just into nerd shit because it's trendy. But plenty of Whales are nerds, or have grown an interest for such things. But their appreciation takes the form of mindless appreciation, meaning that they can't look past the issues of modern or old material and will always remain faithful to the brand they've grown attachment to. Leading to more and more terrible things to happen because they keep supporting it.

Famous whale-bait

Bundles: The most obvious form of merch. Just bring a bunch of individual items together and then sell it for some manner of discount.

• Pretty much the common state of vidya since 2010 involves adding pre-order incentives that not only get you the game the instant it comes out (on top of any potential playable demos you might be allowed to access), but also includes all sorts of special pre-packaged DLC and even physical merch like statues and vinyl records.
• Sites like Humble Bundle and Bundle of Holding let you purchase all sorts of stuff at steep discounts, from vidya to comics to - most notably for us fa/tg/uys - RPG books. If you aren't opposed to only having PDFs, you can occasionally find a bundle that includes dozens of books to a certain RPG that only costs around 30 bucks. Of course, what starts with one important bundle then gives way to another, and then another, discounting any packaged-in vouchers for other purchases...
• GW's been leading pretty hard into this with stuff like the Games Workshop Start Collecting! boxes and Vanguard Boxes giving a means to begin building an army, only to realize that you'll only be able to play small games without buying more. 10th Edition 40k is leaning harder into this with the Combat Patrol Boxes providing you a whole prepackaged army for you to play against other prepackaged armies. Did the pre-built army you buy suck more dicks than you did to afford it? You either go to regular 40k to build your army or just buy another pre-built army.
  • Adeptus Mechanicus War Convocation: The "I-Win" formation that seamlessly merged both Skitarii and Cult Mechanicus back when they were separate armies. Was purchasable as a single box in 7E and provided rules so utterly bullshit and OP that it was near impossible to lose.

Battlepasses: See this (presumably) free game? How do you make people pay for a game more than just once and in a regular interval? Battlepasses are essentially in-game programs that reward playing the game with certain in-game rewards that reset each month. However, paying for this battlepass not only speeds up your progression on that pass, spending enough on it also gets you to certain rewards that are otherwise inaccessible just by playing the game. Not only is this a recurring drain on the bank account, it also gives rise to the utterly paradoxical idea of treating this video game that you play to enjoy as a second job that pays in nothing physical.

DLC Pipelines: One of the skubbiest discussions on boards like /v/ revolve around the notion of an "expansion pack" and its difference with a "DLC Season Pass". For one thing, expansion packs actually expand on the game, whereas DLCs are often accused of filling big gaps in modern games. Henceforth, they are usually sold as a definitive part of the game, but one you gotta pay for. Whales who usually buy these are very faithful players, but they do not exactly care for the consequences of buying at large approximately $500 worth of DLCs. Companies take notes. They see all trade. Some games companies are starting to move away from the DLC/Expansion model to the "Live Service" model. What this means that you have to pay a monthly fee to be able to even access the game to begin with, and that the game is basically never finished as its continually added to, which can be really annoying for more story-centric games. What's especially annoying is that TTRPGs like D&D are starting to move to the Live Service model as well.

• Total War: Warhammer is famously guilty of this. Not only do you not have access to many of the central factions of the game if you don't actually spare a few all of your bucks, but the pipeline is so large that it might actually be more profitable to just start playing the tabletop version. Of course, nobody in the community even dares to approach the issue because this would mean directly calling out a system they have helped nurture for the past near-decade.
• Anything made by Paradox Interactive. The Wehraboos buying their games have practically given them so much money for their DLCs that they could fun a new Marshall plan on their own. They've been called out multiple times, but god forbid you directly confront their fanbase about this. They'll just call you "poor" and an "uncultured swine".
• Know who else is prone to suffer from this? TTRPGs. Not all of them, mind, but if you have a system that feels very incomplete or merely bare-bones, you'll be needing all those books just to get the relevant rules. Of course, this can lead to someone collecting every single book in a system, just to get all those fringe rules ideally.
  • Paizo in particular weaponizes this through their Adventure Path scheme, which has them split up what may have been a full adventure into smaller modules they release episodically for cheaper.
• GW is guilty of this as well back when you needed to buy the Chapter Approved series of books for the necessary points adjustments - a matter not made any easier by the fact that they released four of these (two Grand Tournament books for new matched play rules, two Munitorum Field Manuals for points updates) each year. It was only halfway through 40K 9E's lifespan that those dunces realized the problem of hiding mandatory rules updates behind a paywall and thus made the points updates free PDFs you can download from Warhammer Community.

Hats: What? It's just a hat. A silly hat. A wacky, unfitting hat. Hats are funny. Don't you wanna buy it? It won't affect the game. Of course not, but its got a price tag. Cosmetics are everywhere in modern video games; they serve zero purpose and they are the ones who most likely get defended by the public. Because they have no impact on the gameplay, so it must be all good, right? WRONG. The Whale is attracted to such frivolous bullshit. Even though in older games, there would've been in-game currency you could've won if you played legit, now its practically faster and more efficient to just drop that credit card and feed your spending addiction. For just a fucking hat.

