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Pokemon Rumble World won't let you become a free to play whale

Push it to the limit

Pokemon Rumble World won't let you become a free to play whale
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3DS
| Pokemon Rumble World
Limit

Nintendo's latest free to play game - Pokemon Rumble World for 3DS - has a hard limit on how much real world cash you can spend. And the game removes some of its barriers if you hit the limit.

Over on Reddit, user Mitosis says "once you purchase 3000 gems you are barred from spending any more money at all. From then on you receive a drip of 20 gems per day, and the stage refresh and roulette bypass purchases are discounted."

Essentially, the game stops becoming a monetisation machine and changes to become more like a traditional paid game with fewer barriers to your play.

Getting 3,000 gems would cost about £23 to £26, depending on which Poke Diamond bundles you get.

Chasing the Wailmers

It's being hailed as more consumer friendly model, but it should be pointed out that if Nintendo plans to use this when it starts producing mobile games it might find itself struggling to compete.

New research from analytics platform Swrve suggests that whales - the big spenders who drop hundreds or even thousands of dollars into free to play games - account for a higher percentage of revenue than ever.

Gamasutra added up the numbers and came to the sobering conclusion that "less than a quarter of one percent of F2P players are responsible for 64 percent of those games' IAP revenue."

This isn't the first time that Nintendo has experimented with free to play. Rusty's Real Deal Baseball let you haggle the price of its microtransactions so you could unlock new mini games for less cash.

Mark Brown
Mark Brown
Mark Brown is editor at large of Pocket Gamer