How much was sold on Day 2? On Day 3? How much do we make per unit sale of the retail box? How many preorders were made because it could get you the DLC? All
Peter Moore said that 40% attachment rate I quoted was for all of Week 1. We can assume a large amount of those were true Day One, but even if the full amount was lost during that first with a Week 2 DLC launch, that would only be 40% of the 1 million+ units of ME3 moved during the first week, equalling roughly 400,000 to 500,000 units, since we don't know the details of that "+" as well as Peter Moore.
SourceAll for an unquantifiable cost of what the "PR disaster" actually costs. The economics are not as simple as you paint it out to be.
Then let's throw all of the intangibles aside and look at what the PR disaster of ME3 cost, in terms of things that cost real dollars. Granted, the PR disaster from D1DLC was inextricably tied to the PR disaster for the endings, so it is incredibly difficult to measure anything about the ME3 release, tangible or not, without taking that into consideration.
EA's Help Center (or whatever it's called) staffing. I'm unsure if EA uses offshore or domestic birds for this work (possibly a mix of both), but it is something to consider. Given the flood of calls, emails, chat help and all other forms of correspondence, I would highly suspect, based on my own staffing model experience from a Contacf. Center perspective, this was a 50% hike in anticipated volume MINIMUM. Requiring extra staffing, overtime hours and infrastructure in terms of desks, phones, computers, etc. you'd likely see that spike from the month of March well into late May/early June when the EC came out. Granted, not 100% related to D1DLC, but definitely a contributing factor and a source of some of these complaints.
You could argue that the salaries of Mike Gamble, Casey Hudson and any execs/managers in the PR/Marketing department went solely to managing the ME3 fiasco full tilt. While not a true lost expense in terms increased expenses, any other tasks or functions, including positively promoting the game (instead of putting out fires) were lost opportunities while these salaried work was consumed with damage control.
Vendor relations, such as with shipping back returned copies through Amazon, BestBuy, GameStop, etc. consume time and coordination to move the physical products back and forth, as well as money management group sending the appropriate funds and credits back. Not to mention the intangible cost of gaining a bad name with some of these groups.
The time Bioware spent talking to agents for their big name actors might be either negligible or mammoth, as we're unsure if actors like Martin Sheen and Seth Green may have been agitated about being drug through the mud by fans and the public along with the game. Intangible costs of losing a pool of willing actors to join a video game series (let alone a Bioware game) is an intangible cost that isn't often discussed, just is the possible cost of actors being more likely to play armchair directors, some maybe even being the video game equivalents of Edward Norton and would seek editorial review of the game's plot to avoid having their names attached to a sub-par product.
Marketing materials for Javik likely had to be reviewed and possibly pulled and reissued to counter the messages of being on-disc and the integration of Javik's character into the main plot in original scripts.
Again, many of these are directly tied to the endings controversy. However, the controversy put the entire game under a microscope, causing the most caustic and brutal analysis of every facet of the game's development and release. Large numbers of people who bought the game felt let down, but many who had shelled out the money for the Collector's Edition felt especially burned, which directed some of the ire to the extra content included with that CE, Javik.
Point being, you never know when a game will have something that will cause it to be received in a largely negative way. But pricing and planning your DLC model with the mindset that the game will be loved is a risky one, one that can result in a developer's name being dragged through the mud. Again, for a small piece of the revenue pie when you look at the big picture. It is difficult to prove one way versus another... but when it comes to uncertainty why not tread the more cutious path, especially when you are talking about charging your customers a 15% markup?
Modifié par Fast Jimmy, 01 août 2013 - 01:29 .
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My reaction, as an Aussie, would have been, "Woohoo."
