Could NBA players really create their own league?

During the recent NBA lock-out between the NBA players and the team owners one idea that was continually kicked around was the idea of the players leaving the NBA to create their own league. This is a fascinating idea since the NBA revenue is driven by its Players marketability and popularity in most cases a fact with which players are familiar. Thus I wanted to conduct a 5-forces analysis on the NBA to see how feasible it would be for players to create their own league.

Barrier to Entry - Extremely High - The players would need to come up with huge capital investments to put together a team, secure an arena lease and market the new league. Making the team and marketing would be easy for the players due to their vast popularity but getting capital together for an arena, staffing the teams with support (GM, coaches, office staff, arena crews), and arranging scheduling and travel costs is really expensive. Even though the players make millions of dollars from their current NBA contracts the owners who are Billionaires with sufficient capital often loose money running their NBA teams. Additionally most cities do not have multiple NBA quality arenas and most of those are already contracted out to the resident NBA team increasing the difficulty in securing a regular arena to host games in.

Supplier Power - High In this instance I would argue that the players are both the suppliers and the Product if the Players decided to quit the league (NBA or new players league) would struggle to continue to put a decent product on the court. Many NBA analysts have said that the fans want to watch certain players and if those players are not playing they won't watch. The league also has to negotiate TV contracts giving companies like ESPN, TNT, and Fox power

Buyer Power - High, the fans pay for the league through ticket sales, merchandising, and TV ratings. if the Fans are unhappy revenue falls

Rivalry - Low currently the NBA has no rival league and even if the players create their own league the NBA would still have the most money and while they may struggle at first eventually they will be able to out-last the player league

Substitutes - High - The NBA or a player's league would have to compete directly with College Basketball, the NFL, and Professional baseball. The high popularity of these other sports gives buyers/fans even more power because the fans can (and have in the past) switched to other sports when they didn't like the NBA. This will be true for a new player's league as well.

Overall I don't think the players could realistically run a viable league. They are great athletes and many have some business knowledge but I believe that they do not understand the amount of time or money it takes to run a pro-basketball team let alone an entire league. We are all much better off that the NBA and the players settled the lock-out instead of the players creating their own league.

Competing With the World of Warcraft - Journal Post 2

I am a huge gamer. I love video games and especially World of Warcraft (WoW). Being the budding strategist that I am I began to think about what it would be like competing with WoW thus I began thinking about a 5 forces analysis of the MMORPG industry in which WoW is the market giant. The Microsoft of the industry.

Barriers to Entry - high - in 2008 the CEO of Activision estimated that it would take a company between $500 Million and $1 Billion dollars to create a competitive game to WoW (and that is true even for other large game makers like Microsoft and EA Sports) and thus make it difficult to enter then industry. http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2008/02/activision-ceo/

Supplier Power - medium - The suppliers to the industry are the video game designers. The best designers are hard to get but there are plenty of other designers to hire. The trick is getting the right designers who have the right skill and the right passion to keep the game exciting for both new and old players

Buyer Power - High - there are a lot of substitutes in the video game industry in general and several other MMORPG games that people can play instead of WoW giving the buyers (game subscribers) a lot of power and forcing WoW to continually innovate and respond to player concerns. If WoW stopped trying to keep its players and attract new ones through innovation the players would get bored and leave.

Rivalry - Low - There are lots of other video game makers but in the MMORPG, WoW really has not competitors. Most new MMORPG games don't have the sustaining power that WoW does. I constantly hear players say they are going to leave and try a new game but those games just do not last. This is an interesting industry in that new games are always coming out but none can stand up to WoW and so they quickly fade.

Substitutes - High - there are a lot of substitutes for WoW. Other video games (PC, Mac, XBox, PS3, Wii, etc) that people can play and different formats that they can play in. WoW also has to compete with TV, movies, and sports for peoples time. One of the downsides of being in an entertainment company is the high amount of substitutes so you constantly have to make people believe that they should play your game instead of choosing other forms of entertainment. This keep the game new and exciting even though it has been around since 2004.

Blizzard Entertainment (who makes WoW) is in a really powerful and enviable position but if they are not careful they could loose it through alienating old players and failing to pickup new ones. http://outdps.com/2011/09/06/competing-interests-in-the-wow-playerbase/