Gate Revenue in OOTP

Diving deep

Gate Revenue in OOTP

As I noted a few days ago, we’re going to do some deep dives into the OOTP financial structure:

We’ll start off today by looking at gate revenue.

The OOTP Wiki describes gate revenue in pretty basic terms. It’s determined by the price of your tickets multiplied by your attendance. In other words, when you’re looking at ticket prices, you should be thinking in terms of the cost of the average ticket. Like Football Manager, OOTP doesn’t make any allowances for the various ticket pricing structures that exist in real life — though I actually don’t think a system like that would be all that complicated.

The Wiki mentions that your team will receive 80% of home revenues and 20% of away revenues. Actually, you can change that setting in Game Settings > League Settings > Financials. You can also change the baseline ticket price and the baseline attendance:

Allowing teams to change ticket prices means that teams can adjust ticket prices from that baseline price depending on demand, fan interest, or whatever they feel like. What that means is that you can theoretically create a league structure in which all teams have the same forced ticket prices that are unchangable.

Now, you’re probably confused about that “Apply Gate Share to season tickets” option. That is explained in this forum post. Basically, if you click that button, the visiting team will also receive a share of revenue that comes from season ticket sales for each game played in your stadium.

The other confusing thing is that OOTP’s default system doesn’t exist in the modern MLB. Instead, it seems that MLB revenue sharing is done by combining 48% of “local revenue” from each team into a large pool, as explained in this Reddit post.

Now, the current revenue sharing model is actually quite controversial. This post goes into some detail. It turns out that the local television portion of this shared revenue is capped, which has allowed the Los Angeles Dodgers to maintain a salary far above the other teams in the league. And, as you can guess without even looking, the television share of revenue can be easily manipulated if the team and the television station are owned by the same person (or corporate entity).

The nice thing about OOTP is that you can remedy these wrongs. The easiest way is to simply force gate share to 50%, include season ticket costs, and force media revenue to also be shared evenly (which we’ll get to in a future post).

So what can you do to increase your team’s gate revenue?

• Buy popular players

• Win games

• Don’t sell popular players

Fan interest also plays a role, though it is a lagging indicator as described in this thread. Basically, the modifier that determines fan interest is constantly in flux, but does what you would expect it to do in real life: it increases when your team does well or when you hire a superstar, and it decreases gradually as fans lose interest in the team.

Finally, you should know that you can take over determining the ticket price instead of letting the owner do it. You can also just let the owner decide that for himself.

Gate revenue is one of those items in OOTP where simplification actually makes the game better. When you look at each component individually, you’ll realize that it’s not quite as complicated as it seems at first glance. This is a pattern we’ll see as we continue to look into the world of OOTP finances.