I think that's beside the point - more relevant is that people were both willing to pay a good deal to organize the games and that the games were a central and

I think that's beside the point - more relevant is that people were both willing to pay a good deal to organize the games and that the games were a central and import part of roman society. You can argue - almost certainly correctly - that there was a significant portion of society that found the game distasteful, but you can't argue that there was still an even larger slice of the population that considered them so important that they built the coliseum to host them.