"Players are undercharged"

>A Wall Street financial analyst has claimed that Star Wars Battlefront 2 players are "overreacting" in regards to the game's microtransactions, adding that they're actually being "undercharged" by EA.

>Wingren came to this conclusion after calculating the amount of time players will spend with Battlefront 2 compared to watching The Last Jedi. The analyst estimated that if a player purchases Battlefront 2 for $60 and then spends an additional $20 per month on microtransactions, if they then play the game for 2.5 hours a day for a single year the total will come to "roughly 40 cents per hour of entertainment." This is compared to an estimate of $3 per hour if watching a movie in a theater. Wingren added that an hour of video game content "is still one of the cheapest forms of entertainment and that "video game publishers are actually charging gamers at a relatively inexpensive rate, and should probably raise prices."

gamerevolution.com/uncategorized/357167-financial-analyst-evan-wingren-battlefront-2-players-overreacting-undercharged

Hear this shit? Aparently, 60$ for game and 20$ every month is "undercharging" aka "players should play more because hurr durr $ per hour cost". For me its like apples and oranges. Or saying that books should cost much more because of how many hours you spent on reading them and how many hours you spent on watching movie.

Im simply speachless, honestly. How about you, Sup Forums?

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>Financial analyst demands more profit
woah really

this is why I LOL at people who want to say Video Games are an art form
Art is made for the artist not the shareholders lmao

>(((financial analyst)))

Is he right Sup Forums?

>decarabbia

Like movies, the ultimate goal in mind is what comes into play when defining something as art. EA is a huge public company, they only care about profits and the bottom line. They are not trying to make art.
An indie game or small studio who only cares about the quality of the game and not about how much money it makes could be "art", much how like an art house film isn't created to make money but to be a passion project.

Nothing wrong here. If they want to charge more, they can. To imply otherwise means you're a fucking communist.

> play the game for 2.5 hours a day for a single year

God lord please tell me nobody would actually do that to themselves

>Financial analysts.

Bunch of fuddy retards who desire more profit than anything.

I work for a bunch and one of them thought laptops had more "charge" than desktops so he shouted at the IT guys next door til they charged his laptop since he was incapable of it.

Don't worry it'll be dead by next month.

No, he actually bought the game so no.

We'll live to see the day that games charge so much that buyfags will only be able to afford one game. Market analysts are fucking stupid.

Im simply angry that they want to demand MUCH more for something I enjoyed before, since after some point, I cant afford that form of spending free time.

By analogy, if I would be buying a burger at some bar daily, paying 5$, I would get angry if they would rise price to 50$. Nobody stop them from doing that, even if they would lose half of clients because of this and get massive negative attention. They might even get more that way if said half would cover the loss of the other. But it wont stop me from being angry at being unable to buy a fucking burger.

You are right, when somebody come home at 8pm and have to get up next day at 6am, they dont really have time for vidya except weekend so their avarage daily time is lower than that.

Nope.

>you better buy my garbage multiplayer FPS filled with microtransactions and loot boxes, or else you're a commie!

No one's arguing against their right to sabotage their own game. But all the analysts reporting on Battlefront 2 only selling 40% of what the first one did on its launch weekend have been implying that the gaming community is at fault, and committing "financial terrorism" for not buying a piece of trash video game on the basis that it sucks.

Trying to imply that the free market is obligated to buy subpar products because the filthy goyim are just supposed to eat my trash is where I draw the line

alright, financial analyst here. here we go with some mid-level econ. in as easy as i can make it

Reservation prices: the max that a consumer is willing to pay for a good. A reservation price for SWBF2 might be 120 bucks for a consumer. Bear with me.

Consumer surplus: the left over 'value' of a good after a consumer pays. say they would be willing to pay 120 bucks for swbf2 but they're only charged 60, the cs for the one consumer is 60 bucks.

the purpose (vaguely) of profit-earning business is to deplete CS and turn it into producer surplus (think same as CS but for the business).

microtransactions allow for the producer to deplete CS and turn it into PS allowing for the consumer to reach their reservation price.

had the financial analyst said this, he wouldn't have shot himself in the foot with 40 c/hr entertainment.

but the reality is, at least from the financial standpoint, these motherfuckers are undercharging and would be better off making the games they've always been making, sans DLC/microtransactions, for a higher price.

EA, instead of doing whatever they already did, should have made the price whatever they wanted to meet balanced out with the whales (say 60 bucks base game, 60 bucks extra content), charged that - and probably would have came out just as well as if they had focused on whales as is because the general population will suck it up.

