Streamer priority confirmed. PoE is free to play, so play it for free, but Boycott GGG.

About streamers... They rarely look like they are actually enjoying themselves to me. This is all a perception thing and I can't know how they feel, but when they sing the praises of the game what I hear is "I like my job, there are much worse ways to make a living."

I wonder how they'd really feel about the game if it wasn't their livelihood. Anyway they just look tired and annoyed to me more often than not but I could be projecting since I'm tired and annoyed lately.

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Omnicide24 wrote:

About streamers... They rarely look like they are actually enjoying themselves to me. This is all a perception thing and I can't know how they feel, but when they sing the praises of the game what I hear is "I like my job, there are much worse ways to make a living."

I wonder how they'd really feel about the game if it wasn't their livelihood. Anyway they just look tired and annoyed to me more often than not but I could be projecting since I'm tired and annoyed lately.

Well, you can like and enjoy the game, even if you disagree with some changes they've made. I'm not a streamer, and I don't think I qualify as a whale, but I do enjoy the hell out the game still, but I do disagree with some changes.

Sadly, the moment you defend some changes or do in fact like the game, you are put in a certain bright box from the middle ages.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Ugh. You lumped the streamers in with the whales...again? I'm pretty sure I've dismantled this notion that we have anything significant in common elsewhere but let's stick to the specific context here.

No one is debating the vested interests that streamers have, as compared to those with expendable money, or the means to contribute more significantly. A streamer can hate fuck the game simply because its how they make their living. If anyone thinks Mathil really enjoys playing 25k hours of PoE and everyday each league, they are delusional. He has even admitted as much that doing this for a living has sapped the enjoyment out of gaming for him in general.

The point I was trying to make, again, was that its clear GGG looks at player segments as differing "piles of money". If pile "x" represents revenue "y", they seem to have pushed their development strategy in that direction.

What I think they have failed to understand fully, is the massive fluctuations in average player generated revenue by making significant design decisions.

So sure, if you look at just raw numbers, a single whale might represent the average revenue of a 1000 average players (numbers out of my ass), so perhaps you think an emphasis on a whales feedback, or maybe even giving their positive support too much importance, is validated.

However if your design decisions impact tens of thousands of average customers negatively, you get the cluster-fuck that PoE is right now.

I guess the TLDR is yea, I've lumped the streamer money and whale revenue into similar piles of money, because it represents the miscalculation and flawed logic GGG is seemingly following regarding the average, normal, PoE/Arpg gamer.

Hopefully the lesson learned is a million dollars from 100,000 people is the same as 1 million dollars from 2,000. I dont know if this miscalculation is from a position of contempt, or more ignorance / incompetence. Tbh neither is a good look, and highly disappointing.

This conversation is pretty interesting.


The whales are not just people with money to blow but also people who don't prioritize their money in a healthy way. Among the high spenders the ones who spend a higher percentage of their relative income are probably more likely to stay out of a need to justify their sunk cost I'm guessing. You can't just whale all kinds of different games if that whaling actually hurts.

The things these two types of whales like and want from the game could average out to be quite different. Put the same person in two wildly different states of financial security and you might not recognize they are the same person anymore, which doesn't even begin to ponder the difference in psychology between either of these types of whales and the average person, let alone a streamer.

It's fascinating, the real game being played in business and in games is on human psychology. How much do you think GGG shoots in the dark vs following the advice of analysts who have studied this?

It's skinner boxes all the way down, always has been.

Im convinced streamers get many perks to promote the game that normal players dont receive.

Its clever marketing

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Omnicide24 wrote:

The whales are not just people with money to blow but also people who don't prioritize their money in a healthy way. Among the high spenders the ones who spend a higher percentage of their relative income are probably more likely to stay out of a need to justify their sunk cost I'm guessing. You can't just whale all kinds of different games if that whaling actually hurts.

This assertion makes no sense to me?! If what you're trying to say is that no one could possibly have enough net worth to make giving tens of thousands of dollars to a game developer a reasonable decision, I'd just like to say that someone paid Jeff Bezos 28 million dollars for a ride to space.

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Turtledove wrote:

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Omnicide24 wrote:

The whales are not just people with money to blow but also people who don't prioritize their money in a healthy way. Among the high spenders the ones who spend a higher percentage of their relative income are probably more likely to stay out of a need to justify their sunk cost I'm guessing. You can't just whale all kinds of different games if that whaling actually hurts.

