A whale, in the context of gaming, is a unique type of gamer who will spend significant amounts of money on ingame cash shops and/or microtransactions. These features don't usually make the publisher any significant amounts of revenue from the regular player base, with the median player spending around $5~10, "whales" account for more than half of a game's cash shop revenue.
As such, "whaling" is considered to be the goal of cash shop design.
seriously?
why are they called whales? why is it called whaling? that seems such an odd term
They're bloated, they're high return farmable creatures. ---