>completely missing the fact that it costs 60 fucking $
>implying he would go watch the same money EVERY FUCKING DAY FOR A WHOLE YEAR if he had """""""""""""""""""""""free""""""""""""""""""""""" access to it daily

Behead everyone that works for EA

If you're not buying lootboxes in SWBF2 you are literally stealing from EA.

>Wingren came to this conclusion after calculating the amount of time players will spend with Battlefront 2 compared to watching The Last Jedi
...because watching a movie in a theater and playing a video game at home are essentially the same thing.

He doesn't know shit about video games

Or, even better, why not just MAKE PRODUCTION COSTS LOWER

The reason western game development is so expensive is because AAA publishers INSIST on making all of their games look photorealistic and spend inordinate amounts of money on this goal. That, and hilariously inflated advertising costs. And for what? To make the games look more "real"? They end up failing in that regard anyway because they spend all the money on modeling and texture work and then forget to animate it so all these games end up looking like realdolls flapping their lips at each other.

I still remember when they announced the first EA Battlefront, and they spent the entire hour-long debut showing off the models and environments and didn't show a single iota of gameplay. Maybe if they had remembered to use their budget to, I don't know, MAKE A VIDEO GAME instead of a catalogue of gorgeous 3D models in a vaguely interactive environment, they wouldn't be feeling the need to nickle-and-dime the people who already bought the game to buy even more shit in-game.

>production costs and inflation are higher than they were 10 years ago
>so games should cost more
why is simple economics so triggering to Sup Forumseddit? inb4 another retard suggests that they just get rid of their entire marketing budget

Better graphics make for better ads which make for better sales. If you don't want good graphics, just go with Nintendo or something.

"Players are undercharged" should read "Developers are over-spending"

When your entire budget is 70% marketing 30% game then you already failed in the video game industry.
And thats just pure bullshit overall. Theres studios that made masterpieces with a 1mil$ budget with barely any marketing whatsoever.

>dude just make games with PS2 graphics nobody will care
I wonder how fast a studio run by Sup Forums would go out of business

You know what they could do? Stop making shit games now and expecting everybody to buy them just because they bought good games 10 years ago.

he's right that you can unlock all the characters pretty quickly

>Comparing two mediums as if they are the same or can be compared
>B-but my math checks out
And this faggot honestly has a job? Can do math but logic 2 hard

After EA changed how the game works due to the PR fiasco

You know what else is doing marketing?

The players telling everyone the game is good.
Woah?! Crazy, I know EA PR shill. Go collect your 0.15$ now.

>When your entire budget is 70% marketing 30% game then you already failed in the video game industry.
Why? Games with large advertising budgets seem to do pretty well which is why studios keep spending money on ads.

>Theres studios that made masterpieces with a 1mil$ budget with barely any marketing whatsoever.
then buy their games instead, why do you even care about EA if these studios exist?

If it's such a great deal then why aren't more people buying these games? Could it be that they are shit?

Games, particularly now with digital sales, only have artificial scarcity. If steam sells a game for 5 cents, that's still profitable. So without there being anything physical being spent and the structure costs already being there perpetually, the prices for games should have gone down, not up. There are also considerably more consumers for games these days, which works really well given that the cost to distribute digital games is effectively 0.

The record revenues the gaming industry keeps seeing is proof enough that games are currently overpriced, rather than underpriced.

At the guy and of the day the gameplay sucks and that's why no one is buying it. Many people played the beta and the general opinion was it wasn't fun to play. Word of mouth spread and now you get this. Not to mention that dice's first attempt at battlefront was pretty poor too but I believe they at least got the gameplay right

Actually, production costs are not THAT higher. They are mostly inflated. When you compare works of smaller studios and bigger ones, turns out that EA or Ubisoft massive teams dont produce that much better quality products than, say, 40-50 man studios over similar time. There is simply some "critical size" of defv studio after which costs rise much faster than product quality or development time.

But true problem is advertising. Same deal is with movies now - in most absurd cases, advertising can eat up to half of budget. Sure, its important to have your product well known but the costs are once again started to inflate to the point when they are not making any sense and additional number of consumers attracted to the product is generating much less than massive advertising cost.

AAA titles and their devs/publishers cant leave the wild ride now, its rapidly accelerating loop. I wonder when it will crash.

It's because they're commies.

>you filthy goys should be thanking us!

