New Scaratings

In my previous posts; I’ve talked about Hybrid Showdown and hopefully shown that there is nothing inherent to it that gives players an unfair playing advantage over conventional play in a bar.

Yet there is one “ick” factor to this and to other forms of remote play that could leave you opposed to all this. You can say it in one word: Freeloader. It is true that no money has been going from our pockets into Buzztime’s, through whatever channels. It is true that Buzztime’s current position on the matter is “COVID is over. Get back in the bars.”

For most of the last few decades, Buzztime had thousands of places where you could play: 4,032 in 2005; 3,925 in 2010; 3,204 in 2013; 2,952 in 2015; 2,639 at the end of 2018.

What is it now? 810.

It is also true that you cannot get back into the bar where there is no bar to get back into.

Unlike most in our position, we have refused to give up on the game, and we have used the available technologies to keep playing. On the whole, we rather like it. We’re playing even more than we did before COVID. We like it enough that we would be willing to pay for playing the way we play. Nor are we against going back to a bar in the general vicinity at least sometimes. But most of us are too old to travel for hours on each of several pilgrimages a week just to pay alms for food and drink in order to play the game, especially after we have spent the last few years sitting at home and playing most of our games. We know there’s another way and that it works.

We respectfully suggest to you and Buzztime that the problem isn’t our unwillingness to travel to distant lands to pay homage at one of your increasingly rare temples, but your unwillingness to come up with a way for us to pay you for what we’re already doing for free.

I’m sure most of you have gone to a bar or restaurant to see the Super Bowl, and you found it good. But I’m just as sure you stayed home or went to someone else’s house to do that other times, and you found that good, too, or sometimes even better. Now imagine if the only way to see the Super Bowl was to go to a certain bar that was hours away, and you couldn’t even pay to see it at home or anywhere else instead. That’s our situation, and we are not alone.

Just how well has the bar/restaurant picking up the tab for Buzztime worked out for both parties?

Being a child of the Eighties and Nineties, the original Buzztime is based on old technology. It was based on desktop PCs receiving getting and relaying minimal data from dedicated wireless devices with very short range. It was what was doable at the time, and that required a lot of expensive hardware. The cost was far too high for typical home use, and the substantial bills had to be paid by somebody, so the technology was pitched as an entertainment device to restaurants and bars.

How well did that work? Let’s look at this from the perspective of Buzztime and from the perspective of the average bar/restaurant.

Buzztime raised a substantial amount of money as a startup, well over a hundred million dollars. Unlike many startups today, it did not spend that money quickly to try to “get big fast.” Instead, the following happened:

The bar business was never consistently profitable. It was almost breakeven. This was mostly because they never had a stable customer base; they had a lot of churn, and it cost them a lot to find new customers. Buzztime’s revenues came from their database of trivia questions. Buzztime was only getting revenue out of it from one activity; the bar/restaurant business, and that was not quite enough.

The history of Buzztime can be summarized as a series of efforts to develop new sources of revenues from using that database, and failing. Remember NTN on AOL? Buzztime in the UK? This was a real-life Groundhog Day:

1. Someone (usually new CEO) comes up with an idea for a new source of revenue.
2. Buzztime spends a few million dollars trying to get this great green hope to work.
3. Great green hope fails because it generates almost no revenue.
4. Buzztime abandons new idea (and usually fires CEO), retrenches to just core business, breaks about even for a while until . . . .

Repeat, with a new green hope. Again and again and again, and with each cycle, the piggy bank gets raided some more. Over time, Buzztime spent the piggy bank.

By early 2020, Buzztime had little money left Then COVID hit, and the 40%+ drop of revenues from the loss of BWW was compounded. If Buzztime had not gotten a PPP loan, they would have died in 2020. If the trivia business had not been sold when it was, Buzztime would have been died soon thereafter, a big chunk of the purchase price had to be advanced to Buzztime to pay for their operating losses.

Now Buzztime is being held privately. Does that mean happy days are here again? At the end of 2020, during COVID, Buzztime still had a little over a thousand sites. Today, 810. No recovery here.

But one thing hasn’t changed: the Groundhog Day strategy is back! This time, the great green hope is Buzztime Go. I have nothing against Buzztime Go, but no advertising? No subscription fees? Show me the money!

Let’s look at Buzztime from the perspective of the average bar/restaurant. The sad truth is Buzztime only rarely makes financial sense for a location. About 25 years ago, that question came up with the group I was playing with, and I came up with a quick calculation to test for that:

1. Take the cost of Buzztime (historically it has been at least $500 a month, Buzztime Light is about half that)
2. Double it.
3. Are people playing the game spending at least that much a month while playing the game?

This is meant as a very rough test. You could make a very good argument that you need to more than double the cost of Buzztime to properly estimate the revenues it takes to cover the additional expense, especially if the customers are buying more food than drink. But if you find that customer spending doesn’t even approach my ballpark figure; they surely won’t reach yours.

In the 25+ years I have played the game, outside of a few cases with unusual circumstances, the game did not make financial sense for the places where I played. The typical pattern was an organized team, a few lone players, and in NYC, an occasional tourist.

Maybe the best proof that locations usually don’t find this game a must-have are the BWW locations. They were required to carry the game as part of corporate policy. About 1,200 BWWs had the game when having the game stopped being mandatory. How many BWWs have the game now? Six. Not six hundred or even sixty. Six. That’s a 99.5% drop rate.

So what do we have here? We have a company that loses money selling a product to customers who rarely make money having it. Even worse, if you didn’t make money selling your product that way for most of your existence, how well can you think you can do after you've lost most of those customers paying those fees?

Maybe the old way was the best you could do in the beginning, but it isn’t 1992 or 2002 anymore, and unless you change your game; it’s going to be the end.

Is there another way? A few thoughts on that in a few days.