The Impact of Resale Market on Video Games: Boosted Revenue and Better Player Engagement

Although introducing a resale market to games may be beneficial for game companies, many are still hesitant to do so due to the additional investment required and the difficulty in quantifying the extent of these benefits. In this paper, we propose a consumer-behavior based loot box opening analysis framework with a resale market and systematically describe players' stochastic behavior through a loop of loot box opening and trading until the steady state. By carefully designing the simulation process, we found the optimal pricing strategy for game companies and demonstrated that this strategy can increase revenue by around 63.1% compared to the optimal strategy without a resale market.