What Makes a Freemium Game Player Become a Paying Player

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.