What turns a Freemium Player into a Paying Player

Autor(en)

Sandra Boric, Christine Strauss

Abstrakt

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(en)

Institut für Marketing und International Business

Externe Organisation(en)

Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz

Journal

Journal of Data Intelligence

Band

3

Seiten

201-217

ISSN

2577-610X

Publikationsdatum

2022

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

502050 Wirtschaftsinformatik, 502019 Marketing

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/what-turns-a-freemium-player-into-a-paying-player(1c5ed6e8-e09a-4fb4-9424-1913c756af4f).html