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So, let just say people can now trade characters with each other. How much would Nintendo's profit crash?


False Prophet
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So, I'm doing a little thought expriment about gacha games and artificial scarcity when this question came to mind. The main way which these games earn profit is through microtransactions, with players buying from the publishers. But what if players can trade between themselves? How will supply and demand be affected when that happens, especially in popular games that earn huge profits?
 
(Of course, there are many questions still stand for this player-operated market to work. For example, the question of pricing: Are characters being trade based on their stars alone, or will attributes like limited-events and usability drive the prices up? If you have any problem you want to highlight, please add it to your comments.)
 
Fire Emblem Heroes is kind of an interesting case, because to the average gacha games it does give away considerably more "currency" - orbs in this case - for free, and playing without paying is a viable strategy.
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This trading thing is something I never saw in online gacha game. Nintendo would need guts to pull this off first. Would it help them? How would it help fair trading? The targets would be 5* units obviously as you can vet everything from f2p orbs. Don't see this happening, but prove me otherwise.

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The problem with trading is that people could just make new accounts and redownload the game as many times as possible to get all the characters they want. There would be no point in spending money anymore.

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Basically Michelaar hits the biggest point. At a bare minimum there would need to be something to prevent reroll abuse. Possibly a mix of 'need to have bought at least one thing from the shop this month(so a 2 dollar entry fee)' AND some sort of limit to how many can be traded per month. Actually they could even offer it as a premium service to further entice folks to buy those 'special orb packs'.  Basically a 'pack will give you X trade tokens, letting you trade heroes with other players' on top of the orbs and useless crud that goes with them(excepting the Black Knight of course). That would fulfill both criteria of trade limits and making someone put at least some money in. Not really FTP friendly though unless they enable a free way to get said tokens. Maybe give one out per month for completing all the monthly quests or something.

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31 minutes ago, Michelaar said:

The problem with trading is that people could just make new accounts and redownload the game as many times as possible to get all the characters they want. There would be no point in spending money anymore.

But there are people who can not or do not want to do waste time doing that or farming for orbs in general, and these people are spending money into the game.

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55 minutes ago, Michelaar said:

The problem with trading is that people could just make new accounts and redownload the game as many times as possible to get all the characters they want. There would be no point in spending money anymore.

I've thought about trading for awhile with various ideas for cost and time restrictions. The most reasonable option to me seems to be trade tokens. Each side would spend a token and a unit of equivalent rarity. These tokens would be given out in events very rarely (maybe once a quarter or so). It wouldn't allow players to get all of the units they want (or many merges), but just their most favorite. (This assumes they can find a favorable trade or are willing to create an alternate account.) The token rarity would help prevent abuse, but they would still be common enough to make some players very happy. I've turned some very popular units with good IVs into manuals because I very much disliked the particular character. I think trades would mostly involve cases where each side has a desirable unit that they personally don't like.

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1 minute ago, Tree said:

I've thought about trading for awhile with various ideas for cost and time restrictions. The most reasonable option to me seems to be trade tokens. Each side would spend a token and a unit of equivalent rarity. These tokens would be given out in events very rarely (maybe once a quarter or so). It wouldn't allow players to get all of the units they want (or many merges), but just their most favorite. (This assumes they can find a favorable trade or are willing to create an alternate account.) The token rarity would help prevent abuse, but they would still be common enough to make some players very happy. I've turned some very popular units with good IVs into manuals because I very much disliked the particular character. I think trades would mostly involve cases where each side has a desirable unit that they personally don't like.

I think tokens would most likely be the best case scenario. 

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5 minutes ago, Vaximillian said:

Just let me trade three- and four-stars for three- and four-stars respectively already. I’m not and I won’t be asking for trading five-stars.

You still could with tokens, but that would sort of be a waste. Perhaps they could start by only allowing trading at 3* and 4* rarity to test the feature. Arena medals could be a decent currency for trades of lower rarity.

Edited by Tree
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4 minutes ago, Tree said:

You still could with tokens, but that would sort of be a waste. Perhaps they could start by only allowing trading at 3* and 4* rarity to test the feature. Arena medals could be a decent currency for trades of lower rarity.

I don’t care how, it just needs to happen

It can take many months to get a three- or four-star in such a bloated pool, especially—Naga forbid—it is red or grey.
It took me three months to complete my +9 Cecilia because the game decided that I apparently need Sorens and Libras more.
It took me five months to complete my +9 Marth because the game decided that I apparently need Seths and Lon’qus moreat all.

And so on.

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Arena Medals for trading 3 and 4 stars isn't actually a terrible idea. The question is how many Arena medals? 200 for a 3star trade and 500 for a 4star? Like the weapon Evolution vs Refinement? I don't play much Arena and I got more than 18000 of those things laying about. You could probably double those numbers and not affect me much.

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I am assuming you mean revenue, and not profit. And the implementation of trading does not necessarily mean their revenue will crash either.

Δ Revenue = Δ Revenue from Trading + Δ Revenue from Other Features

Δ Revenue: In my opinion, there is no way this will realistically be 0 or less. Anna will never implement feature that causes them to reduce their revenue, unless there is a way to monetize it and turn it into a positive net change in overall revenue. If you ignore the big picture and only focus on trading as feature, then yeah, Anna will probably lose some sales on Orbs; however, looking narrowly at it this way is like limiting yourself as an Uber driver to driving in only one neighborhood of the city instead of driving throughout the city, with the only reason being that you are afraid of missing out on sales from that one neighborhood.

