BuzzerBeater Forums

OK, here's something that has kinda bugged me for a while...

The conventional wisdom seems to be that it's critically important to build your Arena up as quickly as possible because the sooner you do, the sooner you start paying off the sunk cost of construction so that in future seasons all revenue from those seats is pure income.

Here's my question: if you're having to charge relatively low prices (and by "relatively low", I'm arbitrarily defining the original ticket prices for a new franchise, namely $10-$35-$100-$800, as the benchmark) why not just up your ticket prices rather than having to spend money for new seats that will cause you to lower ticket prices in order to fill them? Am I crazy or does continuing to expand your Arena when you're charging on the order of, say, $8-$25-$80-$550 seem like a waste of money?

Very interested to hear the opinions of more veteran (and more successful) team owners on this. I've been playing for a good while, but it's more of a casual diversion for me, so I haven't done the kinds of analyses that I've seen others do.

Thanks guys!

As in a market place, the cheaper a product or service, the more people will be able to afford. Say you have 1000 seats at 30 bucks. You sell out and make 30,000 dollars. If you have 2000 seats and charge 17 bucks you will make 34,000 dollars. A broader percentage of the population can pay 17 bucks for the game than 30. You make your games an economical choice of entertainment.

It doesn't sound like a lot in the example I gave, but when you start talking about a 20,000 seat arena versus a 10,000 seat arena it can be tens of thousands of dollars per week depending on the level your team operates at. Arena is your team's lifeblood.

I understand your concern and I agree just recklessly building your arena as fast as possible is not always the best course of action. However, there are multiple factors that speak for that case. Like said above, income fluctuation is one. Another one is that's easier to save money in a less competitive league (ie early on in your BB career). And if you aim to be highly competitive at some point, you're gonna need those seats anyway. Besides that, the higher your prices are already (in a small arena), the more people will stay away when you increase the prices further.

Personally I feel that increasing the prices up to about 30-40% over the original prices is effective before you really need to expand your arena, starting with the seats that are relatively the priciest compared to the original price. The opposite goes for prices 30% under the original price, at that point I think it gets less effective to build extra seats and just increasing the price will yield better gains.

Please note that these just estimates from my own experience and in no way based on actual statistical research.

First off, bigger arena will always bring you more money(barring extreme cases). That's the rule.

The exception may be in some cases, if you invest into players, instead or arena, you get much better results, and therefore by raising price, you will earn more money than increasing arena.

Building up the arena is still the safest path though..

I've only played 1.5 seasons, but have noticed with my last price increase that even a slight change in ticket prices can reduce attendance significantly, especially versus the weaker teams in the league. What I'm discovering (and really appreciate) about many aspects of this game, is that it likes balance. So it's good to expand the arena as you can, and to nudge the ticket price up as your team improves. But it seems you need both to max out your revenue.

That might be true short term you can make mroe by just raising prices. But at some stage you will hit max prices and have no room to move. A solid consistent building program is the key to long term success. But building to a plan is also important. Kist adding buckets of bleachers is not the answer. But not building much at all early is also a mistake.

Yeah of course bigger is better, I just said at some point it's get less effective and more is to be gained by just raising prices and waiting with another expansion (maybe invest in a better roster first).

I agree building a good arena is very important, I just want to bring some balance into the general opinion which tends to advice "build arena asap".

My english is not perfect but I will try to explain how I see it. The fastest way to move up through divisions is knowing how to keep balance between expanding arena and investing money into the roster. You need to have arena big enough to receive max or highest income as much as you can and to maintain salaries of your player roster which need to be competitive or good enough to win games. Higher ticket prices are inevitable.

Bigger is not better... Better is better. And better is expanding to a point were you can get a return on the investment as quick as possible. I do agree that you can't just sit with a starter arena and expect to compete but spending a couple of million on an arena and having no players will cause your ROI to stretch far into the future.

Investing well in your team and your arena are all important, as well as developing young players.

Better is better and better is good.

And better is expanding to a point were you can get a return on the investment as quick as possible.

That's not 100% true, if you have a small arena and you will improve your team, one day you will have to use money that could be useful to expand the arena for your team, if you wanna stay competitive in the higher divisions; in BB is better to build an arena when you can and usually this is at the beginning of your experience.