What turns a Freemium Player into a Paying Player
- Author(s)
- Sandra Boric, Christine Strauss
- Abstract
This paper presents a derivation of freemium game players’ playing and paying motivations and demographic attributes by aggregating the results of 17 studies. For further characterization and a clear distinction from other gamer subgroups, this paper also contains an aggregation of playing motivations and demographic attributes of video game players in general, and of non-freemium game players. Our results suggest that socialization and competition are common motivations for playing a freemium game, and we derive enjoyment to be a particularly important playing motivation for freemium games. We further find that freemium game players who proceed to pay particularly name economic factors and applied, freemium game-specific mechanisms as motivations. Regarding demographics, while the studies which were analyzed to derive freemium gamers’ playing motivations have a dominance of female participants, the studies which were analyzed to derive freemium gamers’ paying motivations have mainly male participants. For analyses by both motivations and demographic attributes, we suggest a more differentiated picture including genre and platform considerations. For marketers and developers, we suggest a differentiation between markets, a mechanism transparency, and an emphasis on socialization in freemium games.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Marketing and International Business
- External organisation(s)
- Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz
- Journal
- Journal of Data Intelligence
- Volume
- 3
- Pages
- 201-217
- ISSN
- 2577-610X
- Publication date
- 2022
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 502050 Business informatics, 502019 Marketing
- Portal url
- https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/what-turns-a-freemium-player-into-a-paying-player(1c5ed6e8-e09a-4fb4-9424-1913c756af4f).html