In the world of the BSG simulation, being a celebrity must be a much better career choice than being the executives of a shoe manufacturer. In many games of this Invitational, the celebrities are making a lot more money than the companies that contract with them.
For example, there’s one team playing in the Invitational that’s contracted to pay about $170 million to celebrities each year, while their own net profit is less than $2 million. They have 9 celebrities at the moment, paying up to $26 million each, with an average of $19 million. This team is completely wasting millions of dollars with no benefit at all to themselves.
Celebrities don’t have some magic power to make your company profitable, which apparently some BSG players don’t realize. Celebrities are merely just another form of advertising, except unlike regular advertising, companies are allowed to bid much more than they’re worth in increased sales vs. their cost.
Perhaps these players haven’t noticed that the Sales projection screen lets values be entered for celebrities to see how they affect sales and profitability, just like advertising, rebates, and the other factors that affect consumer demand. The maximum celebrity value for each region is 500, but like all of the demand factors, they have diminishing returns. In other words, the first 100 of celebrity value has a much higher affect on demand than the next 100 added to it. Going from a value of 400 to 500 has a much smaller increase in demand than from 0 to 100. Celebrity values above 500 result in no increase to demand at all.
Therefore, having 9 celebrities is wasting a large percentage of the money spent on them, since the celebrity values per region will hit the maximum with many fewer than that number. Due to diminishing returns, even the celebrities that contribute to the 500 maximum value are worth much less, the more that are contracted.
I’ve observed hundreds of games played in the Invitational. Here are some of my observations.
Many teams that end up winning often have no celebrities at all by the end of the game, and often have few celebrities at all after year 15. That’s because it only takes one team to go crazy on the bidding to make all celebrities to be over priced.
Most teams that overbid for celebrities will have no chance of winning the game. They usually end up at the bottom of the rankings. That’s where they should be ranked. They’re throwing away their company’s money.
Any team can win bids for celebrities. It take no skill whatsoever to bid more than other teams. It’s much harder to bid values that you know will be profitable if you do win the bid. You lose no money when you lose a bid that would be unprofitable. In fact, you save your company money when you don’t win unprofitable bids.
If you don’t know how to calculate the value of a celebrity: DON’T BID AT ALL. Overbidding for celebrities is one of the most common ways that teams lose the game. Overbidding only make the celebrities rich while your own company heads towards bankruptcy. In the example above, the team has paid their celebrities more in one year than they’ve made in profits for 5 years. That’s beyond foolish. It’s irresponsible mismanagement.
The point of celebrities is to bid an amount that will be PROFITABLE. It’s better not to have any celebrities at all than to have ones that are unprofitable. If you can’t accurately estimate the profitability of a celebrity, then how can you possibly bid any value that you know will be profitable if you win the bid? You can’t. That’s why the sales screen let’s you enter celebrity values to estimate their profitability.