Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-31526827-20181217052414/@comment-29898480-20181217140026

It's intuitive that lower prices would induce more people to buy, increasing revenue, and since net cost is zero it would also mean higher profit. In other words, that FM have not optimized for the most profitable price given the price elasticity of demand for GC.

However, intuition isn't always correct. Of course I don't know anything about FM's numbers, but it was curious to see the 21-day GC card go away, and not come back. It was the best GC/$ ratio in the store, and had a number of customers who posted here. With that gone, some folks posted that they wouldn't buy any more GC. Personally, I bought 3 of the 21-day GC cards as I recall, but haven't bought any GC since.

By eliminating their cheapest option, FM should have seen a drop in revenue/profit if in fact they were already above the optimal price for GC. That is, they would have lost more revenue from people who stopped buying, than revenue they would have gained from people buying at higher prices. And it would have made sense to re-instate the 21-day GC card. As we know, they have not re-instated the card. This makes me question the intuition that GC prices are too high from their business perspective. Or they could be stupid, but even stupid people tend to get a lot smarter when their own profits are involved.