Premium membership not worth it. I'm canceling.

[Hervor]

Well, I was interested and not very motivated to do my actual work this afternoon so I did have a further look at BGAs financial statements. BGA is published by AD2G Studio SAS and I'm pretty sure they don't do anything besides BGA. At least I couldn't find anything else. So these should tell us what we want to know.

As a disclaimer: this was not a thorough audit, I just skimmed some documents for half an hour. The last statement was for the period 01-03/2023, so quite old. Please keep that in mind.
I was wavering if I should post this at all or not since I don't want to give the "conspiracy theorists" more ammunition but I guess that I did the work and the information should be available to the users.

Let's see if this gets deleted .

While the financial statements does not show separate numbers for hosting and development costs (everything beside asset depreciation and personnel costs and is basically lumped under "other expenses"), we can see the total operating income and dividends paid. In sum from 2021 when Asmodee acquired AD2G till march 2023 (balance sheet dates 31.12.2021, 31.12.2022 and 31.03.2023) the total operating income was 12 Mio. and 4 Mio. in dividends were paid out to the beneficiary.
While this is certainly a nice payout for Asmodee we can also see that 2/3 of the operating income are staying in the company to pay for the staff operating expenses (and taxes) or for - I assume - future investments.

[Meeplelowda]

Let's see if this gets deleted

Hopefully not, but information publicly available on BGA itself has been deleted in the past, so I wouldn't be shocked.

[Arjuna92]

While the financial statements does not show separate numbers for hosting and development costs (everything beside asset depreciation and personnel costs and is basically lumped under "other expenses"), we can see the total operating income and dividends paid. In sum from 2021 when Asmodee acquired AD2G till march 2023 (balance sheet dates 31.12.2021, 31.12.2022 and 31.03.2023) the total operating income was 12 Mio. and 4 Mio. in dividends were paid out to the beneficiary.
While this is certainly a nice payout for Asmodee we can also see that 2/3 of the operating income are staying in the company to pay for the staff operating expenses (and taxes) or for - I assume - future investments.

What about the monies paid out to licence holders and developers?
According to this article licence holders typically get either 50% or 33% of the revenue, split among them depending on how much of the total play time of premium users is spent on their games. That 4 mio. is 1/3 of 12 mio. reminded me of this. Maybe this is factored into or represents these 4 mio.? But then of course there are all the other publishers to be paid too, as well as the developers (if paid by BGA).

[Hervor]

What about the monies paid out to licence holders and developers?
According to this article licence holders typically get either 50% or 33% of the revenue, split among them depending on how much of the total play time of premium users is spent on their games. That 4 mio. is 1/3 of 12 mio. reminded me of this. Maybe this is factored into or represents these 4 mio.? But then of course there are all the other publishers to be paid too, as well as the developers (if paid by BGA).

Licencing fees are part of the "other expenses", if not listed separately. However it should be possible that Asmodee lets BGA use its IPs (Catan, 7 Wonders,...) for "free" in return for higher dividends (or they view this as basically marketing expenses to sell more physical copies of those games). That being said, multinational corporate groups have all kinds of subsidiaries and paper companies mostly for risk reduction and tax optimization. It is entirely possible that another subsidiary does work for BGA without those expenses showing up in AD2Gs statements (for a classic example: one of the companies buys MS Office licences in bulk that are then being used by all employees of the subsidiary companies). As long as neither investors are mislead (they are typically only interested in the overall health of the group, not a tiny subsidiary) and there is no tax evasion (for corporate taxes these subsidiaries get taxed as fiscal group not individually) there is little incentive to show this in the public financial statements even if they probably have those numbers internally.

AD2G is certainly expected to turn a profit and pay out dividends to Asmodee but it would be inaccurate to say that premium memberships (or even 1/3 of premium memberships) are there to only pay for Asmodees debts. Some of it will, some will go to overarching costs, a lot will probably go to compensate for other failed products and to pay higher management and dividends to Asmodees investors. That's the nature of capitalism.
As I said in my first post, percentage wise BGA is a small fish in this corporate network. In November Asmodee statet that they want to reduce debts by 1,6 Billion ahead of spin off in march. BGA is incapable of moving any numbers here. Maybe we will see big changes in the future, in which case I predict that the membership fees will go up but also that there will be more content for paid members, or BGA will continue to exist as a community building platform, in which case little will probably change.

[Arjuna92]

I'm actually surprised at how profitable BGA apparently is. I thought Asmodee's interest was more in growing the site by attracting people who are not (yet) hard-core boardgamers. They would not only profit from more premium accounts (and a lower account-employee and account-development expense ratio) but also would sell more physical games, since they themselves are owners or distributors of many of the most popular games, especially in the gateway game sector. If BGA is so profitable at just 3€/$ per month and at the current high growth rate (in terms of new games at least) that's pretty amazing. It also means that any near-future price increase would not really be "necessary".

But I doubt they will ramp up the prices since it would endanger the business model and customer growth. Like you say, BGA is too small to be able to do much to solve the newly independent Asmodee's debt problems. I consider it more likely that investors will compel them to sell off studios, especially the most lucrative ones (Catan Studios perhaps). While I'm not keen on having such a behemoth in the board game industry due to an excess of market power, I'm worried about who might buy such spin-off studios and what buyers from outside boardgaming might force them to do.

[detlefchef11]

I think my premium membership is an outstanding value. I could probably get by with the basic, but I want to be part of the group that keeps the lights on here.

In terms of how responsive they are, it's MUCH better here than on another gaming site I play other games on. On that site, they have a suggestions subforum and everyone recognizes that it's the place to post what you think would make the site better, have others agree with you, and then watch your suggestion, like every other suggestion, die a slow death. And, actually, that site IS dying a slow death. People are openly trying to figure out how low the number of paid subscribers can get before they shut it off.

[Andrew Davidson]

Premium membership seems good value to me. My impression is that it doesn't buy you better performance but it gives you some extra functions. I've started using the notepad more and am finding it quite useful for turn-based games.

[Rex Goodheart]

This is one of the best sites on the web. I've been here for a long time and I've witnessed an explosion in the number of games offered and in the number of players. It's not surprising to me that increased trafic might cause an occasional glitch. Who cares, really, when the annual fee is only 34 bucks.