My 4.2 pounder is set to arrive today, and whatever it is, will be whatever it is. I knew that when I hit the buy button.
Of course it was totally a gamble, in the same sense that bingo, slot machines, 50-50 raffles or really any raffle, and the lottery are gambles. Only unlike the others, at least I am guaranteed something. Two things actually: a surprise and whatever tangible goods come in the mail.
People play bingo (I hate... no abhor... bingo) to win crappier swag from the Oriental Trading Company
People play stupid games for tickets to win same garbage at Dave n Busters or Chuck E Cheese
People play the lottery
People buy into raffles (granted, these are usually just donations for whatever fundraiser is going on)
People play slots
Aside from raffle tickets which I buy to support whatever fundraiser it is, I don't bother with any of these other gambles because the odds are terrible and/or the prizes are worthless. In the case of this mystery box, I knew that I might be buying a $99 for a sportsack, a couple stickers, a trucker hat, and a max weight z nuke OS. I'd still rather have something like that than pay anything towards a lottery or pay $25 to sit through 2 hours of bingo (and gouge my eyes out)
The odds in this mystery box game were good: 100% at receiving something
I would hazard a guess that at least half of the "players" felt like they got at least half of their money's worth ($50) in prizes even though they might not have chosen those particular items if they had $50 to spend at the store
How many of these boxes do you think they sold? 100? 200? Let's say 1000.
If they had 20 chainstar lites and 10 chainstar whatevers and 20 GripEQ bags, that's 50 big ticket items or a 1 in 20 chance of winning a big item.
Personally, I think they were expecting to sell about 100 of them which would make the odds 1 in 2 which is in line with how much they were selling the Grip bags in the first place (ie buy two mystery boxes, you are even odds to win a big ticket item, priced around $200)
So now let's say if they expected 100 but sold 4x they sold 400. Even if they added no more big prizes, that's a 12.5% chance of winning a big ticket item (with the same 50 unit assumption I made earlier) Maybe they were telling the truth and they upped their prizes by a factor of two (100 big prizes). That's a 1 in 4 chance of winning something big.
I don't really see a problem with what Discraft did here. Anyone could have bought the same big items for the price of two mystery boxes, but instead played a game where they might win one of them for half the price. I played, and while whatever comes this afternoon might be a disappointment, it won't make me mad.
