The Lion's Share Referendum

[crazypackersfan]

Did I come back here just to talk about The Lion's Share? Yes, yes I did. I want to know what you people think of the game. I want to know if I'm out on a limb in hating the game, or if a lot of you agree with me. So, make your move and vote!

(Edit: If you're wondering why I hate the game, it's that you're almost guaranteed to win really, really big just out of dumb luck, whereas a game like 3 Strikes takes perfect play and a lot of luck just to win something that's half the price of one ball of this game.)

[Alfonzo]

As a pricing game...HATE IT. As I've said before, it plays more like a bonus round of another game show than a pricing  game. It just screams of "MOAR!!!" If the $500,000 is ever won, it'll be the 12th of Never. It's just one giant gimmick that actually makes me appreciate Plinko more.

That being said, I'd LOVE to play it. Who are we kidding?!

[chef855]

I think it could use some retooling to be a long-lasting game, but it's got a good base. It just needs to be less branded and bring down the number of balls to maybe 20 or so? I realize it would mean the prizes would be scaled down, but I'd be okay with that if it meant the branding went away too. If they start introducing other branded games, it's going to be a harbinger of the decline of our beloved show.

[TPIR98665]

I like:

Pretty easy to win balls
Good potential for big win

I don't like:

Sponsored game (a new reality...I hope not)
Game play is cumbersome and time consuming

• The random number order on the SP with T/F pick is not needed.  Just show the two numbers...Is the sander 19 or 91?
  
  
• The air ball room can also be replaced with a bingo/lotto type machine where x number of balls are drawn

[gamesurf]

I don't like it very much at all. I think it hurts to have it around much more than it helps.

Hangup #1 is the sponsor. I think the association with BetMGM is tacky. I am not wholly opposed to the show looking for new ways to make money, or exploring the idea of sponsored elements if it's the right fit. I don't think BetMGM is the right fit for The Price is Right.

Hangup #2 is the prize. Offering $500,000 is way, way too much. Even making it easy to win $100,000 makes every other game look like a cheap consolation prize.

Hangup #3 is the presentation. I don't like the wind tunnel. I don't like the keno board. I don't like the prizes being revealed on a digital monitor. I don't like that they contestant "randomly" draws balls but that order doesn't matter because they also pick the order Deal or No Deal style. About the only thing I kind of like about it is the idea of the mini-wind tunnels with the two balls randomizing a price, but I like the idea behind it much more than I like the actual execution.

A big part of why I like game shows is wish fulfilment and wanting to live vicariously through the contestant. When I watch Supermarket Sweep, I really wish that I could someday be the one racing a cart throwing turkeys and giant cheese wheels in a cart. I want to smack the giant Deal button in Deal or No Deal (the arcade game is great in this regard). I want to throw the giant dice in Dice Game. I want to drop a Plinko chip. I want to punch a hole in Punch-a-Bunch.

Don't get me wrong... I would love to play it! I can absolutely be bought! I would love to be showered with $100,000 prizes without doing very much to earn it! But I don't want to be in a wind tunnel with goggles strapped to my face, or picking digital numbers of a keno board. That has never been a part of my Price is Right fantasy.

[illustriousrocket]

Thank you for giving me a chance to finally let loose on how I really feel about it, lol.

Here's a real bomb to throw right at the outset: it is in my bottom five games of all time. It's the best out of the five, to be fair, but still the bottom five. (The others are some order of Bullseye I, Double Bullseye, Shower Game and Professor Price, with the latter the #1 worst.)

May as well just list the problems with it.

-It's Patient Zero for the sponsored games trend.

-The budget is insanely overinflated to the point of absurdity. This isn't even just about the $500,000 but the fact it has a ton of prizes loaded into it that you may never even see, let alone get a decent amount of information on even if you do win them.

-The gameplay is an incoherent mashup of ideas that both do not work together well and are not executed to their best potential. The Joker pricing method is a welcome return, but "true/false" is a confusing way of presenting it, enough so that it can obscure the information the player needs to make their decisions.

-The wind tunnel is completely unnecessary to the actual gameplay and serves no purpose beyond introducing extra rules that waste time.
         -As an aside, I happened to see a playing of On the Nose earlier today, and the level of convoluted overexplaining Bob needed to do for that game is similar to what Drew needs to do for The Lion's Share. There are so many unnecessary things going on in The Lion's Share that he is constantly explaining new elements.

-The reveals being digital kill a lot of the tension. Punch-A-Bunch avoids this issue because the host can improvise each reveal however they need to, whereas The Lion's Share has a uniformity in its reveals that makes them fall flat.

-Taken as a whole, The Lion's Share is counterintuitively designed. The only tension in it comes during the reveals at the end of the game, but instead of building around that, you have to slog through all the tedious time wasted on the wind tunnel segment first.

-Speaking of time, it takes way too much time to play. The ball-dropping for the prices is particularly unnecessary and time-consuming.

