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A comment on It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal. Parent comment

Re:It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal by Karrot_Kream on Sunday June 05, 2022 @05:32AM (#31629359)
It's hard for a person in the throes of addiction to last as a whale for long. Most long lived whales are likely to be from wealthy families, or the fun side addiction for a very wealthy individual. That doesn't change the fact that there are addicted people who spend a large percentage of their income on a game. Whales are one thing and addicted players are another.
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Re:It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal by patrec on Sunday June 05, 2022 @06:15AM (#31629601)
> It's hard for a person in the throes of addiction to last as a whale for long.

They don't have to. Repeatedly unearthing cow-clickers whom you can milk for $10'000 before sending them into financial ruin sounds like a much more viable business strategy to me than trying to build a portfolio of people both rich and dumb enough to sustainably cow-click.

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Re:It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal by Karrot_Kream on Monday June 06, 2022 @03:21PM (#31644767)
> build a portfolio of people both rich and dumb enough to sustainably cow-click

I think you're putting wealthy folks on way too high of a pedestal. The wealthy aren't some hyper-rational, utility-maximizing robots. They're people with likes and dislikes like any other. Being a whale for a very rich person or a very rich family is a drop in the bucket in terms of their net worth. Plenty of people can keep their degeneracy to a budget.

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Re:It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal by j_4 on Sunday June 05, 2022 @05:56AM (#31629501)
I don't necessarily disagree, but for the purpose of my argument this is splitting hairs. Both audiences are functionally the same from the game design standpoint.
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Re:It costs $110k to fully gear up in Diablo Immortal by cycomanic on Sunday June 05, 2022 @06:13AM (#31629589)
Why do you think the mechanics of nonchemical addiction are different to chemical addiction? I certainly see plenty of nonrich people being addicted to drugs and essentially spend everything they have on drugs (the proximity to crime is obviously an additional factor)
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