Gem sale time -- pour some fuel on this fire

[The Pale Rider]

Every guild that ever made the top 50 or aspired to the Top 50, thinks they can make Top 25 this GW. Give them all a reason to buy like crazy and set a revenue record this war. Time for a 20% or 30% sale that lasts the whole war (but I'll settle for a one day).

I've got my money queued up in iTunes ready to go when the sale tag appears!

[Sol Invictus]

Wasn't there a 40% once?
30% should be a minimum for this. People will gem hard.

[busteroaf]

If people are going to gem hard... why would Gree give them a bigger discount? Yes, more of a discount and you may entice people to buy more gems, but this could be their test. Better prizes should be enough to entice the people to spend gems. And if so, they should be willing to buy them at a smaller/normal discount.

[The Pale Rider]

If people are going to gem hard... why would Gree give them a bigger discount? Yes, more of a discount and you may entice people to buy more gems, but this could be their test. Better prizes should be enough to entice the people to spend gems. And if so, they should be willing to buy them at a smaller/normal discount.

Come on Buster -- you're smarter than that.

A Gem has no intrinsic value. The only impact a "sale" has is relative to the value of a free gem. To illustrate the point, imagine a gem sale where you got 100 gems for a dollar. At that point, most people would compete predominantly with purchased gems and the value (impact) of free gems would drop to next to nothing (1 cent). To put it another way, would you wait 25 minutes for a block or sit through 10 commercial vids for a block if they were worth 4 cents?

So the sale, causes the value of purchased gems to rise relative to the value of free gems. This only helps GREE as more people buy gems.

GREE can kill the golden goose if they take the value too low though as people will become reluctant to purchase when they otherwise would to take advantage of sales. Also if they got to low (as in my illustartion) it could blow up the game theory behind free gemming. But anything in the 20-40% range only INCREASES GREE's return on a given war.

You make more money when you increase the value of purchased gems relative to free gems by incentivizing people to move from the former to the latter.
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Incidentally - the facts have bourne this out as GREE has had bigger returns in months where they had gem sales. My own purchasing of gems exactly correlates to it as well.

[EljayK]

Gems do have value to a company that makes F2P games. When they do their yearly sales quotas, they have to announce, declare, and value those gems, the same way that an electric company has to claim the amount of electricity that they provide. It has no intrinsic value, except that it's generated by a free flowing system. The same with gems. They are 'created' from seemingly thin air, but their existence is the financial foundation of the company. A sale is a cut into profit margins.

[BossParmar]

no sale yet lol

[Darth Ovious]

Gems do have value to a company that makes F2P games. When they do their yearly sales quotas, they have to announce, declare, and value those gems, the same way that an electric company has to claim the amount of electricity that they provide. It has no intrinsic value, except that it's generated by a free flowing system. The same with gems. They are 'created' from seemingly thin air, but their existence is the financial foundation of the company. A sale is a cut into profit margins.

No it doesn't. A sale doesn't necessarily cut into profit margins. That's not how economics work. If it was then no company would have a sale. By having a sale you increase the demand for the product and thus you could increase your profit margins by selling more of the product but at a slightly discounted price. Some people might not buy the gems if there isn't a sale on and this could hurt Gree balance books.

[busteroaf]

Come on Pale, you're smarter than that too.

My idea of not having a huge sale is to help get a proper look at the effect of new rewards on guild war spending.

If you just have a huge sale, of course people will buy gems like there is no tomorrow, and scores as a whole should increase. If that is the case, you get the "oh man, people spent 1000's of gems on this war for an old epic. See, we were willing to spend for better rewards the whole time. * " See the * there? That is because you don't know if it was the rewards or the huge sale that preceded it, that made the masses spend more gems. If there is no major sale, you can track the effect of those new rewards more accurately. You know, finding out if rewards alone is enough to entice people to spend. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be a sale to entice people, of course sales entice people and it means more $ for Gree, but the more variables you include, the harder it is to verify to Gree that te movement is actually willing to spend for better rewards.

If you can't see that, you need to go back to school and re-learn your scientific method and eliminating variables to track results properly.

[Darth Ovious]

Come on Pale, you're smarter than that too.

My idea of not having a huge sale is to help get a proper look at the effect of new rewards on guild war spending.

If you just have a huge sale, of course people will buy gems like there is no tomorrow, and scores as a whole should increase. If that is the case, you get the "oh man, people spent 1000's of gems on this war for an old epic. See, we were willing to spend for better rewards the whole time. * " See the * there? That is because you don't know if it was the rewards or the huge sale that preceded it, that made the masses spend more gems. If there is no major sale, you can track the effect of those new rewards more accurately. You know, finding out if rewards alone is enough to entice people to spend. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be a sale to entice people, of course sales entice people and it means more $ for Gree, but the more variables you include, the harder it is to verify to Gree that te movement is actually willing to spend for better rewards.

If you can't see that, you need to go back to school and re-learn your scientific method and eliminating variables to track results properly.

You make a good point, but the 20% sale is so common now that's its not a variable to begin with. By not having the sale then what you are doing is taking something away from the normal equation. So if you end up selling the same amount or less gems as usual then you don't know whether that was caused by people not being interested enough in the new rewards of if the deduction of the sale had a negative effect on gem buying.

[The Pale Rider]

Come on Pale, you're smarter than that too.