Overall costs actually went down significantly thanks to digital distribution. Publishers are just lying to you when they say it's gotten too expensive. Profits are bigger than ever.

no, before that

>anyone that isn't surprised that something increased in price from 2007 to 2017 must be paid by EA
Wow great argument.

>then buy their games instead, why do you even care about EA if these studios exist?
Because EA buys those studios, milks the everloving fuck out of them and then kills them once they no longer bring any $$ (the thing EA only cares about)?

>simple economics

Publishers are making a fucking killing off of digital distribution, the death of retail has saved them so much money. Publishers being extra greedy has NOTHING to do with inflation or production costs, it's because of the stock market. Milking whales with microtransactions is a way more consistent and larger revenue stream than the $60 entry fee. Corporate culture is to blame.

>undercharged
Is this the 'games should cost $100 but they cost $60' meme I've been hearing about

nintendo is doing really well right now

kek

But this model fails to take into account how those costs affect the product itself. Not every consumer is going to have that reservation price of 120. Let's say some are dead set at 60. Well they might have still bought the game, except those guys spending extra on microtransactions are given a preferential experience in the game at the expense of the people choosing not to spend more. So now the game's value is further reduced, and the guy who would have bought it at 60 bucks instead chooses not to buy it at all. If this 60 group is significantly larger than the 120 group there's going to be a loss of profit in the end. As for the guy who dropped 120 into it, he eventually realizes the game's online community is a bit sparser than he expected and there's not as many people for him to exploit his additional purchases against online, so his continued interest in the game also diminishes much sooner than predicted.

...

One seems to still be going well and becoming close to a cultural phenomenon with only one game

>Financial Analyst Evan Wingren 'fucking desperate' to get his name mentioned in headlines

>check a youtube video about Battlefront 2 video
>endless casuals defending this garbage
normies need to be fucking purged

Not to mention that digital distribution allows them to jew it up to eleven with games being attached to accounts. Not only are they saving costs on distribution, they also get to kill the used games market.

Prices won't go down so long as people keep buying it, though. A company has no reason to drop their prices if the product is selling, even if the price is too high and specially if they can't sell more to the point of recouping the price difference.

This guy works with ea, its so obvious. Just like the "dice dev" that got death threats, just a calculated misdirection from ea's pr department.

>using $ per hour of entertainment card
>financial analyst in charge of speaking about video games
>people who do not have any passion or knowledge of games talking about video games
>everyone knows that top EA bosses have no interest in "video games", instead they operate the company like it was in any other sector to make profit and nothing else
>same EA said to studios under it "if your game doesn't earn as much as FIFA games then you have no right to exist"
I have no fucking words for this kind of shit. I'm just going to grab more popcorn, like a big bin of popcorn. No, I'll get myself a popcorn machine and a few sacks of corn. That'll do it.

Before that they reduced the heroes price something around 75% or 80% less.

Nani ? Which one ?

You know Monopoly has given me party fun for hundreds of hours over the years, they should charge at least 500$ for it.
>financial analyst logic

>Ok, see this game they bought? It's CHEAPER than watching the same movie at a theater every single day! They are getting a HUGE deal here!
False equivalency, movies don't remain in theaters for a year straight, and even the most hardcore fan isn't gonna come back and spend $20 to watch it over and over every single day it is in theaters. If he wanted to compare games to movies, he should have compared the cost of buying a game and the enjoyment gained VS the cost of buying a movie DVD and the enjoyment gained.

Mojang, if you consider the influence Sup Forums had in Minecraft's early years

This expert analyst is so smart that he failed to take into account that gamers don't just play one game per month, or how the current pricing norm was reached to begin with. If anything, $60 is a big up front cost for something that gaming hobbyists do so regularly, and putting the games on sale from that price has been shown to be beneficial by pure numbers moved.

>gamers are undercharged

How much something is worth is determined by how much the customer is willing to pay. You don't get to make the decision of what my money is worth to me for me, buddy. I wouldn't buy a game that expected to drain $100+ from my wallet without providing an additional $40+ worth the value compared to something that the base $60 price point. The worth of $60 and $40+ is also for me to decide as a consumer. Clearly, from the results, $60 + lootboxes is overcharging.

>not 50.000$
Stop trying to do my job !

Bring back my AA games. Fuck AAA.

