Why have these many currencies? Shouldn’t we as game designers seek ways to consolidate currencies?

If Galaxy of Heroes tried to consolidate some of their currencies, it would make for a more accessible game. Fewer currencies mean less clutter on the UI, less for the player to remember.

Besides accessibility, it allows players to have more choice on how they spend their currencies. For example, if they consolidated all energy into a single energy currency, players would be able to pick and choose which modes they wanted to play in and ignore the rest. This is exactly the choice that EA did NOT want players to have -- they wanted to heavily incentivize players playing in ALL modes equally. This is the same reason why they have so many material types (Gear, Ability Upgrade, Droids, Shards) and within each type having so much variety in those rewards. This heavily incentivizes players to play in every mode. Ensuring that players actively want to play in each mode promotes their core loop further.

If players could ignore the “PvP Arena” mode completely, then the player would be completely cut out of the long term aspiration of becoming the best team. If players would feel okay with completely ignoring the “Cantina Battles”, then they would rarely feel challenged by the game, and feel okay with just spending all their time grinding in easy levels. Because each mode has its own energy, and each mode can have its own unique rewards, the player is heavily incentivized to compete and play in each mode.

On top of this, because there are more currencies in the game, and each currency’s sources and sinks are heavily restricted, this makes an economy balancer’s job much easier. They can easily model and predict the rates that players can gather and spend this resource, thus allowing much better control over the economy.

I believe Galaxy of Heroes was very smart in the design they had for their currencies. Going for this many currencies was the right choice.

The complexity that comes from having many currencies is worth the tradeoff for better balancing control and better monetization.

The Premium Currency won’t convert easily into everything.

The second smart thing that Galaxy of Heroes does, is ensure that their currencies are tightly controlled how they can be converted into each other. Especially the premium currency (Crystals).

Most of the currencies in the game aren’t directly convertible from Crystals. Crystals can only directly purchase data cards, skip timers, skip cooldowns, and speed up the energy timer. Compared to other games, the premium currency in Galaxy of Heroes is very restricted. These restrictions help to ensure the maximum potential of monetization.