EKGaming’s Rebuttal series is about responding and refuting to claims in the gaming world. There’s a time for reporting, and a time for arguing, and that’s where our very own CapsLock comes in. He doesn’t speak for EKGaming, but we let him use our platform to rant because every once in awhile we actually agree with something he says.

A recent interview from CNBC with KeyBanc Capital Market indicated that EA’s pricing isn’t the problem. In fact, according to Evan Wingren, a Capital Market Analyst with the group, EA should be raising prices higher than they are. This may strike gamers as a huge surprise considering no one has ever heard of Mr. Wingren and he made zero attempts to address any of what the community was actually angry with, but let’s pretend he isn’t being a condescending dick and pick apart his argument.

This is the crux of Wingen’s argument. He even backs it up by stating that $60 for Battlefront II  plus $20 in microtransactions a month would be an average cost of 40 cents per hour. This is compared to 60-65 cents an hour for television, 80 cents an hour for a movie rental (and we have to applaud Wingren for including movie rentals, because that’s still a super popular thing, right?), or $3 an hour for watching a movie.

I thought I would take Wingen’s argument a bit further, since he is just equating completely different things like they are the same. If going to the movies – which is often a social outing – is exactly the same as sitting in my underwear and downloading games from the PSN network, then sure, what else can we compare it to?

How about reading a book? Well that’s about $2 an hour. That’s pretty pricey. Maybe we need to use Wingen’s math to tell publishers they need to drop prices. $6 for a new book. That fits better.

Going to a museum? Well, that’s usually free… unless you count the parking. Boom! $7.50 an hour. Those greedy, curating sons-of-bitches. Thanks to Wingen we all know that museums are terribly overpriced in the ‘having fun’ market, which all activities share equally.

Having sex? Sex with condoms is gonna cost you about 75 cents an hour. Holy cow! That’s almost the best rate out there. Someone tell Trojan to double their prices because according to Wingen, they have room for markup!

As evidenced by the above chart, you can see museums suck and are too expensive. Going to the movies is too. Don’t do that. However, do have sex and play games because they’re cheap, but not for very long because all forms of entertainment are the same according to Evan Wingen, and making giant, stupid claims makes you sound smart.

In fact, I thought maybe Wingen was onto something, so I decided to try arguing in the same way he has. First, I just had to make a humongous, sweeping generalization that didn’t come close to capturing that actual argument. Then, I just have to say something incendiary that’s sure to piss people off and make them pay attention to me. I even put it into a pie chart.

As good a counter-point as this is, there might be some use in actually trying to decipher the arguments against Battlefront II. There might be value in actually trying to understand the gaming landscape – and the killing that companies like EA are making in it – despite not raising the price of games.

Maybe what people are actually mad at EA about is being lied to. Maybe people are angry because there’s such a thing as a Market Average, and while EA is trying to get thousands of dollars out of people for one title, Shovel Knight has released three DLCS for free for a single title. Or maybe before making grand claims of pricing, Wingen should have looked at how much costs of production have gone down for publishers, gone down dramatically now that the vast majority of game distribution is done digitally. There’s also the insane profits made from microtransactions, far more than the cost of a single title, which is the entire reason EA no longer cares about making linear games.

But the hard thing about trying to have an actual conversation about something you know nothing about is doing all that pesky research, which CNBC and Wingen made no attempt to do. Maybe next time CNBC shouldn’t talk to a market analyst that deals mostly in big business big money. Maybe next time they should just ask a gamer.