We have always been here as small time bettors and I have been part of primedice community on the first day it was created, I in fact remember the time when we had 10k satoshi faucet that we could simply abuse by refreshing the page and that was swiftly removed from the system because of how easy it was to abuse it and changed it with a leveling system that gave you something instead.
In accordance to my experience in stake I have to say that there has been a shift towards caring about whales a lot, and not caring about "shrimp" (what people call small time gamblers like me) enough, which is a problem for me and people who gamble in amounts closer to what I gamble, however at the same time that caused the VIP members to get more and more advantages, so much so that eventually Stake managed to get whales and helped them be happy to stay and gamble here. This 474k bet is a proof that they are very good at keeping whales happy and gambling, nothing more.
Could you blame stake? I mean how many small fish do you need in order to cover for one whale like that? Dude wagered 474 thousand dollars! it is normal that places would start giving more and more towards them and ignore more and more about us because that is just insanely big difference. This dude just lost 474 thousand dollars to stake, if we play like with 10 bucks that would mean we need to wager 47 thousand times and lose them all in order to equal that, do you gamble 47 thousand times a day? Surely I do not.
This is why the difference is staggering. If I ever owned a casino ever (which I won't, even if I had the money for it, way tooo stressful of a job, kudos to stunna) I would definitely go for whales as well, hell give whales less house edge based on how much they wager, make it default 5% house edge, and if you wager more and more it goes as low as 0.5% in the end, because those are the ones that pay the bills.