-Returning to the inflated budget, it is far too easy to win a massive amount in it. It was not that long ago that Pay the Rent hyped up its arrival with the promise it would "offer a prize never offered before," which turned out to be a regular $100,000 that was extremely difficult to win. Now, The Lion's Share offers a 1/8 chance at that same $100,000, and you don't have to do anything right to get it.

-Conversely, while Plinko offers a seemingly unwinnable top amount that's unwinnable due to the luck it would require, The Lion's Share is unwinnable because no sane player would take the gamble required to get it. It feels exploitative. Even if you pull all five $100,000 balls, the further you go the returns diminish compared to the amount you're gambling. It's the same dynamic casinos try to get inside peoples' heads - the idea that winning it all is just one more pull away, so you don't stop playing - and it feels sleazy. Anyone who is able to resist that idea will not gamble $400,000 to get $100,000 more. They won't even go that far.

I will give it credit for one thing - even though the wind tunnel looks flimsy, it has an audiovisual presentation that is very solid.

EDIT: Removed a point I did not know had become obsolete.

[DR12Price]

     This game makes "Pay the Rent" look like TPiR gold.

[Josh444]

I don’t hate the game, but it is very flawed for sure.

The sponsorship is tacky, and I don’t like that TPIR is basically promoting gambling. I do like the set overall, including the jungle theme and prize cues. The overall gameplay is clunky. The wind chamber theme should be eliminated, and replaced with a giant bingo hopper. A smaller hopper can reveal the small prize balls (like a lottery machine). The need to enter and exit the wind chamber is just too much. Have the contestant pull a level or press a button to release balls from the hopper.

I also am not a fan of the large display screen reveal. It “feels” disingenuous, even though we know they can’t change the amounts. I also don’t like that the game is played for cars, trips, boats. Just play the game for cash! Speaking of cash, $500,000 is too much! I would cut the top amount in half, for a top possible earning of $250,000. Have 5 balls worth $50,000.

Here is the breakdown I would have:

5 $50,000 balls
5 $10,000 balls
10 $5,000 balls
15 $1,000 balls
10 $500 balls
10 $100 balls
5 Lose it All Balls
 

[Mallory16]

Yeah, I can safely call it my least favorite active pricing game.

It's not a very good game, and it's really not worth the amount of time it eats up in an episode. The Joker-esque pricing was done a lot better in, well, Joker. The whole wind tunnel thing feels largely superfluous, not just for the small prizes, but even for the "main part" of the game. The prize reveal is far less exciting than it should be for such a big prize. It's far too easy to win such a massive prize, yet the top prize is far less likely to ever be won than Plinko's top prize.

The game is just an absolute mess.

[Alfonzo]

The latest playing (4/21/26) with the Porsche win shows even more problems with the game. The Porsche was worth over $99,000, less than $1,000 away from one of the top money amounts. Understandably, the contestant quit, but we found out later that she could've won $100,000 had she gone on. This reeks of the Shell Game bonus being lost after the contestant won the main prize. There should never be any disappointment attached with winning a nearly $100,000 Porsche, that's just horrible television. Maybe such an expensive car shouldn't be offered in this game, there's already five possible chances of winning $100,000, as well as other nice prizes, trips and cash amounts. That just screams of excess.

At least the had an actual Porsche behind one of the Big Doors. Having just a picture of one on the screen would've  been a bad precedent for the show.

[Briguy]

I guess if I had to design this game, I'd think what if this game were played in the 1980s, during the height of the Bob Barker era.

Here's what I'd do:

* One free choice at the outset, just like Plinko.

* Small-prize segment: Just like the other games with small prizes – either either-or, or higher-lower, with the contestant winning any prizes they guessed correctly on. Keep it simple.

* Game board segment: Twenty-five number board, and contestant just calls out the numbers (rather than by blind draw). Assuming a mid-1980s launch, nine would contain cash prizes – two $10,000 and two $5000, and then one each $500, $1000, $1500, $2000 and $2500 – for a maximum cash payout of $25,000. Two "Lose Everything" cards. One has a mid-range car ($10,000 to $15,000 value, assuming mid-1980s); no economy models here. Two spaces have a grand prize, one of them a trip and the other another announced large prize (over $3000). The remaining 11 spaces have standard game show prizes of the era, each worth $300 to $1500; no duplicates. Car, trip and the other grand prize plugs are shown behind the Big Doors (and displayed in a fashion similar to Master Key) and announced at the outset; any medium prizes announced are at the end of the game and shown on art cards, and the small prizes of course are described as usual and placed on podiums.

* Contestant can stop at any time and keep what has been won, or risk finding Lose Everything. Any contestant finding Lose Everything before his/her last pick gets to use his remaining picks but of course cannot recover any lost prizes. At the end of the game, the entire board is revealed to show where the penalty and grand prizes were hidden.

* Cash values and car model would be adjusted for inflation as the show progresses into the 1990s and onward.

I've not seen TPiR or enough of The Lions Share to give a fair comment, but based on the comments I have seen this is how I would have designed the game. Sure, the payouts could potentially be large – assuming it were a mid-1980s launch, $40,000 is a big payout, but then again so was Golden Road back then – but that's the thing ... you could walk away with just four small prizes and a modest amount of cash and/or maybe a refrigerator ... or you could have $25,000, a nice car and a nice trip and walk away with a lot ... or maybe nothing at all (except whatever small prizes were won).

