I don't know if this is a joke or not (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Wednesday, October 25, 2017, 16:07 (2592 days ago) @ Harmanimus

I appreciate the points you bring up and your concern for the wellbeing of folks who may be taken advatage of. There is some great reading provided here and some informed opinions on micro-transactions. However, you say the following:

So are my study-based numbers misleading? I don't think so.

And I do draw issue with that. Contextualizing data with assumptions to elicit a response supporting your existing conclusions is dangerous. The first article is being used to provide additional information and contextualize certain aspects of the business practices but provides no additional information to support what portion of people making major purchases, these "whales" as it is being referred to, are being exploited through addiction. Even the example of shifting development to support an individual spending 10k/mo can be considered misleading without sufficient additional information. 10k could literally be a budgetary afterthought. We simply do not know and so cannot treat such a conclusion as factual.

And in the context of 10% of a customer base being 50% of the revenue stream as being just as damning as presenting it as being 0.15% I just cannot agree with. Without broader context you are basically telling me that the numer 1 and the number 67 have no practical distinction. And I am not saying that there aren't folks in that group who are addicted and/or being exploited, just that you cannot present it as a fact that they all are, or (unless I missed a secontion on socioeconomic demographics) that any specific bolume are. It weakens your argument because you are presenting an unsupported claim as fact. And yeah, appealing to emotional responses gets a reaction, but it makes it harder for people to accept other conclusions you reach because there now exists a question of the validity of your conclusion.

That's my issue with your use of those numbers, because your conclusion isn't supported by them - a correct conclusion or not.

Thanks for clarifying. It's much easier to provide a nuanced response when I get a nuanced reply :)

I'm not not conflating 10% with 0.15%; they're different percentages and are not at all the same as saying 1 is the same as 67.

0.15% of players is the same as 10% of *paying* players is the same as 50% of microtransactional revenue (I actually found articles claiming as much as 70%, but I didn't find the research as generally applicable as this study - it was usually limited to a single app or family of apps). So we can tell, thanks to these numbers:

98.5% of all players pay nothing at all.
1.5% of players pay *something* Of those, 50% of the payments come from a total of 1.35% of all players.
0.15% of all players pay for the remaining 50% of all purchases, which is the same as saying 10% of all *paying* players cover half of the payments.

To describe this as 10% of the paying players vs. as 0.15% of all players is, I think, just as damning. A significant minority of the players accounts for a disproportionally higher portion of the revenue. That concerns me either way. Maybe it's because I already saw how few actual players ever pay at all, but those two numbers tell me the same information.