Let me ask you a question – how much do you typically like to spend on online games? I’m not really talking about games that you purchase once, and that’s that – I mean games where you can spend a practically infinite amount of money. Free to play games like “The Old Republic”, “Clash of Clans”, “Marvel Future Fight”, “Candy Crush Saga,” “Pokémon GO” and more, which are completely free to download and play for as long as you want, but you can use real life money to purchase things like skins, items, characters, weapons, in-game currency and other bonus goodies. How much do you typically spend on those types of games? Maybe you spend absolutely nothing, preferring to simply enjoy the game for absolutely free and see how far you can get within the limitations that free-to-play players encounter. Or maybe you just buy the bare minimum, such as the ability to have an additional life every single run in “Sonic Dash” for £1, or a subscription of 75 crystals every single day for about £3 in “Marvel Future Fight”. Or, if you’re like me, you occasionally like to open up your wallet, spending £10-15 on in-game items and bonuses in order to unlock that one lucrative character or upgrade the person you already have.

But there’s another type of players out there. Players who spend £100 or more every single month on their favorite mobile games, players who are determined to unlock absolutely every single thing that their game has to offer, and they don’t care how much money they need to throw at it. Within gaming communities, these types of players are known as “whales” and… Honestly, they’re nothing new at all. As a matter of fact, even if we go back to the time when the only free-to-play online games were online blackjack for real money, whales still existed in quite large numbers, except they were known under the far more prestigious title of “high rollers”. Actually, I don’t know why I’m even talking in past tense, since high rollers are still just as much of a thing as they’ve always been – that’s the reason why the highest blackjack limits online are as high as they are. Today, high rollers make up the majority of profits when it comes to online casinos, and the same holds true for whales in free to play titles. That’s precisely why so many games start to seem almost hostile towards their non-paying players at some point.

We already established that there’s quite a lot of similarities between high rollers and whales, but what are the differences? Well, we often tend to imagine both of them as incredibly rich people with lots of disposable income. I mean, hell, in order to be considered a high roller in many online casinos (and take advantage of their high roller bonuses) you need to deposit a three-digit sum, all at once. It’s ridiculous! There’s no way most people can afford that! On the other hand, whaling isn’t really about spending a whole ton of money – it’s about knowing how to spend your money, and on what. I’d like to point you towards this Reddit thread, in which a whale from the game “Marvel Avengers Academy” explains things from his own point of view. It’s not really that he’s spending thousands upon thousands on the game in order to get everything – he’s spending relatively small amounts (still huge by mobile game standards, but certainly fitting within most players’ disposable income) in just the right way. Many assume that both whaling and high rolling are all about just throwing as much money into it and hoping for the best, but as a matter of fact, that couldn’t be further from the truth. There’s a whole lot more strategy when it comes to how you spend your money than there ever is in regular gambling and gaming, and the notion that whales and high rollers are just dumb rich guys that don’t know how to play is as ridiculous as it is false.