My idea of not having a huge sale is to help get a proper look at the effect of new rewards on guild war spending.

If you just have a huge sale, of course people will buy gems like there is no tomorrow, and scores as a whole should increase. If that is the case, you get the "oh man, people spent 1000's of gems on this war for an old epic. See, we were willing to spend for better rewards the whole time. * " See the * there? That is because you don't know if it was the rewards or the huge sale that preceded it, that made the masses spend more gems. If there is no major sale, you can track the effect of those new rewards more accurately. You know, finding out if rewards alone is enough to entice people to spend. I'm not saying that there shouldn't be a sale to entice people, of course sales entice people and it means more $ for Gree, but the more variables you include, the harder it is to verify to Gree that te movement is actually willing to spend for better rewards.

If you can't see that, you need to go back to school and re-learn your scientific method and eliminating variables to track results properly.

If everyone spends the same amount with a sale or without a sale the only impact will be the number of purchased gems used will go up relative to the number of free energy from time.

Sure the scoring would be higher but why do yu think that's a metric GREE gives a rat's ass about. The metrics that matter are number of people who spend, average spend and total spend. Better rewards effect that and so do sales.

You're arguing irrational actor behavior on the part of players (which I acknowledge definitely exists), but in terms of the economics, discounting gems should have no negative impact on GREE revenue per war. It should only enhance it.

EliJ -- You're just completely wrong. Electrity has a huge inherent value. There's a huge cost to produce it and there's also a huge cost to build and maintain infrastructure to deliver it. You're also wrong about accounting requiring Gem counts -- that's ridiculous. They probably report revenue from ingame purchases (assuming it's not just consolidated into revenue), but that's the extent of it.

[Sir William]

Pale, you're overlooking the bigger picture.

If all of the players are accustomed to discounted gems, and only purchase gems whilst discounted, the true cost for gems is at a discounted rate.

If gree only finds them self selling gems when discounted, then they will either stop discounting altogether until the market has balanced back out and people will buy full price, or continuously discount to the point that the discounted rate becomes the status quo.

The players here aren't going to pay full price for gems before a war when they know there will be a sale momentarily (as has always been the case).

To suggest that gree putting gems on sale is of overall better value to them is ignorant.

[King juju]

Pale. All your predictions are wrong. Green knows people will buy gems anyways. So a sale is them losing money. Go on now an pay up. Tool.

[Theodorus]

No gems sales at all this war or am i missing all those flash sales?

[The Pale Rider]

Ad hominem attacks in lieu of logic. Typical. Sorry for trying to reason with children and a-holes. GFY

[Sir William]

Ad hominem attacks in lieu of logic. Typical. Sorry for trying to reason with children and a-holes. GFY

It's interesting; I replied to your post with logic and lacking any form of attacks. Why not reply to those having an actual discussion instead of taking the time to avoid the actual discourse and point out the trolling going on?

Where's the logic in that?

[Dark Prince]

Fine..... Done

[The Pale Rider]

It's interesting; I replied to your post with logic and lacking any form of attacks. Why not reply to those having an actual discussion instead of taking the time to avoid the actual discourse and point out the trolling going on?

Where's the logic in that?

You are not making an economic argument you are putting forth a theory about customer behavior based on what you think they might do in the event sales occur consistently. It's your opinion, you have nothing to back it up (GREE is experimenting with gifting versus sales to see which motivates more spending). I acknowledge user behavior is a factor, but it's also irrelevant to the point I was making which doesn't depend on user behavior to understand.

The effect sales have which is empirical, is it makes the value of a free attack worth less. Which was where my point largely stopped. Assuming a somewhat rational actor, GREE will convert more free spenders into spenders with a sale because as the value of free energy declines, the ability of f2p to effect the game declines.

The other point I made is total spend versus price per gem. Total spend should increase (or be unimpacted) by a sale, as the entire pool of purchased gems used in the game increases in accordance witht he lower price (put simply if you have a $100 and the other guild has a $100, whether that buys 1100 gems or 800 the result is the same as between those two guilds). The result is different only for the guild that doesn't buy gems -- they are put under pressure to buy or accept irrelevancy. That's to GREE's benefit because it's objective is to pressure (incentivize) non-spending guidlds to spend and spending guilds to spend more.

Expect more staggered sales, because it optimizes the effect.

[King juju]

Sale the last day of war, gree wins again. Told u...pale. false predictions.

[Mr Spock]

Pale. All your predictions are wrong. Green knows people will buy gems anyways. So a sale is them losing money. Go on now an pay up. Tool.

I had burned my quota and was on F2p just hanging and ensuring I wasn't getting farmed.. Then the sale came and I said "what the hell" and bought more. Thanks to the sale I exceeded my quota by
400 more gems then I would of used otherwise...

So how did this sale cause Gree to lose money.. I would tend to agree with pale rider...

So Juju u didn't by and use one more gem then u would have otherwise had there been no sale?

[ColombianThreatMachine]

What happened to the 3 day gem sale? it only lasted two days!!! I wanted to buy a rainbow pack!!!!! ARARGHARGAH

[Hopeless82]

What happened to the 3 day gem sale? it only lasted two days!!! I wanted to buy a rainbow pack!!!!! ARARGHARGAH
It was stated to be only for 36 hours, or one and a half day.

Cheers.