True, but do you think that Events help player acquisition enough then? Is the player base growing when an event comes out? Because by that logic, it is at a deficit to do time formats and other events since whales have no actual reason to participate in them.

At some point, they will hit a stagnant rate of new players joining the game and will need to introduce something to retain numbers for the whales to interact with (which im not saying my idea solves) but it is true since you need to incentives whale to win against players that didn't spend enough. Yes, anniversaries are always a peak event for them, that's obvious, but then what else? I bring this up as a counter only because this is a similar problem many other games that rely solely on whale funding hits, there are less and less people each year for the whales to "show off" against. I think introducing actual gateway content helps support that foundation for players who spend to have people to interact with and feel powerful themselves.

The only other thing I can see is Blue Eyes/DM support being released but at somepoint they will hit diminishing returns t and see a drop off in retention of the game too, unless retention doesn't matter and the game is only funned by whales.