Editing Whale (section)

==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 [[Skub|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 <s>a few</s> 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.
* [[Stellaris|Anything]] [[Hearts of Iron|made]] [[Crusader Kings|by]] [[Europa Universalis|Paradox]] [[Victoria|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. [[Derp|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.
* [[The Elder Scrolls|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 [[Japan|Japanese]] managed to hone this down to such a point that they've given it a whole term: '''Gacha''', which is derived from ''Gacha''pon, 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.
** [[Blizzard|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 [[No Girls on the Internet|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 [[PROMOTIONS|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 “[[Drug|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 [[you|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&trade; right away as well as a dependency on lootboxes to force people to spend more to get the hot new thing&trade;.

[[Category:Gamer Slang]]