Can this really be considered lost revenue? It's unlikely that all 1,000's of the "free" games were going to be purchased at the current price. You run in to the same questions with piracy. Were the pirates really going to pay if they couldn't pirate?
The lost revenue should really only come from customers who would have paid the asking price but managed to get an illegitimate deal, plus whatever support and overhead costs can be applied to the game downloads.
Yes because some (most of the ones worth paying for) of the games require some sort of server. So every new player in a game is not free for EA. Giving away a game means they will lose money on this person if they play online.
The costs are also very difficult to determine, where $1 sounds a bit high to me. Lets try to do some random estimates for a random game: 30% of the users wont touch the game whatsoever, and will just have it on their "list". Of the buyers, 0.5% will require some sort of support effort in relation , where 65% are handled by the auto-response and 30% by the first email by an employe.
Say a total of 5,000 downloads are from this "free" coupon for any specific game title. Would $500 or $5000 sound closers to the actually hosting/support cost that the publisher has.
Consider however you have to download Origin to get the games and play them. A feat they've been struggling to get gamers to do, so every gamer that got free games is actually worth a lot to them and probably wouldn't have bought any of these games anyway as they're mostly old and lame.
It's pretty much a win for EA which is why I expect they let it continue so long.
Someone needs to come up with a term for this, "hypothetical maximum lost revenue" or something.
I don't have an issue with anyone quoting this sort of number (retail cost x lost units) but they need to make clear exactly what it is, which isn't actual revenue or profit.
The lost revenue should really only come from customers who would have paid the asking price but managed to get an illegitimate deal, plus whatever support and overhead costs can be applied to the game downloads.