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Space sim Squadron 42 is "feature-complete" and gunning for Starfield's lunch with massive new video
(www.rockpapershotgun.com)
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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Gaming
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Ah, the annual whale fracking operation is in full effect.
The what now? ๐
I'm not a native speaker so some jokes / analogies just totally fly over my head
Star Citizen is a game that's been in development forever, all while attracting money in forms of donations and sales of in-game ships. A single-player game by the same devs, Squadron 42, is a somewhat similar story, except that people can't even play it yet (as far as I remember).
A whale is a tern that often means someone/something that brings you the substantial part of your revenue, so in case of the games above, whales would be the players that spend most money on the in-game ships or donations to support development.
The "whale fracking operation" in this context probably means that the entire trailer is a yet another bait for the community to go crazy and bring in the money so that the devs don't starve and finally deliver finished products.
The punchline is, however, that it's likely not gonna happen anyway lmao
Ahh doi, I understood the terms separately but for some reason "whale fracking" just made my brain go "whaaaaa". Thanks for the patience ๐
I'd guess that the idea here is that a "whale" is someone who will spend a lot of money on something. Historically, catching an (actual) whale meant that you'd caught something that was very valuable; my guess is that this is where the phrase came from. Whales were valuable because at the time, they were an economically-reasonable place to get oil. Fracking (or hydraulic fracturing) is a way to extract oil from the ground.
It's a bit of a stretch, but I can see where they're coming from. A "whale fracking operation" is not a standard term that I've ever heard before, though I get what the guy probably meant.
Oh yeah I took it to just be wordplay, interpreting wordplay is still sometimes stupid hard for me, even despite the fact that I speak English at a near-native level and can understand each word individually.
It's a good question how "whale" ended up having this particular meaning. I was in the games industry for way too long and first saw it used in the context of big spenders in freemium mobile games, but I have a vague memory that it's used in the same way in the gambling / casino world. Your guess for the history sounds pretty believable, and it seems like the ginormous size of whales could play a part? Big spenders stand out from the "small fish"