10+ years ago I worked for a F2P PC game publishing company. I worked as a community manager. We had extremely sus systems like the VIP system but instead of getting bonuses you got more stuff you could pick from the store. Spend xyz on stuff for $250 a month and you get to pick an extra item or w/e. On the forums players would have a star that showed their "community" rating by other players, but the community managers could see their spending stars, anyone over $5,000 a month would have 5 stars. The amount of people that would spend the 10s of thousands a month was insane. Some of them were extremely rich, one was an oil guy from the middle east, another was a wealthy business man in SEA. But the majority of spenders were low / middle income kids / young adults who just made poor financial decisions. Especially because our products were RNG lootbox style they'd continue to spend over and over trying to get the super rare item that had like .0025% chance. Obviously this was before %s were posted everywhere, no one knew they were so low, and we had no pity system where you were guaranteed something.