Thank you, user. I've learned something new today.

i feel you man, but that's not how finance or economics works. the reservation price is what it is. people won't spend higher than the reservation price. if 60 is it, 60 is it - they won't be buying the microtransactions.

if the pay-2-win aspects adjusts the model, then that is built in. a pay-2-win game may adjust the value down, and a 60 dollar person might become a 50 dollar person

the real key is to go from thinking consumer to entire market demand. which i should have made more clear.

whether or not a person reaches that 'online community' has gotten a bit sparse is perfectly aligned with the model. the purchases are already made and his overall value on the product was maintained through his expenses

I read quickly, so would appreciate a lower cost on books that slow people have to carry the burden of.for fucks sakes Jason I lent you that book weeks ago

>and a 60 dollar person might become a 50 dollar person

i need to add, a 60 dollar person whose perception of value with the p2w model would be decreased in such a matter that they would wait for a sale to enter the market. they wouldn't purchase a game until the price actually hit 50 bucks. but say that the product goes on sale for 30... then, should EA's model of value hold true, they would spend $20 in micro transactions to reach their reservation price of 50 bucks.

thanks other user. glad to hear it.

financial analysis

>$60
>undercharged

>A Wall Street financial analyst

so someone who knows nothing of the games industry. don't know why anyone is replying seriously.

maybe because we've got a good thread going and there's people who get what's going on. not everybody has to be ignorant drones

Totally. Battlefront games always rewards hard players which are following the challenges and playing several games to get better stuff.

Getting a lootboxes won't make you getting good at the game. Having a purple grenade card won't makes you win all your matches.

Maybe the microtransactions stuff was too much, but one crate costs 4000credits which you can collect in 10 matches so maybe 1h30 of game max.

I personnally enjoy it and every person whining about microtransactions are just CoD crybabies who need to GIT FUCKING GUD

Because his words are treated seriously by companies like EA.

Since stock market became more important than actual products market, why even make games anymore? Few years ago, one of similar EA analytics said that all games should run on subs because "investors expect that". Im well aware that devs are not charity but when you stop caring at all about your target group and instead care only about investors who expect high shares, which values were calculated based on how well the company is selling their products... why caring about making and selling said products at all? Your shares became better trade goods than whatever you produce.

>Wall Street

Isn't this ignoring competition? Raising costs to 120 dollars will make people more likely to purchase the competitor's product. So instead they can use DLC and microtransactions to remain at the "60" threshold while actually allowing for increased profits. I know it was just an example, but how well do you think the game would have actually sold at 120 dollars a copy with no additional fees or charges? There's too much competition to be a bitch up front, and it's ignorant to think that EA, king of the jew, hasn't run the numbers on both outcomes. They just happened to get unlucky and end up in the news this time.

Classic kike advice.

You're describing the exact reason that large companies and corporations tend to stagnate and end up being more about buying smaller companies and startups than outright innovating themselves. Shareholders only understand short-term profit gaining because besides their investment which can be easily sold, they have zero stake in the business.

>apples to oranges
Why the fuck can't fruit can't be compared? That doesn't even make sense.

That owns EA stocks too

>tfw shareholders are like little children

Really makes you think.

>>A Wall Street financial analyst

Stopped reading there.

>hurr durr why are people allowed to "own" what they pay for! Fine them everytime they derive entertainment from your product!

Guess I should pay "entertainment fees" for every hour I wear my glasses to read. Or better yet!
Put a microchip in books so I'm charged everytime I turn to the next page!
And here I thought journos were fucking retarded.

>the reservation price is what it is.
clearly the entire practice of economics is fucked in the head then since the reservation price would actually follow a curve distributed over the population instead of one set price

or do the existence of saudi princes give every game a 300000 dollar reservation price?

The "financial analyst" is fucking panicking.
He feels he has to double down on EA's shitty practices or else the industry will be shaken as a whole, with people demanding lower prices for every new game release now that they're waking up and realizing these AAA games rely on them to remain profitable.
He probably has stock on some other game publisher and fears they'll lose value if a domino effect happens.

that's a fucking bomb ass point user. good thinking

microtransactions are a sneaky way of pulling out the reservation price without the consumer understanding what's going on in their head. it's just like the psychological thing, the skinner boxes or whatever, that people always talk about - expect in money terms.

the question here is in profit. how much would they have really made?

lets keep it simple -

say they sell 100 copies at 60 bucks and 50 copies at 120 bucks. total revenue is the same. the price of producing an extra disc of the game is negligible, seriously - 1 extra copies might cost a penny a disc. so, essentially, total profit (revenue - costs) would be the same selling both tiered pricing.

that's the idea there. the whales allow them to sell at a super duper low price with a lot of people deciding "hey, it's just a couple bucks to get a lootbox". They essentially get to pull all that extra money and then some.

