Controversial new service helps developers hunt down mobile gaming's whales

If you're a whale you're about to be hunted down and probably have a harpoon thrown at you.

No, this isn't a strange retelling of Moby Dick. We're talking about new mobile analytics service Whally. It's the first service of its kind.

It has been set-up by Fred Thuard, a former employee of mobile analytics leader App Annie, to specifically hunt down whales. It was launched on September 11th.

Whales, if you don't know, is the term used to refer to people who spend large sums of money on free to play mobile games.

They make up about one percent of all players but provide the majority of a successful developer's revenue.

Whally tracks playtime and scoring data obtained from GameCenter and social media. This is perfectly legal, if morally questionable, as all the data is publicly available.

Speaking to PocketGamer.biz, Thuard said "we decided to start analysing daily scores of nearly 380 million iOS players, posting daily more than 73+ millions scores in 12 countries within 20 categories of games on 190,000+ iOS mobile games."

That's a lot of people. And a lot of games, too, each of which are ranked according to the number of daily players scoring big on their leaderboards.

The purpose of Whally seems clear: developers can discover what kinds of games (and designs) lure whales the most and then apply these lessons to their own games.