The whales foot the final bills though. Unlike the vc's money which goes through economical cycle, there will always be suckers for those gacha gambling games

Those whales are something else. That's all I'm going to say.

I will _never_ understand sinking money into a mobile game like that. Blows my mind. Couldn't even be worth the effort.

There are two types of whales. Those who plow an objectively large but relatively (to them) small sum into the game are fine. Those who fell victim to psychological programming to feed every dollar in are not.

Yeah, sure. Let's go with this. Wanna buy a 250 dollar cash card for Arbys?

Even if it cost a few dollars to me (to equal their $10,000 for example) I just wouldn't do it. Just feels like I'm being taken for a ride... which doesn't feel good haha.

Same way with games I enjoy. I never tend to buy the "skins" or "cosmetics" unless one _really_ clicks with me.

The trick is that you have a big chunk of your social graph in the game

You aren't spending $25 on video game shit, you're spending $25 on a fun skin to show your pals, or upgrades to help your friends beat some boss, or whatever

Once you get on that path, it can lead pretty normal people to some very dark places indeed

At least those people are getting something out of game. Completionists/collectors having their OCD taken advantage of are going to an even darker place.

Ah... I think you've given me the missing puzzle. I will say I don't get sucked into those "one up" wars (I really hate spending money on things I feel are gimmicks) _but_ this makes a lot more sense.

That's because the easiest to get new customers for a mobile game are the ones who play similar games but not yet this one. The customers then play the game and buy more in-game currency than was paid for the ads.

> Also I downloaded a QR code scanning app and every time I tried to scan a QR code it showed me an ad for another QR code scanning app lol.

Maybe you've already found a decent app (or realised that your camera has a built-in scanner), but the confusingly-named Barcode Scanner (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.zxi...) scans QR codes without fuss.

I should have been clearer, it’s more for debugging - so I need to read the content of the code rather than actually opening it. Eg if there’s an app configured for it then scanning with the built in camera just opens that app and never displays the content.

I’m on iOS, tried a few but they all wanted a subscription and were a terrible experience without it. So I wrote simplescan.vercel.app / https://github.com/mcintyre94/simplescan which does the job for me! Though Apple have broken using the camera when you save it to your Home Screen and open it as an app which is annoying.

> I’m on iOS, tried a few but they all wanted a subscription and were a terrible experience without it. So I wrote simplescan.vercel.app / https://github.com/mcintyre94/simplescan which does the job for me! Though Apple have broken using the camera when you save it to your Home Screen and open it as an app which is annoying.

Ah, that explains it! Your usecase explains it, but I'm reasonably assuming Android because recent iOS versions have it built-in.

> recent iOS versions have it built-in

As does Android, just open the Camera app and point to the code.