The fatal flaw with the current business model.

Girasol was an Assistant Producer

Interesting.

I also received messages from people who claimed to be ex-employees at free-to-play companies, and who told me that their respective employers would often build games purposely to entrap these "whales."

One such response in particular (for which I was able to verify the respondent as having worked at the company named) gave a stark picture of what's going on behind the scenes. I've chosen to blank out the name of the company as I see this as being able to apply to multiple game studios, rather than just the one discussed.

"I used to work at [company], and it paid well and advanced my career," the person told me. "But I recognize that [company]'s games cause great harm to people's lives. They are designed for addiction. [company] chooses what to add to their games based on metrics that maximize players' investments of time and money. [company]'s games find and exploit the right people, and then suck everything they can out of them, without giving much in return. It's not hard to see the parallels to the tobacco industry.

This employee chose to leave the company as a direct result of feeling dishonest due to the work being done -- feeling like they were making the lives of a select few players worse.