Every dollar spent on marketing equals more than one dollar in sales? I guess they don't need gambling boxes, then. The game is automatically profitable.
No, just common sense. They don't spend money for the fun of it, they spend money so that more people hear about the game, enough that the additional revenue exceeds the spend on marketing. Marketing
increases your margins, e.g. it means you end up with more money to spend on everything else, including development. The more people you can spread the development costs around to, the more money there is to develop the core game: everyone gets a better game.
In-game purchases are entirely separate to that. The point of in-game purchases is that they create an
optional pricing scheme.
e.g. assume a box price of $60, 1 million players, an no in-game purchases. You have a total of $60 million for development and distribution costs. If you want to compete with the latest games however, you need a $90 million dollar game, not a $60 million one, so you need to charge a box price of $90, but then you're going to lose customers, meaning you really need to charge $110 per box for a game with a $90 million dollar development and distribution budget.
So, you make in-game purchases instead. If you keep the box price at $60, you still get ~1 million customers, but if you can convince half the players to spend another $60 in-game then you now have your $90 million to make the better-looking game, but the average cost-per-player is lower even considering the in-game purchases, since the lower box-price allowed you to pull in more players than for an equivalently-funded game without variable pricing.
People want a killer-looking game, people want a low base-price for the game, and people
also want there to be no in-game purchases. They
can't have all three things at once.
Not having gambling boxes equals Coca Cola giving out free product?
But I never mentioned gambling boxes at all so any connection there is in your mind, not mine. It was burnttoasts statement:
You're trying to argue poor starving activision has to chop out parts of the game to sell in gambling boxes just to make ends meet because games are so expensive to make when they are spending 280% of the cost to make the game on marketing.
That is a completely incoherent straw-man. First there's the idea that they "chop out parts of the game". The point about variable pricing is that those parts wouldn't be there in the first place without the option of variable pricing, so it makes no sense to say they "chopped them out". The point about marketing spend also has nothing to do with it. Marketing lets the devs reach more people, and spread core development costs around to more people.
Marketing doesn't
cost other players anything because each dollar in marketing pulls in
more additional dollars than they spent on it. But the "more additional dollars" is made up of the same mix of core-price and variable-price as everyone else, so the same principles apply as I mentioned above: games with variable-pricing are out-competing ones that don't have it, precisely because the variable-pricing scheme allows you to fund more content
in general since you have a bigger player base than you would otherwise. This is why those games are winning the battle for sales.