Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Cost Of Playing The Game: Modeling In-Game Purchase Intention And Investigating Purchase Behavior Of Mobile Gamers, William J. Shelstad

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Free-to-play games typically have a monetization model that relies on players to purchase in-game items or virtual goods to generate revenue (Nguyen, 2015). There have been several empirical efforts to investigate purchase intention of virtual goods in video games with some focusing on quantitative models of purchase intention. Most of these studies tend to be with virtual worlds and lack the use of validated instruments to measure constructs (Hamari & Keronen, 2017). This research sought to gain a greater understanding of purchase intention of in-game content or virtual goods in mobile games through two studies.

Study 1 modeled purchase intention …