But say they wanted to avoid the bad business practices. They would calculate the profit they desired from the general population and the whales... and set it at the price that brought them there knowing the consumers would buy it.

That price might be like.. 83 bucks. So they sell a "Gold Bundle" that's 60 bucks + 23 in Special Edition content. Boom. They've made their money.

Problem is that they see their shit beyond the limited scope of what humans think is acceptable. All of a sudden they throw a gigantic ass wall in the way and people start realizing... my reservation price... is not this. "A game with this level of grind is only worth $20 but I'm paying $60"

and therein lies exactly the reason they dropped microtransactions temporarily. people inadvertently became aware of their own reservation prices... and it didn't bode well for EA

>reddit spacing
imagine my shock

God made everything.
God's creation is the ultimate art.
God made games.
Games are the ultimate art.

Checkmate, dipshit.

>I personnally enjoy it and every person whining about microtransactions are just CoD crybabies who need to GIT FUCKING GUD
kill yourself pajeet, it'll be more dignified than shilling corporate products on a webside that hosts dickgirl bestiality porn

>A Wall Street financial analyst

He's just not some Wall Street analyst.
He's a man with a stake in the company that's getting shat on.
twitter.com/mombot/status/932997883799814144

He honestly sounds like a young upstart with incredibly shortsighted get-rich-quick ideas for a market he has surface knowledge of.
He's better suited for infomercials or financial presentations to confused geriatrics.

Financial analysts are retards. I know because I'm an even bigger retard whose job is to read their retarded reports. Also his analysis is flawed on numerous counts.

there's a huge difference between the reservation price of a consumer and the demand curve. reservation usually refers to demand, but if you were to take D=f(p) and turn it to p=f(D) then you get what you're asking for.

The Saudi princes know that you're going to buy X amount of gas at Z price. They raise the price to Z+A and you get what happens in the mid 2000s - not so much an oil shortage but a whole bunch of folk who don't want to pay 4 bucks a gas, but have to.... so they drive less. Everything filters down after that. Less driving distance for vacations (vacation places suffer in tourist numbers resulting in less revenue had by tourist town which results in more people getting less extra cash to spend on gas and so on down the rabbit hole).

you try to keep mathematical concepts straight in your head and keep them accessible to others. I don't know what you specialize in, but god damn shit is rough.

just fuck ea and western video gaming in general
if it isn´t some sjw propaganda, it´s them trying to squeeze every last cent out of you while expecting you to pay 60 plus dollars for a broken, uninspired sequel

Underrated comment.

here's a good rule of thumb Sup Forums, if a financial analyst is "tweeting" their predictions, or talking to some publication, then they're not good enough to be working for an ibank, hedge fund, or rating agency. just don't listen to them lol

>enjoying things I don't like
>'kill yourself pajeet"

You sayin what you son of a basterd bich

Fuck the west.

>The Saudi princes know that you're going to buy X amount of gas at Z price. They raise the price to Z+A and you get what happens in the mid 2000s - not so much an oil shortage but a whole bunch of folk who don't want to pay 4 bucks a gas, but have to.... so they drive less. Everything filters down after that. Less driving distance for vacations (vacation places suffer in tourist numbers resulting in less revenue had by tourist town which results in more people getting less extra cash to spend on gas and so on down the rabbit hole).
I meant more that there exists saudi princes who can spend 20 thousand dollars on an ivory-plated dildo for their 43rd with without batting an eye, who would then cause a incredibly large reservation price even though the area under that curve would be incredibly small compared to the area below an asking price of like 60 bucks

Food analogy time

If entertainment is a flat value of time for money, then all drinks should be too. I should be able to buy a 2L bottle of imported French wine for $1 like I can store brand pop, because they're both drinks. The experience is the same right? They're the same thing, right?

ahh. nah, you're right - finally get what you're saying. it still goes back to the whole demand curve. they are the bastards at the far left of the curve who will demand an object at the highest possible price. Yes, they have a huge fucking reservation price and they embody the whale in game-buying terms. they are the whale - what with their 20 thousand dollar dildo.

>using $ per hour of entertainment card
Nothing wrong with that, I don't buy games unless I know I'm getting at least 1 dollar per hour of playtime