The Million Dollar Gimmick only benefits casual watchers

I take it you mean DOND? I don't think Let's Make a Deal has ever got into seven-digit territory.


In my opinion, the problem is not so much the fact that million dollar wins get spoiled, but it's that the MDW is so ambiguous that it causes chaos among the casual crowd any time it comes into play (which is ironic since it usually does not get any reaction from the studio audience when hit). When you have a Wheel that's known for its assortment of numbers, having a space among them that says "One Million" is obviously going to cause people to think winning the million is an easy feat, then when they corrected by fans who know better, they think, "What? All those other rules? But that's impossible!"

The famous YouTube gaming channel Smosh did a video on the latest Wheel video game and when one of the players landed on the MDW, they were all screaming and jumping around. It took several minutes for somebody offscreen to finally tell them all what they really have to do to get the million, after the player solved and noticed his score did not go to seven digits, and then still asked, "Wait, I don't get my million dollars?" when he didn't make it to the Bonus Round.


And we all remember all the unnecessary media hyperbole when this happened... If the MDW didn't exist, this excuse for a story would not have blown up, period.

I very much agree with the points expressed in this thread. Though I will add that unfortunately, if Wheel were ever to get rid of the million dollar wedge at this point, because of these casual fans it might cause an outrage so bad that people WOULD stop watching the show in droves. It has become such a ubiquitous part of the show that it would make the show feel really cheap to get rid of it. "What, the top prize is ONLY $100,000 now? Is the economy that bad?"

I think a lot of the MDW confusion is natural as well. Other than 1/2 Car, it is the only wedge on the board where if you pick something up and solve the puzzle, you DON'T necessarily win anything. 1/2 Car is super easy to understand because..well, all you need is the other 1/2 Car. The MDW on the other hand has a complex set of rules that the show doesn't feel the need to spell out every time it's picked up (and they shouldn't, we're crunched enough for time as it is).

So the show has really painted itself between a rock and a hard place with this one. They can't really get rid of the MDW because the outrage would be massive. But on the other hand, Wayo's analysis of it as a "relic of the 2000's" is spot on. It's a relic of the 2000's that the show clearly can't afford at all (as evidenced by the disastrous New York road trip a few years ago that happened immediately after a late-season MDW win). What the show needs to do is milk the good out of it as best they can by spoiling when it's won to get eyeballs watching the show, and then trying to bury it when it's lost. That's all they can really do. For us, the hardcore fans, we're kind of stuck as Wayo alluded to. If it's won, it will be spoiled. If it's lost, it may cause social media/viral outrage, but on the other hand, the budget can't really take the strain of it being won once, let alone twice, so maybe we should just be happy that the last week played out as it did, as twisted as that sounds.

Cancel the show. There. Problem solved [/sarcasm]

I've always been in favor of how the MDW works from a game mechanics standpoint, but I do think a good point has been made about it about its fit in the budget.

How much advertising does Wheel do when there isn't an upcoming million-dollar win, and how much can it afford to? Say every week there's a set of commercials advertising the theme for that week, and if that works attracting viewers even if they don't get to see the big win, then start shutting up about it when it does happen until the day after the episode.

At first I appreciated the fact that WoF always made the million genuinely hard to win, in an era when most game shows like WWTBaM and DoND were handing out seven-figure prizes like Halloween candy. But that era has kind of died down, and game shows are tilting more toward a back-to-basics approach. The current versions of $100,000 Pyramid, Match Game, and Let's Make a Deal, along with the stalwart Price Is Right, show that there is still a market for game shows that are just straightforward, tried-and-true formats without excessively inflated jackpots or massive gimmickry (granted, TPIR and LMaD sometimes dip their toes in the gimmick pool, but not to nearly the extent of DoND...). I'm surprised WWTBaM didn't die out ages ago, because its format and host were in constant flux, and while most of the gimmickry has been stripped away by now, it's clearly running on fumes and has long since given up on paying out anywhere close to its title amount.

What rubbed me the wrong way with a lot of the $1,000,000 gimmicks of the early 2000s was the element of chance. DoND had literally zero strategy and was entirely blind luck. Most of the shows that inflated their jackpots had conditions borne largely or entirely of chance. At least original-format WWTBaM had a format that felt more like its top prize was earned than lucked into. Granted, Wheel itself is built around an element of chance, but there's also enough skill required to help balance it out in my opinion -- with occasional exceptions, such as the "mythological hero Achilles" guy displaying shockingly incompetent gameplay, yet stumbling his way to victory simply because of pure chance. Everyone who's hit the million on the bonus wheel, win or lose, got that envelope just because that's where the wheel stopped -- it had no bearing whatsoever on how they played their bonus rounds.

On top of that, as mentioned upthread, most people don't seem to know how the $1,000,000 works to begin with. Maybe it was the glut of excessive jackpots over the years that has some people thinking that just hitting the wedge awards such a huge prize on-sight -- which itself is a problematic mindset, and IMO a negative outcome from said inflated-jackpot shows. Again, at least early WWTBaM made their players EARN that big jackpot. Most people have long since given up on seeing another seven-figure win on modern-day WWTBaM?, so I don't think there'd be concern that WoF's budget is shot if they yank the million out of play.

I have no idea what kind of alternative could exist that would make the $1,000,000 feel more like it had been "earned" instead of lucked into. People already have enough difficulty with the existing BR rules when normal prizes are on the line, so I don't think it'd be plausible to have a second puzzle played if the $1,000,000 is on the line. And a tournament wouldn't be possible, because again, the element of chance inherent in the show sometimes allows even bad players to persevere. Would you want the Achilles guy stumbling his way to a chance at $1,000,000?

tl;dr: maybe Wheel would be just fine without the $1,000,000.

This has been on my mind for a while now, but why couldn't the show have waited to introduce the MDW a few seasons after the 25th?

In other words, why couldn't the show have introduced the Million Dollar Wedge in maybe 2010 or 2011?