Abstract
The market growth and popularity of Blockchain technology in various fields has been astonishing. The gaming industry is one of the prominent industries that applies Blockchain technology. However, there is some concern about the speculative aspect of Blockchain-based games. Therefore, this paper examines the effects of speculative and enjoyable aspects on users’ playing behavior in Blockchain-based games. For this, we developed a web crawler and collected data from Cryptokitties, one of very first successful Blockchain-based games. To analyze our dataset, we conducted fixed panel regression. The results indicate that the external aspects of the game are negatively related to item selling, whereas the internal aspects of the game are positively related to item selling in the Blockchain-based game. This result suggests that playing Blockchain-based games is a mix of behavior with enjoyable and speculative aspects. As such, it remains unclear whether users play Blockchain-based games just for fun or as a form of speculation.
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Lee, J., Yoo, B., Jang, M. (2019). Is a Blockchain-Based Game a Game for Fun, or Is It a Tool for Speculation? An Empirical Analysis of Player Behavior in Crypokitties. In: Xu, J., Zhu, B., Liu, X., Shaw, M., Zhang, H., Fan, M. (eds) The Ecosystem of e-Business: Technologies, Stakeholders, and Connections. WEB 2018. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 357. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22784-5_14
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