EA's Business Model Finally Revealed

cogitoergosum8 wrote:

teo47 wrote:
If EA is making a lot of money off of this game, good for them! Most of us want to make as much money as we can in life. If your employer offered you a raise, would you decline? No way! Corporations are no different, they'll take your money if you're willing to give it to them. If you give out everything for free, you go out of business. There have been mistakes made in the implementation of this event in my opinion, but the fact that you need to spend donuts to get all of the prizes (unless you're incredibly lucky) is not one of those mistakes.

I have to disagree. Yes, making money is great. As a libertarian, I believe strongly in the free market. However, there is a limit to how much a company should take advantage of its customers. TSTO was never advertised as a gambling game. Yes, the product description says "SIMULATED gambling", which is not the same as actual gambling with real money. To get to my point, I think it's bad for business in the long run to implement gambling into the game. Most TSTO players are not looking to gamble with their money, nor are they used to it being a feature of this game. This will pay off in the immediate future for EA, but in my opinion, the increase in profits will be short-lived. People are wising up to the horrible odds in this event and it's made a lot of us premium players, who used to gladly throw tons of cash at EA, rethink our spending. That's not good for business. If companies followed your logic to its natural end, there would be massive price gouging. Good business is about balancing profit with customer satisfaction. If your only concern is making the biggest profit possible, but your customers are dissatisfied, you'll soon find yourself without customers and without profit. EA is playing a dangerous game with these gambling events. That's just my take on it. I don't think that this is a good long-term business strategy.

I guess we will see if it's bad for business in the long run to implement the chance/gambling aspect into the game. Perhaps EA should have gone with the same strategy they used with the Faberge egg and made the Easter prizes available for a fixed number of donuts as well as available by chance through the box system. That way you'd at least know exactly how many donuts you'd need to spend to get prizes X, Y, and Z instead of spending an unknown amount of donuts to buy enough eggs to get them through random spins. Personally I haven't been upset with the gambling aspect of the game, as I've received several of the good prizes through eggs I have purchased and realized the risks going in - yes, I've also gotten a lot of extra stuff I didn't want (yay for 15 beach towels). I also don't view it as EA taking advantage of its customers because EA isn't requiring customers to participate in the chance/gambling aspect of the game if they don't want to except as a free 'simulated gambling' game as is advertised. This is no different from Kwik-e-Mart scratch tickets or Springfield Downs except you're winning objects and characters instead of in-game money.

I also think that the behavior of players as a whole is probably vastly different from the tiny subset of players who post on this message board. People complaining on a message board likely has no significant impact on the overall spending patterns of the entire game playing community as a whole. I bet there are a whole lot of premium players who don't post here who are happily tapping away, not really caring that they aren't going to get all of the Easter prizes, spending the same amounts of money they always would on the game.