Alosso:
Well certainly I am the more optimistic of the two.
I just did a quick analysis of The Peoples Club stats. (we (or maybe that is I) keep way too many LOL).
Our 248 members last month played 11,161 Ranked rounds (so forgetting about all the practice rounds or the numerous Alt Shot and Match Plays going on. There is some information that can be gleaned from this one number.
WGT's rough income just from ball usage just from Ranked rounds.
A single ball lasts about 4 rounds and there are 3 in a sleeve. So dividing 11,161 by 12 we find that the members would need to have bought 930 sleeves of balls just to play our ranked rounds.
The Peoples Club is composed of about 91% Tour Master and above members. So the balls used will typically be on the expensive end of the scale.
Say an average of $5 (oh I mean 500 credits a sleeve - oops). 930 sleeves of these balls makes WGT money - about $4,600 in March. So about $55,800 in a year just from one of the most active clubs in WGT.
In another post somewhere I mentioned that a computer programing engineer in San Francisco makes just under $100,000 a year. Taken to an illogical extreme - that basically means The Peoples Club all pays for 20 hours a week of the programers salary. Note this is not the true cost to WGT for the programing engineer as it does not include benefits or other cost of operation like space costs for the employee.
The first question for WGT is quite simple as this game further matures.
Focus their attention on attracting new players who come and go quickly spending a small amount if anything OR focus their energies on supporting a loyal fan base who form the basis for the entire operation while having a natural growth of new players discovering the game?
The second question and the harder one for WGT is how to support the chosen group without decreasing their profit margin?
If they choose the flash in the pan - get them in and maybe they will spend - approach then they have to focus on things to attract new players like a mobile android version that takes a few minutes to play.
My personal opinion on that approach is: OK fine but how do you get them to spend money as why would they care to? I, for one just do not see this approach working all that well. However it is the easier way to go because the number crunching is all done - one has to know that WGT has the numbers that would answer: "On average a new recruit to WGT will spend X.XX dollars.
On the other hand.
If they choose keeping and increasing their loyal fan base then what they need to do is to offer them incentives to both keep playing and spending at least as much if not more than they have been amongst the fan base and attract a new set of players to be involved.
My personal opinion is that this is the way to go BUT the problem WGT has is there is a lot of number crunching on the cost versus benefit of maintaining and increasing the play of the base. In this there is also a lot of uncertainty - there is no experience for them to say with any degree of certainty (for example) that giving members of Level 19 CCs a free CC Pass every 6 hours instead of every 12 hours will generate more revenue overall from ball sales then just having those CC members buy a CC Pass if they want to once a day.
In the end it is all the bottom line as WGT is a business. So the decision is theirs.
None-the-less, I still feel optimistic that WGT will figure out that they get more income from keeping a loyal fan than they do from focusing more of their energy on bringing 100 new ones in. They can find a balance and I hope they do before they see more of their loyal customers saying enough is enough because then this great game will totally unravel - look at their web traffic data in another post (I forget who posted it) it seems to be already happening.