"we limit whales. When we were getting guys that were spending $20,000 a day in our game. (Editor’s note: Yes, we were incredulous about this figure too. But we double-checked with A Thinking Ape by e-mail on this and they said $20,000, as in real – not virtual – currency.)"
These people do exist. I used to play MMO's a lot more than I'd like to admit, and during the time I probably went through ~5k selling game items for real money and vice versa and personally dealt with some "whales". I can think of about 20 people who I knew from in game who spent sums in the range of 10-20k. I'm sure there's people who spent much more but I didn't ever talk to them directly.
I can understand spending that over the life of a game - but $20k every day? If they played 100 times a year - playing just twice a week - that would be over $2M per year. That is probably more than Charlie Sheen spends on hookers - I am sorry but I just can't believe it. What could they possibly be spending it on?
"we limit whales. When we were getting guys that were spending $20,000 a day in our game. (Editor’s note: Yes, we were incredulous about this figure too. But we double-checked with A Thinking Ape by e-mail on this and they said $20,000, as in real – not virtual – currency.)"