If you think from a business perspective, you know that those players don't matter. New players will buy this stuff before they even get into the "real" game, meaning they get out of season.

The big money comes from whales who buy costumes to sell/melt them. Those are the players who spent thousands per month. New players who spend 200-300 at the start and then maybe from time to time again a bit for a VP or a costume are just small fishes.

Devs recently stated their attachment to owpvp, and the vision have never been to make a pk game, neither has it been my dream.

And to this day, BDO is a game with owpvp, implying pk, and this "hostile environment" works fine, in fact. Not many Mmorpgs can boast the same success.

You don't know the game, its orientation, nor even the opinions of the players you're talking to, yet you want to give lessons?

You're not even a good sophist. 

Of course you have the inside financial information to back up your claims right?  SOURCE NEEDED!!!

If I didn't know any better, I'm only kidding WE ALL KNOW BETTER............ One might think you are pushing a narrative that toxic DFS players are the ones funding this game while casual PVE players contribute next to nothing.

Final Fantasy must be really struggling financially.  I mean the have the largest player base a positive reputation and money flowing in all the time, but they don't have those PVP whales.  Final Fantasy is just like a dead game brah.  They will never make it with those petty casuals.

Do you ever make a statement about anything ever that isn't just a guise for that trash narrative?

I just gave away my grind location to another player.  WHAT!!!!!!! WHY!!!!!!!! WHAT!!!! He asked nicely and wasn't a DFS obnoxious toxic player so I felt like it.  It felt good actually.  My way of helping to fight the toxic and entitled garbage I usually come across in BDO.

That's pretty much the general knowledge for games like this with a very strong cashshop or as you constantly call it "p2w". You have a few whales that spend a lot and the rest barely matters.

WRONG.  The P2W business model has been compared to other business models with very disturbing results.  However, those results mainly conclude that P2W garbage especially with BAD products is more profitable than other models.

What is DOES NOT generally include is a break down of which spending ranges account for the majority of sales.  Whales spending on an individual basis does not equate to them being the MARJORITY of all spending.

Most examples are also complete trash.  For example they would brag about a whale spending $100,000 as if that means something.  A simple *ahem* this is a BILLION DOLLAR comany and your giving an example of 100k?  Not good enough.

This article sums it up pretty well.

Whales are massive game spenders and are more loyal to the games they choose. They spend a lot on micro-transactions in an attempt to enhance their gaming experience. Data from the top-grossing games show that whales are the smallest percentage of users but are responsible for more than 50 percent of the revenue. 

Game developers are after these users because they often mean the difference between breaking even and making a profit.

Whales are the reason why F2P games can be a good source of revenue and why p2w is going nowhere. If p2w is possible, then you'll have whales and they will whale. The rest of the playerbase just gets enough to keep them engaged and get some money from time to time, but they are the minority in terms of revenue generation.

So it's pretty clear that games like bdo will cater towards the big spenders and big spenders are not your average gamer who playes maybe 1-3h a day, does some grinding, lifeskilling and maybe some pvp here and there. Big spenders are those that buy costumes to melt for crons or sell them so they can progress faster than anyone who's not spending as much.

Also, whales are usually more loyal to games because of the money invested into it and not wanting to see their progress go to waste or other players catching up. Other players are usuallly quicker to jump from game to game due to no heavy investment into a specific game. Keeping your whales happy is the most important thing on the road to monetary success for a game.

I think it is a good idea to check the numbers against the headline. Some of these web articles are poorly written because they take figures and quotes from different sources. For example, that picture has a headline that says "2-6% of users drive 95% of IAP purchase value" and "only 5% of our users buy IAP". Then it has a chart below showing the breakdown of spending tiers. If you enter the numbers in the chart into a spreadsheet, you get the following result:

This chart tells us that the lower 96% of users drive 55% of revenue, an order of magnitude higher than the 5% implied in the headline. In fact, 82% of the revenue come from people who spend an average of $29.27 or less per month. That is a reasonable gaming budget for North American gamers (the chart is for NA players). Of course, the person is spending that amount on 1 game, but you might be surprised by how many mobile gamers play only 1-2 games (plus more than half of that revenue comes from people who spend $8.15 a month or less).

There are also other issues with using averages to examine an extreme outlier like Genshin. For example, according to the chart, killer whales account for 1% of the player base, spending an average of $70 a month. If Genshin wants to generate $1.7 billion a year from just killer whales, it would need 24 million killer whales. Because this is supposed to be 1% of the player base, that would imply Genshin had 2.4 billion players in the last year. You would think Genshin would be a much bigger cultural phenomenon if about 1/3 of the entire world played it.

We know that nothing you have to say on the subject matter is listening to.  This is because your agenda is to ALWAYS put your narrative first.  It just seeps out everywhere.  You desparately want to portray these "DFS players" as huge whales and thus being so important.  It's pretty foul smelling.

The TRUTH is the infomation is very hard if not impossible to discern.  Some games will have higher ranges, console vs mobile may yield different results.  There will NEVER be an concrete way to even define "whale".

What is really helpful is the last example on Genshin.  People like to give these super low numbers of how many whales there are, but they are magically supposed to create BILLIONS not MILLIONS in revenue.  This theme is also common with the "excuse model".  People claim THEY are NEVER the problem because someone else spends more.

I have had people that admit to spending $1,000's on P2W trash try to just argue someone else is spending $10,000 so it doesn't matter.

In the end you have not given enough evidence to substantiate your claims and there are PLENTY of sources that contradict lets face it "the narrative you desparately want to push" ;)

open close On: Jan 30, 2023, 09:15 (UTC), Written by JackBelling

And where did you pull this from?

Stats say something else:

Minnows, represent less than 1% of the total revenue, whereas whales generated 86.6% of the revenue in our games sample. It is important to note at this point, that the revenue is derived both from IAPs and in-app advertising. (source)

As a reminder, PA knows its stuff about that, far better than any random forum participant.

So if they choose to target this audience, and keeps targeting it, that's because it WORKS. If there was a huge population of other types of players reading to spend money on BDO, without any drawback for the game, FOR SURE they would go for it.

And don't forget that PA is planning other games. Maybe they don't want BDO to be in conflict with these targeted audiences. 

Exactly. Cashshop clearly shows who's their main target.