Mobile games—the kind played primarily on phones, though also on tablets—have a very, very strange property that they allow an effectively unlimited amount of money to be spent on them, and a few people—perhaps one in 100—do spend extraordinary amounts of money on them. There are people who will spend hundreds to thousands of dollars a month on a mobile game.

To put this into perspective, until recently, the fanciest games with the best graphics and hundreds of hours of gameplay with stories and voice acting and so-on could be bought for a one-time price of around $70. Many feature free online play, but those that required monthly subscriptions (servers aren’t free to run) would cost $10-$20 per month. I said “until recently” because the big game studios are starting to notice the business model of mobile games and are trying to emulate it.

What is particularly strange about the “whale” phenomenon is that the things bought are generally small advantages in the game. This is why the whales spend so much money—to get a significant advantage, they need to spend extraordinary amounts of money in order for these small advantages to add up. To put it more bluntly, they’re paying substantial amounts of money for slightly bigger numbers in a database and in some cases slightly different artwork to show how upgraded an item is. To be fair, if their slightly bigger number is greater than that of someone who they fight, the game says that they win instead of the other guy winning.

I really don’t understand this phenomenon. I don’t mean that I’m critical of the whales. As C.S. Lewis said in a different context:

I see no reason why I should volunteer views as to how other people should spend their own money in their own leisure among their own friends. It is highly probable that they want my advice on such matters as little as I want theirs.

But one thing I think worth talking about is that I suspect that the whale phenomenon is really an expression of (admittedly predatory) developers discovering a need that some people have. Or, more properly, a set of needs with a key characteristic in common. People do not accidentally spend a thousand dollars a month for many months in a row. Whatever exactly it’s doing for them, it’s clearly doing something quite significant, because these people are not all the wealthy children of billionaires. And where there is a need that people with money have, someone will eventually take their money in order to fulfill that need.

Which makes me wonder what they had been spending this money on before mobile games showed up.