• Famously, Team Fortress 2 and Counter Strike: Global Offensive are guilty of this. Big time. And their respective fanbases are in complete denial of how ludicrously ridiculous the whole ordeal became. Sure, you can buy hats at a very cheap price from resellers in the case of TF2, but CS:GO has a whole unhinged part of its fanbase (and that's saying something) who goes extremely crazy for a bunch of gloves. Unsurprisingly, some players and even content creators have become addicted to collecting those things, and the workshops of both games are filled to the brim with hats, warpaints and reskins. They even bicker about which hat should get added into the game. God forbid you actually confront them about it, they will just call you poor.
• Oblivion infamously had the Horse Armor debacle. It was one of the earliest examples of a company charging money for cosmetics, and was roundly mocked by the gaming community at the time. Oh, if only we knew of what was to come. Over a decade later, Bethesda would go overboard with microtransactions for Fallout 76, which became one of the many reasons why the game sucked so badly that Bethesda had to be sold to Microsoft.
• Darktide. In the game, you have the mandatory shop of frivolous wares, in which you can find hats. And this thing was designed by Satan's marketing team. To put it simply, there's a timer on all of the hats. If it goes off, the hat might be gone forever. To get them, you must obtain a certain amount of in-game bucks. By doing certain missions, which themselves are temporary. Funny thing is, you never have enough cash to buy the hats at the end of each mission, so you must max out your characters and carry those missions faster to get enough money in-time to obtain it. OR you buy it with Paypal. The choice is obvious to the whale.
  • Fat Shark never did this before. Vermintide had a similar system, but at least the pricetags were reasonable and you could actually obtain enough money through missions. Which actually aren't set on a timer and can be done at any given time. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with you, Fat Shark?

Lootboxes (Random Packaging IRL): Buying for an item that comes with a random chance of getting valuable in-game items, from minor stuff like emotes to important stuff like playable characters and good equipment. The fact that people will sink millions of dollars just to get this one rare item makes this the most harmful of perils to confront a whale as it preys upon the very real addiction to gambling.

• The Japanese managed to hone this down to such a point that they've given it a whole term: Gacha, which is derived from Gachapon, little coin-operated kiosks that give you random tiny toys. Any mobile games coming from somewhere in eastern Asia (mainly Japan, but also includes China and South Korea) pretty much wallow in this mechanic to uproarious success by having whales dump loads of cash for random drops in hopes of getting their waifu/husbando as well as the ability to min-max them to hell.
  • While not quite weeb, Star Wars Battlefront 2 was famously lambasted for its egregious overload of lootboxes. It's dependence on buying lootboxes to get all of the items in the game was so outrageous that it even got governments to turn a critical eye to the nature of the whole mess. Not helping was EA's own defense of this bullshit, which became the most downvoted comment in Reddit history.
  • Overwatch - that is, the first one - was viewed by some as the first case of lootboxes arriving in the west, but funnily enough all those boxes gave were mere cosmetics with the big rewards being super-rare character skins. Removing these boxes only for the costs of directly buying those same cosmetics at a significant markup was but one of the countless many mistakes that have put the sequel under a hail of criticism.
• Another industry that thrives upon this is Card Games. After all, you have no idea what cards you'll get so you'll be spending hundreds of bucks just so you can get that super-rare, nice-looking card that can finish your build.
• Many mobile games and games aimed at younger children take the lootbox model to a nasty degree, in that the game becomes unplayable or otherwise exceptionally grindy if you try to play for free.

Simping: While not (usually) rooted in anything /tg/ would care about, it is nonetheless one it can be subject to thanks to the rise of real-play livestreams like Critical Role on sites such as YouTube and Twitch. Essentially anyone who streams on any of those sites will get weird people who will dump dozens, hundreds, maybe even thousands just to see the cute girl on stream say their name. Why do they do this? Because these are people who sadly have lost touch with reality and view their relationship with the streamer as something closer than just a performer and an audience, the causes of this belief being a lengthy discourse on psychology us neckbeards playing make-believe with plastic toys aren't the most qualified for and only got worse with the 2020 pandemic.

• Simping has taken on another meaning as well, in that someone will pay a girl for NSFW material, usually only reserved to special paying individuals like them. While not as relevant to /tg/ as simps on TTRPG streams, the rise of sites like OnlyFans shows what lows these kinds of whales will go to. May go hand-in-hand with the above point, as part of the Twitch-to-OnlyFans pipeline of simpery.
• That said, the person on the other side of the stream isn't necessarily always winning, as that $100 they just received from some unlucky schmuck is split up between the streaming service, paying for relevant services, and paying the wages for any staff, and ultimately leaves the streamer with only a fraction of $100. Sometimes, that money will be spent on improving their streaming setup with new equipment or to pay for something behind-the-scenes, while other times they'll just blow it on petty shit like any of the other shit here.

Freemium: Also known as “free to play”. Acting with the same logic as “the first one’s free, kid!”, freemium games draw in whales with the promise of being able to dominate everybody by simply spending more money than the rest as well as plenty of victims to lord their financial prowess over, due there being no price for entry. Usually paired with artificially long grind times to obtain gear so as to neg people into spending some green in exchange for the digital equivalent of male enhancement pills, except they actually work for a time until they release something new and shiny you are required to buy to stand on top. Expect massive amounts of power creep to drive sales.

• Of course, this particular model sees it hooking into other monetization features with ease; typically you'll see discounted bundles to buy the hot new thing™ right away as well as a dependency on lootboxes to force people to spend more to get the hot new thing™.