You ' ll need at least a customer base to start acquiring whales to support your game and you can only squeeze them so much before they begin to jump ship . When even your most dedicated customers start leaving you , then you have a problem . The games I used to whale on tried squeezing the customer base harder when some of the more famous whales in the community started jumping ship with predictable results . Coupled with a lot of bugs that keep coming back , a promised feature that was buggy and was ultimately never delivered and the power creep gated by a hard paywall that affected the competitive aspect of the game and the game sank . Source Former whale and one of the first to close the wallet , run and never come back .