‘Migrating to a new virtual world’: Exploring MMORPG switching through human migration theory

Abstract

Online gaming has become a popular leisure-time activity. In this study, we enlisted and adapted the Push–Pull–Mooring model, which analyzes human migratory behavior based on the Demographic Migration Theory, to study the game switching of gamers. Data was obtained via an empirical survey of 654 online gamers and then was analyzed using the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) technique. The results indicate that the Push–Pull–Mooring model can be extended to explain the switching intentions of online gamers. The “mooring effect” appears to have a stronger influence on the player’s switching intention than the “pull effect”, while the “push effect” appears to have no influence at all. We discuss the implications of our findings and offer possible avenues of exploration for managers of online game providers in order to help them understand their customers better.

Introduction

With the rapidly growing popularity of massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs), the online game industry has become a highly profitable one in the global market. In the US, for example, its market value is expected to increase from US$1.1 billion in 2008 to US$4.4 billion in 2010. Similarly, the market value in the Asia–Pacific region is estimated as US$6.8 billion for 2010, while in 2005 it was US$3.2 million (Cai, 2006). The explosive growth makes the market extremely attractive to the games providers.

Although piracy is causing a considerable lost of income to other software providers, it does not diminish the profit of MMORPG providers because their main revenue comes from the subscription fees and sales of power-enhancing items. As a result, numerous companies have been drawn to enter this lucrative market, leading to intense competition (MIC, 2005a). As the online game industry moves into maturity, it is important to the success of operators to retain current players in their existing customer base as well as to attract new ones (IDC, 2006). However, whereas existing studies have primarily focused on the players intention to participate (Gao, 2004, Hsu and Lu, 2004, Kim et al., 2002, Wood et al., 2004), persistent participation in games (Choi & Kim, 2004) and addiction to games (Chou and Ting, 2003, Wan and Chiou, 2006), few attention has been paid to player’s switching intentions. Little research has been conducted on the factors that affect players’ intentions to switch from one online game to another. More work is therefore needed to understand this issue in MMORPG player behavior.

As an MMORPG creates a virtual world in which players choose the characters and develop online social relationships with others, players become “residents” of this virtual world. If this metaphor could go further, then players’ switching to a new MMORPG can be regarded as a kind of migration. Thus migratory models that are frequently used to describe human migration in the real world could be applied to explain the MMORPG switching context. This juxtaposition of the real and virtual worlds has also been described by several MMORPG industry experts. Fu (2004) suggests that the behavior of switching to another online game is similar to that of nomadic people migrating in search of water and grass for their animals. Therefore it validates the use of the real-world migration model to explore online players’ switching behavior.

In this article, we propose a MMORPG switching model which is adapted from the real-world Push–Pull–Mooring (PPM) migration model to demonstrate online players’ switching intentions (Moon, 1995). Our findings suggest that the PPM model can be extended to examine the switching intention of players in the virtual world, and to strengthen the model’s theoretical applicability as well as to fill the knowledge gap in the studies concerning the switching of MMORPGs. Furthermore, we identify key antecedents and fit them into a unifying framework to explain the players’ intention to switch between games, which can help game providers and marketing specialists to better understand their customers, thereby leading to more effective business strategies.

Our research begins by reviewing relevant research in the theoretical foundation of the PPM migratory model and comparing the factors involved in the migration process in the real-world with those in the virtual world. Then we propose our research model and hypotheses, and further explain their implicit rationale. After this, we present a survey with data collected from players and discuss the analysis methodology. We use the Partial Least Squares (PLS) latent structural equations modeling to test the results. The last section summarizes our findings and discusses their theoretical and managerial implications.