Δ Revenue from Trading: You can basically break this down into loss from trading and gain from trading.

The loss from trading mostly boils down Anna no longer being the sole supplier of Heroes from the players' point of view. Anna is still the sole source of new Heroes entering the market, but they are no longer the sole source of Heroes in the market.

Gain from trading is less obvious and harder to measure. Increased player satisfaction with the game most likely will lead to increased active player participation, which therefore may lead to more potential players doing summons and spend money. There are probably other factors that affects the change in revenue from trading, but these two are the biggest ones I can think of.

Δ Revenue from Other Features: This is the fun part that Anna would love. This can be similarly broken into two main parts.

Gain from other features would probably be something like a transaction fee. For example, both players may have to pay a fee to utilize the trading system, such as $50.00, 100 Orbs, a trading ticket, whatever old or new currency, or some combination of those resources. If I were Anna, I would charge a combination of currencies, such as 100 Orbs, 10,000 Shards, and a trading ticket for per Hero and their merge level. The trading tickets can be obtained through cash or playing the game over time, such as ranking above a certain Tier in Arena every week or doing certain difficult quests.

I cannot think of anything that will cause them to lose revenue from other Features. The implementation of these features may put off some players to cause them to quit too, but I think that number is minuscule, unless they do something really unpopular with the trading system. Again, there maybe other factors that affects loss and gain of revenue.

1 hour ago, Ice Dragon said:

"Profit" and "revenue" are two different things. We generally know how much revenue Heroes generates from various publications, but I don't believe they've yet released how much profit they're making.

Basically this. Speculating on the impact of trading on profits is the equivalent of guessing where the needle is in the haystack on top of guessing which haystack in the field actually got the needle.

2 hours ago, Michelaar said:

The problem with trading is that people could just make new accounts and redownload the game as many times as possible to get all the characters they want. There would be no point in spending money anymore.

2 hours ago, Usana said:

At a bare minimum there would need to be something to prevent reroll abuse.

This is not a huge deal in my opinion. They just need to put in some form of transaction cost and monetize it. I do not think it is a good idea to limit the number of trades since they could easily monetize trading and earn even more money from players paying to trade.

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I really like the limited token idea, I agree it seems like the only way to make trading feasible. I agree they should allow players to buy extra tokens with real $$ to offset the revenue drop from less players whaling for their units. A lot people say they don't spend money on the game because even if you do there's no guarantee to get the hero you want. With a system like this, now you can. It might even increase their profits! From the player side this is also great because trading adds a whole new social dimension to the game that would make it more fun.

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Fix by having to use expensive materials to get units of higher star rankings. At first its just feathers then its feathers and shards maybe and then its even orbs

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I always thought there should have been a system where you and a friend could trade units with eachother for about a week

Maybe I'd like to see something along the lines of wondertrade from Pokemon 

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I don’t see FEH ever allowing 5*s to be traded, at least non F2P ones. It just sounds like a can of worms that IS/Nintendo would refuse to open, and it’s simply unorthodox for a gacha.  

3 and 4* trading is plausible and likely manageable idea. I bet are some people with Michalis who simply let him rot on the bench, while I would take him in exchange for someone like, say, Ursula or Jamke. Even some of my 3* Hinatas which I have a hoard of. 

Edited by SilvertheShadow
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i know like 7 different people who want certain 3-4* units with specific IVs and said units aren't ones I really want. On the other hand I'd be willing to trade them for other 3-4* units with specific IVs that I do want or for more Hinata/Klein/Sothe/Ares/Silas copies for fodder.

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Would it work for GHB units? I'd happily trade for copies of Jamke and Saias :D 

I doubt they'll ever bring in a trade feature, but it's fun to think of the what ifs. I'd be really annoyed I used some spare Ayras for fodder if it did come in, though, since she'd probably get me what I wanted (heck, I could even trade her for a +Atk Eldigan, maybe!) xD 

That being said, all my spare units are now books, so that probably wouldn't work anyway. 

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On 11/2/2018 at 8:15 AM, Michelaar said:

The problem with trading is that people could just make new accounts and redownload the game as many times as possible to get all the characters they want. There would be no point in spending money anymore.

You can't exploit a trading feature if you add a security wall that prevents new account creation abuse, such as a daily limit an IP can create a new account, requiring a link to a Nintendo account of a certain age (a Week seems fair) before accessing features like trading or even Arena and other game modes that access other users data, and maybe even inflicting harsh punishment on accounts being found to take purposeful advantage of such features.

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8 hours ago, Cute Chao said:

That being said, all my spare units are now books, so that probably wouldn't work anyway. 

Book trades would probably be limited to trades for other books rather than units. However, I think book trading is even more likely to be implemented than regular unit trading because you would not be able to actually use the character you got in a trade.

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12 hours ago, Tree said:

However, I think book trading is even more likely to be implemented than regular unit trading because you would not be able to actually use the character you got in a trade.

Also no need to implement a system to handle "looking for x character with y nature" since books don't have natures.

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I think the best option would be to timegate a lot of it. Only allow trading if the account is x months old, only allow trading with people on the friends list. And limit that to only allowing trading with people on the friends list once they have been on there for a whole month. That would remove rerolling problems and just quick adds to friends list for trading only. And it would make it a bit of a community feature at that point.

As for whether or not I see it happening, probably not. It would be great, but I just dont see it happening.

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