KittyCatS! Market Improvement Suggestions

[Ivy Norsk]

Something I haven't seen addressed in this thread yet is how much of this economy is riding on the backs of Megas. (I loved writing that bit). One of the major things that buffers the larger breeders is their ability to pull in Megas and sell them at a very large profit.

The incidence of a Mega is pegged at something like 1%. So those who have the capital to outlay buy a great many LE cats. While people who buy 4 LEs or 12 or so have a small chance to get a special cat (either new traits, the very rare LE, or a special size), those who can invest, have a nearly guaranteed chance to get at least some of the above and very probably all. They can then sell their megas for 15,000L or so, (and the rare LE for a marked up price also) which then reimburses them for their capital outlay. They can then discount a number of the rest of their purchases to 500L, which further causes people to buy *their* LEs on the secondary market , which further reimburses their capital. I don't know what the margin of profit they get is; it would vary with the popularity of the collection no doubt, and what they actually got in the lottery. But the point is that if you can invest, you can often recoup, as long as people pay the big bucks for the megas.

Over the past year we've seen the rise of the menagerie tiger as a sales item, treated like an LE collectible, and Fabio Mr. Cat has shown the math on that with menagerie cats.

In regular day-to-day breeding, the larger breeders, working with a larger number of cats, are going to pull in megas at the 1% rate, but this happens so much more often in proportion to the number of cats that you breed. And they can then set those for sale at the much higher rate.

So the larger the breeder you are, the less dependent you need to be on the quality of your day to day cats and the sales thereof. So far. But if everyone pursued this strategy, sooner or later, there would also be saturation in this area as well. Not everyone buys megas. Not everyone can buy megas. There are already whisperings that the market for Menagerie Megapuss Tigers is going down.
So encouraging everybody to become a bigger breeder probably is not a great strategy. I also think that it is worthwhile to point out that there really are these economic differences between large and small breeders.

On a related topic: KittyCats HQ has said that they don't want to do more limiting of LE sales because of the people who are on vacation and can't make it online. Some of this is puzzling: nobody takes holidays for Halloween. Spring break falls at different times for different people and would not hit everybody's vacation even if everybody took vacation then which they don't. So that leaves the Winter cat release, where indeed I think a lot of people are gone for awhile. But of course these people can still buy the cats. The secondary market provides them (often below cost) for at least a month after release. What can't they buy on the secondary market for the price of the store lottery? The megas and rares. So the HQ is saying that they have to extend the release so that some people have the opportunity to get megas and rares. That's it. Just worth noting.