This assertion makes no sense to me?! If what you're trying to say is that no one could possibly have enough net worth to make giving tens of thousands of dollars to a game developer a reasonable decision, I'd just like to say that someone paid Jeff Bezos 28 million dollars for a ride to space.

I didn't assert what you think, I'm talking about how there are also whales who don't have a large amount of money but still spend way too much on games.

Believe it or not Chris and I discussed that topic quite a bit. As I said we both know people who are...irresponsible with their money. How could we not? He's big into Magic, I'm big into online gaming.

But I do think most whales can afford to whale. Certainly most of the PoE whales I've known were basically just throwing some cash at something they loved and wanted to support. That said PoE whales are a different breed. We did not buy power, at least not overtly, and so the simpler connection between whaling a f2p game and some sort of rush of adrenaline from getting a super rare gacha item or just straight up massacring others isn't a factor. There was, like or not, an element of philanthropy to being a PoE whale. That has its own reward, its own rush. But it's not the sort that attracts people who spend beyond their means.

And that was and I hope is important to Chris. While he has created a horrifically addictive game, to which casino comparisons are more than warranted, the currency of it is not money but time. And time is a much fairer resource to ask of players...technically.

So I disagree that PoE whales are spending beyond their means. Or people supporting it in general. This just isn't that sort of addiction. Doesn't meant it's not seriously frivolous but frivolity is key to entertainment and pleasure. I believe I was one of the game's biggest whales and I know one of the others near my level and neither of us were ever left without a roof over our heads, bills unpaid or meals skipped. That isn't a brag of wealth but an indication that it's all just a game of scale and sustainability. I didn't stop supporting PoE because I can't. I stopped because it was no longer giving me joy.

And part of that loss of joy was the stark awareness that no matter how much I put in, it wasn't worth anything to GGG compared to what streamers were pulling in on the regular. There is philanthropy and charity, but those are often the shiny side of a very dirty, very selfish coin. Elsewise why would people donate to get their name on a building? Or...on a wooden noticeboard...

Or "support" to get their sword into a game?

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I just read an absolutely excellent article, a Long Read about games, GGG's owner and their country of origin on the Guardian, to which I shall not link due to CoC but if you are interested (and I think every gamer should be) search for "no ghouls guardian". Should be easily located. I am not encouraging any discussion of said article here. But I think it relates to the larger issue of devs having to dance through ethical battlefields if they want those "truckloads of money".

Apologies if I didn't reply directly. My thumbs are about done trying to form words for now.

Have a lovely weekend. Back to Titan Quest for me...or maybe No Man's Sky: Animal Crossing edition...

Yeah that article hurts my head. I'll just say it's hilarious that anyone will cow tow to all the censorship values with one hand while pushing the envelope really hard against what they consider "family values" with the other hand. Not really speaking about any one company in particular but like you say this isn't the place to discuss that further I guess.

Back to the whale discussion, I read an article some years back that interviewed someone who is exactly like the type of whale I guess I'm trying to illustrate. Low to middle income with a mortgage etc etc who blows all his money on mobile games. I think if they exist at all it would be silly to underestimate how many exist. It gets compared to real gambling for a reason, regardless of whether there are irl benefits at stake when you gamble, the system itself attracts and addicts people who harm themselves in the process.

Collectibles should not be underestimated in this area as well, I don't consider PoE to be P2W in any meaningful way. There are people who feel like they must have all the shinies though, how many people own every mtx that has been released in the game and what percentage of that population do you think the cost of owning them all was a healthy expenditure?

I'm not assigning any blame to the business really, I believe people are responsible for themselves. It's still a little tragic at the same time to see so many people who apparently lack the tools in their heads to make better choices.

Anyway, establishing that there are at least 2 vastly different types of people spending excessive amounts of money on the game, I am supposing that what these two types enjoy and want from the game may be wildly different. People who have invested a lot into the game probably feel a different level of attachment to it based on what percentage of their income they have spent. People seem to need to justify large purchases to themselves. Buyers remorse triggers cognitive dissonance.

@Charan that was a great guardian article. I was surprised that GGG did not get a mention.