BuzzerBeater Forums

Firstly, thank you for your comments!

Will you please clarify what WR and STH are?

Also, would you mind teaching us how one can calculate marginal revenue of a certain seat type?
(For example, let's think about Lower Tier seats. Say, somebody has 2000 LT seats and their ticket price is set to $40. Cost of building one unit of those seats is also $700. In the last game 1500 of those seats were taken. Is this info enough, or does the manager need to do some elasticity analysis by changing the price of the tickets and see how demand changes?)

STH = season ticket holders
WR = world rank

You need to make assumptions on the overall receipts difference by expanding and calculate what will get your money back faster.

See this example, with completely random numbers. Say you have 8k Bleachers at $10, and 400 courtside sets at $130, they currently pay you $80k and $52k. You want to expand by $200k, so either 1k bleachers or 100 courtside. If you want to sell the new seats you'll have to drop prices to $9 and $115 respectively, what's better?
The new bleachers would give you $81k, the new courtside $57.5k, so courtside will pay back the $200k investment faster.

Going by memory, getting courtside to 500 asap used to be the safest investment. Between bleachers and LT it's harder to judge and note that bleachers are the most volatile category, but also the biggest money maker and possibly the most useful in the lower leagues if you often win away games. You probably want to bring up bleachers and LT proportionately since the difference isn't massive. Boxes typically pay back the slowest, give you the least money, but they are highly predictable.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 10/17/2020 9:11:10 AM

Thank you for taking the time and elaborating on this. I understand most of what you said, but there are gray areas in it.
First, how did you know bleacher price should be lowered from $10 to $9 or courtside tickets from $130 to $115 (in order to fill the arena, after the development)? Is there a website or application that gives us that information?
Second, your line of reasoning is based on the assumption that maximal revenue is earned when the arena is filled thoroughly, by tweaking the ticket prices. This may not be true. At least in the real world, depending on elasticity of a good or service, increasing price may increase revenue, even though it hurts demand.

An example:
Price of a certain piece of clothing is set to $10. This has led to a daily demand of 100 customers.
Thus, revenue = 100 pieces * $10 = $1000

An economical analyst suggests increasing the price to $20. This leads to a drop in demand resulting 70 customers per day. However, the revenue increases. Revenue = 70 pieces * $20 = $1400

This implies it may not always be the best to fill the arena by lowering the ticket prices.

Last edited by Earthling Ray at 10/17/2020 5:26:04 PM

What does number of season ticket holders tell us? How does it help us to set the ticket prices?
If one's STH is 750, where do these people sit if all the prices are set to their maximum? Do they all go to the bleachers?

Typically if you lower the prices by x% the increase in seats sold is more than x%, provided of course you are within the constraints of the game (i.e. you can't sell seats you don't have and there are overall caps to how many seats you can sell -it used to be 20.5k). This is another reason why courtside are great, because you can control the price more finely, while bleachers are hard to control.

There is nothing out there to help you figure out the optimal price for your own configuration before and after an expansion. There is some guesswork involved, but you can test on your own arena and look at others as well. We do know that in most cases the demand curves are not linear. For example: if you hike the courtside by 5%, you will likely see seats sold drop on average by 7% and then you will know that for small increases in the number of seats you can probably expect something similar in the opppsite direction. Looking at other users' arenas to figure out a correct pricing is nothing new, however there are a bunch of factors at play there, that are team specific (PR, survey, ranking and record etc.). With the option of changing prices before every home game, you should be able to figure this out pretty quickly. At worst you can calculate assuming the curve is linear, so x% change in price = x% change in seats sold. This is unlikely to give you any different result on which category of seats will pay itself back faster.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 10/18/2020 4:58:22 AM

can i ask you a question?
looking at my arena attendance, do you think i'm able to reach 10k LT if i lower enough the price ? do i have to raise as well the bleachers price? if i read correctly you wrote that LT are sold before bleachers so if i'm not solding out the LT it means i'm not lowering the price enough correct?

Not just that, there Is a certain number of fans that are willing to pay till 24$ for LT more or less 5000 in your case, but there are other that are willing to pay maybe 20$ so that second group didnt buy LT and they Will buy bleachers instead at 12$ in your case

Lowering LT till 20$ you Will sell LT ti this group of fans

So probably you cant reach 10k LT cause there arent enough fans willing to pay 20$ at the moment

Last edited by Camy at 10/24/2020 4:01:33 AM

You have the luxury of being able to set the perfect pricing by manipulating LT and Bleachers.

If you lower the price of the LT you will get 10k for sure. You already know you can sell 19,382 seats at $12 don't you? So if you lower the price of LT to $12 you will definitely sell out LT and then you should sell 9,382 bleachers. While this is how it should go, you would obviously lose money that way, as you lose money every time you set the price too low and sell out a section of the stands.

The real question is how much do you need to lower the price to get close to selling out and whether that will make you more money or not. We know that in most cases if you lower the price by 10% you will sell more than 10% extra seats, so it's usually worth it, but we don't know for sure this would happen in all cases (for example in situations where the prices are very low). Keep in mind people usually draw this conclusion from the more expensive seat categories that are more stable, but bleachers are volatile and it's likely that price has a lower impact compared to other factors.

Going back to my first sentence, if I was you, I would experiment with (relatively small) changes and try to figure out if there are benefit from lowering or hiking LT and bleachers. The reality is, given your massive arena it's unlikely to make much of a difference either way if you change the price of both sections by the same amount (say 9%), because if you increase the LT price and lower bleachers, the loss in one category will be mostly made up by the extra profit in the other category.

Also the benefit of higher LT has been observed in D1 and, while it appeared fairly uncontroversial, it was quite small, so I would be surprised if you can establish with certainty that lowering LT will get you some more money in D2.

Last edited by Lemonshine at 10/24/2020 7:47:20 AM

when dealing with large arena consider using tv station level 3, it helps, i can confirm
also consider having a superior PR. advanced does not really cut it.


on a separate note, I have xperimenting w arenas over past 4 seasons. not jsut mine but encouraging local users to do so as well, implicitly gathering more data.


while i agree there is a corelation between how LT and BL are filled, even on my best day, with all the optimisation, 100% positive fan survey, in div 2 i've never seen someone gain more than 400k or 410k$ for one regular seaons game.
the point is, in D2 i think there is a global cap.

in D1 i am not necessarily sure if such a cap exists. most i ve gotten was 603k, granted wth the help of promotion fan boost

now with no fan boost but with all the positive variables i am earning around 560k$.