You can do this today and have maybe a $100,000 maximum cash payout, keeping a good cash distribution system, and still offer a car, trip and some other major prize alongside the 11 medium prizes. But that's how I would have done it.

Brian

[richardjm92]

Not a fan - the game takes way too long and in the end, offers very little incentive to play it all the way out. The BetMGM sponsorship is nauseating as I'd rather not have the ever-pervasive gambling promotion getting into the show (see also, the Slots slop on Punch-a-Bunch).

Hoping this game goes at the end of the season, but I highly doubt it.

[TPIR_rules]

Here's what I would've done:

Make the top prize $1,000,000.

It would be all cash amounts (no prizes).

The distributions of the cash would be:

  5 - dollar signs ($)
 
  3 - $50,000

  3 - $25,000

  3 - $20,000

  3 - $10,000

  3 - $7,500

  3 - $5,000

  3 - $2,500
   
  3 - $2,000

  3 - $1,000

  8 - Lose All

Each dollar sign ($) balls are worth $100,000. But if the contestant draws all 5  "$" balls, that contestant wins $1,000,000.

Also I would have it go in the order from 1st ball picked to last ball picked, instead of the contestant picking which ball to be revealed first/next (like what they do now).

[Axl]

Hangup #3 is the presentation. I don't like the wind tunnel. I don't like the keno board. I don't like the prizes being revealed on a digital monitor. I don't like that they contestant "randomly" draws balls but that order doesn't matter because they also pick the order Deal or No Deal style. About the only thing I kind of like about it is the idea of the mini-wind tunnels with the two balls randomizing a price, but I like the idea behind it much more than I like the actual execution.

I'm bothered by the clumsy presentation. Even the SP section feels awkward because of the way the model has to stick her arm into the machine to slowly turn the balls right-side up. And the contestant is already in the wind tunnel for some reason so it's hard to see their full reactions because of the reflection off the front glass.

The wind tunnel itself is basically pointless (is BetMGM's insurance making them do it this way?), and the lack of a practical proveout for such big prizes is not good. I know they're not cheating, but there's nothing fun about just being told what your prize is in a way that's disconnected from the game play. Why can't they put cards with prize names inside the balls and have them revealed by opening them?

[illustriousrocket]

Why can't they put cards with prize names inside the balls and have them revealed by opening them?

I thought about this and my conclusion was that since it already bears superficial similarities to Punch-A-Bunch, having paper slips was considered too similar.

Anyway, since we're giving ideas for it, I have two paths. The simple one is to just replace the wind tunnel with a lotto hopper that the player pushes a button to dispense a ball from, one for each turn they play.

The more extensive one is to change it into a slot machine, due to "The Lion's Share" originally being an MGM slot brand. I have a whole blueprint for this:

-The game is played for a luxury trip, a high-end car, and a jackpot that includes both plus $100,000, with lesser cash prizes also available. The prizes are revealed one at a time, allowing Drew to build up to the reveal of the game and the $100,000, which is announced by George to be "the Lion's Share."

-The player is given one "Lion's Token" (an oversized coin bearing the lion logo; more details below) and can win four more. The pricing plays exactly as it did in Joker, with the numbers presented like a slot machine (eg. 4|6|4) that spins to reveal the answer ($|6|4 or 4|6|$).

-The slot machine has five different symbols on it: an asterisk, a dollar sign, caricatures of George and Drew, and the lion. Three Georges wins the trip, three Drews the car, and three lions the Lion's Share. The asterisk and dollar sign are worth fixed amounts for each individual symbol that comes up; for example, if the amounts are $5,000 and $10,000, an asterisk-dollar sign-dollar sign spin would be $25,000. Prize symbols are worth $500 unless all three of one are spun, so the smallest paying spin is $1,500 using mismatched prize symbols.

-The player must deposit a Lion's Token into the machine and pull its handle to generate a result. After a spin, they may choose to walk away with the result of the spin or give it back and risk winning less on the next one. The game ends once all Lion's Tokens are spent, the player walks away, or they win the Lion's Share.

-Critically, the slot machine is not completely random. This is to ensure every player faces the same standard, reasonable odds of winning. Prior to a playing, a data set of 40 outcomes is created using a randomizer. This data set is then adjusted until it contains two results where the trip is won, two where the car is won, and one where the Lion's Share is won, with the 35 remaining outcomes being completely random lesser payouts. This is related to the player onstage via an information table stating 1/40 odds for the Lion's Share, 2/40 each for the trip and car, and 35/40 for random payouts denoted as "$$$." When the player deposits the token for a spin, one of the results is randomly chosen from the data set and generated by the machine when the handle is pulled.

-A note on prize values: the game would not offer cars as high-end as the Porsche that was won in it the other day. The goal would be to avoid pushing too close to $200,000 total value for a Lion's Share win.