Quote Originally Posted by Jeffrey Uy View Post
Whale? What?
A whale is a customer who pays a lot of money. The term originated from casinos where their revenue primarily came from the really rich people with gambling addictions rather than all those other people who weren't rich and didn't gamble away thousands all the time, but was quickly adopted fby businesses and companies as a term used for Free-to-play games as well. Basically putting up with all those free players in hopes they will find a few players willing to spend thousands on their game.

The "whale" analogy stems from the idea that the world (or at least, the potential customer base) is an ocean, but the majority of customers are low-paying (and free in the case of free-to-play games) "fishes" that don't provide much meat (money), and the free-to-play company is casting a really big fishing net (by saying, "Our game is FREE!") hoping that somewhere among those little fishes, they'll net a customer who pays a ton of money, the whale. That one single whale is worth more than all the rest of the fishes combined.

To give an idea how much whales spend compared to everyone else, and how reliant on catching those whales Free-to-play games are, most free-to-play games derive 70-95% of their revenue (incoming money from customers) from the small group of whales that comprise 5% of their player base.

....anyways, yea, to get high VIP, you need to be a big fat whale (IE, pay a LOT of money)