> I have seen no evidence that is true.

I saw hard data for at least the company I worked for, which may not be widely generalizable, but is still better than nothing. We also knew a lot about our player-base; we had community forums, regular meetups, bought gifts for "high rollers" as if we were a casino with attached hotel, etc.

Those Saudi trust-funders aren't made up examples; they're real people — high-touch "tier 1" users, that would regularly request features from the dev team to cater to their ability to better screw with one-another.

> I guess most of them would be a person working a regular office job who has $1000 dollars to spend per month and throws it at the game since they are bad at managing money / say no.

That's not a whale. Whales — at least for us — were people spending at least $10k/mo on the game — with a few spending $100k/mo or more. You can't even do that without being disgustingly rich. It's like collecting F1 cars as a hobby; there are only certain people in the world who can even start down that road, and none of them are going to go bankrupt doing it.

Maybe our games were an exception in the industry, in that there were effectively ways to spend as much as you want, as fast as you want in the games, with money directly translating to a marginal increase in relative "power", without any rate-limiting bottleneck of needing to serially buy and open lootboxes, and especially no bottleneck of there being lootboxes that don't actually get you anything. Because of that, our whales were so profitable in aggregate that we really didn't need to care about making a single dollar from our non-whale users.

But like I said, we did made almost all of our money from the whales, and then basically discouraged anyone else from giving us more than the bare minimum amount of money. If a player was spending trivial (for us—which even included $1000/mo) amounts of money, as a series of smaller, high frequency transactions, we then considered that to be a profile of "an addict spending whenever they get money", and set up our backend infrastructure to detect such players and degrade their gameplay experience over time to suck all the reward-feeling out of the game for them, without actually cutting them off cold-turkey (which we believed would just have them switch over to another addictive game.)

The whole thing was a scheme to bilk the rich, rather than a scheme to make as much money as possible. Sort of like a product that's free for individuals and a million dollars per month for companies.

> Seeding rewards early to a person/group is a common way to trigger gambling addiction. So to me it seems like you are doing the worst of the worst kind of gambling addiction scheme here, since you admitted to not having fair chances per try but instead seed out items to trigger gambling addiction in people.

I don't know why you're focusing so much on gambling; we had some lootbox-like elements, but they weren't the money-makers (this was 2012; lootboxes weren't the same all-encompassing front-and-center business model they are today.) Our "games" were essentially continuous auctions for leaderboard positions. People could still get addicted to them—but not for anything like the reasons people get addicted to gambling.