TBF, what WOTC did with MTGO is pioneer the system everyone has gone to. That is “low entry” with “micro transactions”. When they setup MTGO everyone said it would fail because it didn’t do a flat fee a month or upfront cost. Now everyone has gone to the model, but instead of doing “low entry+micro transactions” others went to “no entry+micro transactions”. Oddly MTGO was a trendsetter for once, rather than behind the curve 😛

As for conventional wisdom, Bioshock Infinite is the 10th best selling game of 2013 with 2.89 million copies. Even assuming they got 50 per (very high I imagine) that is 145~ Million dollars GROSS revenue at the retail level. IDK anything about the cost structures of video games, but I doubt they are abnormal enough to be note worthy. MTGO does north of 100 M a year in revenue as well, but as their product is not a new release etc (and they are so clearly cheap with it) I would imagine they have a insanely high profit margin relative to market norms. It would not surprise me if profit wise MTGO is better than the majority of video games released in any given year. Hard to argue with massive profitability, even if we all know it is trash.

TL;DR Thank god Garfield is a genius, and despite WOTCs best attempts they can’t seem to kill MTG/MTGO

yep, WotC clearly interested in high ARPU and not high user numbers. Whether that’s logical is up for debate. It certainly flies in the face of most other industry trends where developers have discovered that $0 entry cost is massively more valuable than a pay wall. Likewise Steam has shown videogame developers the value of halving your price and selling more than twice as much. Magic’s costs look utterly ridiculous in the modern era, ironically one that has only recently embraced Magic’s business model decades after Magic first used it. That said, for a sufficiently high enough caliber product you could imagine premium prices working. MTGO is not that product. WotC will continue to let it wither on the vine printing money rather than try to innovate and risk damaging the physical product and its surrounding ecosystem.

An example of a good marketplace experience would involve me entering the marketplace and typing ‘Grave Titan’, and having the best price be brought to the top.

This doesn’t exist in the UI.

For example, it is very hard for a new user to find the ‘best deal’. I know that the Magic v4 UI isn’t going to help me there, and that I need mtggoldfish or mtgowikiprice to find the best bot.

A new user won’t, and they’ll soon have a very negative user experience by getting ripped off, or at least, sub optimal pricing on cards.

All that said, I agree completely with everything except the cost argument. Well and that downloading V4 takes a hour. If your internet takes a hour to download 125 MBs of data that is a suppppper slow connection.