I run one. When I've done cursory searches on our whales, I find people who appear (at least from LinkedIn/Facebook) to have great jobs. I don't get the impression the large guys can't afford it, generally speaking. I am sure it happens.
I trust that what you are saying is accurate for your company. (And, thanks for saying it. That's one data point I hadn't heard before.) It is at variance with things I have heard about other companies. I am, unfortunately, not able to elaborate.
Good article that got passed around in my office on Friday. People who are 'gamers' and by extension people who make games tend to look at "whales" as gullible stupid people but a lot of us tend to exhibit the same behaviour about other things all while congratulating ourselves for not pay 5 bucks to support a game we've played for 50 hours.
That said I think there is a really really fine line you have to walk to keep your IAPs "ethical" and it's very temping (and profitable) to fall on the Candy Crush side of things.
Oh, Candy Crush does this too? (I have honestly never played it so i don't know). Well apparently there was a little exploit to bypass the wait (without paying). My GF told me about it (yes, she's addicted). You can just change you local clock and the game thinks a day has passed and tada! free lives.
Do you mean him searching for open-source information about his customers that his customers voluntarily put on the web, or him saying it to us?
If someone spent $30,000 on my digital cards, I'd look him up so that I could sleep at night and not worry that his kids are going hungry because of this.
(I'm not someone who sells these kinds of things, so I'm fully aware this is largely armchair quarterbacking.)
It depends on the business, but in general I give a supplier my information so that they can supply me with the goods I request; inform me about that process; and invoice me.
Using that information for other reasons without informing me is a clear, unambiguous, invasion of my privacy. It's probably not legal in the UK.
Tl:dr yes, it's creepy. Especially in the context of a game dev.
There are CRM plugins that do it for you automatically when you view records. At the low-end, when I go into Mailchimp, there's a pay plugin (that I don't use) that puts up social information. If anyone emails me, Rapportive brings up their social profile to the right of the email.
