I've noticed that there seems to be a tendency to lie about how little you spend in a F2P game. That is, you'd have a F2P game with a very obvious P2W structure, and someone will walk past with some super expensive cash shop item, but if you see those guys in some generic 'how much money you spend on this game?' thread they'll usually be saying they only spent very little if any at all. I mean, we know from statistics that something like at least 90% of the players never spend money on anything so obviously those who spend have to spend quite a bit to make up for all the freeloaders. It's not like most games even give you a chance to somehow earn that fancy $100+ cash shop item via any other means. Besides, we're still talking about an English speaking audience here, where having a lot of money to spend is generally considered a good thing. Shouldn't people be saying "I make 7 digit money and this is chump change compared to my McMansion' (regardless of whether this is true or not)? Even back when I played MMORPG I suspected all the super hardcore players are independently wealthy because you can't live your parent's basement for 5 years in a row and never have to work unless you've money from elsewhere to cover it (and a couple of those guys are permanently disabled and live off government stuff). Unless you ended up mortgaging your house to pay for a game, I don't know why you'd want to hide that stuff. Besides, even if you did, you can always lie about it. This is the Internet after all, and it seems like lying about being rich is better than lying about being poor.
It really depends on who you're talking to - some people belong to a culture of modesty, others want to exagerate their hard work - and view the buying in as an easy route which gives them an advantage they don't want to admit to, and whimsical spenders just might have lost track - I'm kind of like that with iTunes, Steam, and eShop =P
As for F2P games - when your daily install base is consistently above 50K, and your daily active users is consistently in the millions, you only need a few of them to actually be spenders in order to turn a large profit. There are different types of spenders, some are whales, others are dolphins, and others are minnows. Minnows generally purchase only what they feel is necessary; and will heavily scrutinize all purchases. Dolphins are more consistent spenders and generally buy all of the content that they are sold on - they may or may not buy anything from a given content update/ may or may not rush, etc... Whales are the all-consumers, they don't scrutinize, if it is there - they will buy it; they might scrutinize in the other direction "Time for my regular purchase of all new content, but this really expensive thing - do I really need this?" - I imagine with whales money is no object so they probably don't pay much attention to what they do with their pocket account.
When it comes to gaining spenders - some players go into games with the intention of being a spender - others just need a taste - and makin them a minnow is a great way to get converts. Sometimes a player doesn't know they're a dolphin until they're a minnow; so F2P devs need to incentivize minnow type spending behaviour while heavily serving dolphins and whales. It is a huge deal Turning a game of 1% game spenders into 1.5% spenders while mainting DAU - if your dev and maintenance costs are flat, then that 50% revenue increase is all pure profit.
