Posted by Although the $10 Kickstarters are small money, where the smallness ends is where the ShameGames begin.
At the beginning of every month since September 2017, Shannon Young (aka KingFattyCakes) starts a new installment of his ShameGame series. Unlike most other DietBet games, you don’t see a lot of calethenics, rabbit food, and tracking gadgets as you scroll through the game feed. Instead it’s commodes, tattoos, and bare stomachs–and a lot of “cheat” meals.
I’ll let KingFattyCakes speak so you understand a bit what is going on here. Under the Details section of his bets, we see:
Join the Kingdom or sarcastic, irreverent Fatties to make dieting suck less
Then in his profile we have:
It’s a bit of a different feel than what you’d normally see in a diet contest.
So is it effective? Are players more or less successful at dropping 4% of their weight in 28 days than in similar games?
Well, I went and pulled the payout data on KFC’s games, and I did the same for another series run by a more conventional host. I chose somebody who was hosting $10 bets on or just after the first day of each month.
Amy Bolton (Amy B) fits the bill. On her Details:
Compete in challenges, gain support, and feel motivated!
Her profile:
See, it’s SSDD standard host fare.
Here’s the data. For this we have KFC’s $10 games since September 2017–I omitted earlier $35 and $15 games so that different games fees are not a complicating factor. (June and July 2018 data were unavailable on the website. I think those games were set to a private status for some reason. I typically scroll through the activity feed for the DietBet post revealing the payout, but the feed was unavailable for those 2 games).
Amy B’s games since December 2017 are also here; she starts a new one at the same time as KFC, except in the summertime when she appears to take time off. I also have a $15 game that concluded just last month.
Here are the payout and ROI charts, with player count also shown:
So what do we have here?
Amy’s games have fewer people that KFC’s do, but the discrepancy isn’t nearly an order of magnitude as it is between Lexi Reed (Fatgirlfedup) and Sydney Torres (Syd Journey) at the $30 level. Both Kickstarter series do have a fair amount of people in them, so the return trends are not as volatile as they would be for groups with, say, 25 people or less. (Amy’s August 2019 Kickstarter is a bit different than its predecessors, however, with only 37 people and a $15 fee.)
We also see the large ROIs that tend to accompany $10 games in both series. The DietBet FAQ tells us that Kickstarter winners get back 1.5-2x of their bet, which is a 50-100% return. Both series show returns consistent with this statement. (Higher fee levels correlate to lower ROIs. With the $80 and $100 bets the money-back guarantee get triggered on regular basis.
But if you compare a particular KFC game with an Amy B game starting at the same time, more likely than not the Amy B game will have a slightly larger return.
This means that the percentage of KFC players who win is larger than the percentage of Amy B players.
Thus, toilet selfies outperform calorie counting and calisthenics for promotion of weight loss!
We also see the coupled phenomena of greatly enhanced payouts on games starting in early December (holiday debauchery) and greatly reduced payouts in games starting in early January (penance for the same).
Naturally the January games have more players in them than those starting in other months. Still, I think ol’ Lexi is taking in the bulk of the resolutioner noobs. My thinking is they’ve generally they have serious intentions and want to risk more than 10 bucks, and they want to go with the lady that lost more than 2 human’s worth of weight because it’s a really cool thing to do that. But they’re missing out on a lot by passing up a KFC ShameGame.
I’ll do a $35 head-to-head soon. Molsinspire sounds like a good contender. Not sure about a $100 head-to-head—maybe when I’m feeling low, because writing about piss poor ROI isn’t much fun.
Weight Betting Odds 