Interesting numbers, but what you fail to take into account is how god awful some of those years were all around for WCW in the first place. Short of Half the WWE roster showing up on the go home show prior to the ppv would have spiked buyrates considering how objectively bad most of those cards were.
Understand that in a couple of those years WCW was doing less than stellar business, but you're failing to take into account a couple of things yourself.
A) These also included some of WCW's most profitable years, when the NWO was at its peak and WCW was the #1 game in town. Yet they still drew about the same, or slightly better for War Games, than they did in the lean years.
B) Those numbers were contrasted with the following PPV (Halloween Havoc) for every year. Even if we can just simply discount buyrates because WCW was a shit show, it shows that during that shit show, the people who would still go out and buy WCW PPV's not only weren't buying them because of the War Games match, but were more likely to buy a PPV that DIDN'T include War Games.
544$? where did you pull this number from? Maybe for one of the big four, most likely for Mania. I have a friend who went to a couple of shows and he paid less then 250$ a ticket for ringside behind the announcers. So wheres the extra 300$ coming from for a ticket that puts you at an awkward seat where you can't see 2 sides of the ring floor?
http://www.bigstub.com/wwe-elimination-chamber-tickets.aspx?event_id=2169153
Not pulling them out of my ass like you think. That's actually what floor seats are running for at this years EC.
This is a good point. Having it as a one of, or have it alternate years with either HitC or Elimination Chamber would be the way they would have to do it. They'd have to be able to weave together a lot of people's storylines which is something they've had problems with since the downfall of wcw. You'd have to go back to the originations of Survivor Series to find the last time they were really able to pull this kind of multi-story combination to work well. And SS has been going downhill since the late 90's and is only a shell of itself ever since they started focusing on individual matches instead of the Survivor Series style matches. Even the few SS matches we have e had have been along the lines of what happened with WCW and WarGames. The fact is the writers got lazy and stopped putting in the effort to really tie things together the way they used to.
Wrestlers used to be involved in multiple feuds at any given time, now they are only placed in one feud until a PPV fight ends it and another feud starts for the next PPV. Sometimes they catch on with the audience for a while and you might have 2 or three PPV event periods of the same feud with minor obstacles thrown between the main 2 guys. And even those are brushed off with little to no consequence for the 2 who were feuding while the others they might have matched up against just seem to fade out ignored by them. it's one of the main drawbacks in today's wrestling, the constant regurgitation of the same feuds because the writing staff isn't able to maintain multiple angles for the same characters at the same time. This is a side effect of getting TV/Movie writers to be among the creative staff of your product. They are all trained to get a character from point a to b to c and then back to a. In wrestling you need to be able to go from a to b to n to f to g to c and possible back to a again. And the top guys in creative have lost sight of that (Vince!!!) and listened to TV production and stylist
Everything you said there is the main reason I DON'T want to see WWE try War Games. It simply wouldn't be booked right, and even if the first one was a success, it would quickly turn into just another theme PPV where they'd do their one War Games match a year because it was time for a War Games match... and they'd throw together 2 teams in a half assed storyline that wouldn't hold any interest.
Plus (and this may just be me personally), but I've always felt that when a wrestling card has the two rings side by side, and the majority of that card is only fought in the one ring, that it just looks like shit. Sure you can come up with a couple cool spots using both rings for the undercard, but the majority is just fought in the one ring and that empty ring right beside is just distracting.
War Games CAN work, and truthfully they can make it work with their current main storyline (The Authority versus Bryan/Punk and friends), but it would only work as an end to that storyline, with the Bryan/Punk team winning in the end, and fracturing the Authority once and for all as a result (preferably with Bryan making Triple H submit, and the rest of the Authority being disgusted by this and leaving him). I just don't see it ever being booked as the game changer it should be, and quickly morphing into something like HIAC today, only worse because instead of making a singles match that has no reason to be in the cell, they'll make a team vs team match that has no reason to exist in the first place.
That's just my personal opinion though. The main reason we haven't seen it in the WWE is because of the money reasons I opened up here with (lose money on the setup, and hasn't proven it can recoup that in buyrates). If this match was the guaranteed money maker that some fans feel it is, you can bet we already would have seen one (Vince may not like using other peoples ideas, but he's used enough of them over the years to show that he's not adverse to them if they'll make him money).
