Don’t get this wrong: this isn’t a terminology issue, much less a matter of catering to one’s own biases.
Personally, I have no horse in this race, Star Citizen is just massive and that’s the reason why it comes under such close scrutiny from so many gamers.
In that context, convincing evidence pointing towards “Star Citizen whales outspending cetaceans from any other game” would make for a head-turning headline. It doesn’t have to be secret documents stolen from CIG’s headquarters, either.
OTOH, if Star Citizen is somewhere towards the top end of the scale for whales, that would be still of interst, but also be kind of expected and not as attention-grabbing.
PS:
@Baines, I made absolutely no claim as to the definition of what a whale is; since F2P models have gone mainstream, there is a fairly accurate idea of how much a whale spends in the top-end games. For SC whales to make other games’ whales look “junior”, SC’s must be spending more. They either do (how much do they spend then?) or they don’t. Comparing SC to less successful, smaller games is not a relevant argument. I’m not playing a game of definitions, nor splitting any hair there.