Research on the Factors Affecting Player Stickiness in Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG)

Massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) have becoming increasingly popular in recent years, but the problem of low player stickiness has always existed. Meanwhile, little is known about what motivates players to generate such stickiness. This paper built a research model based on the attitude, perceived enjoyment, aesthetic design, telepresence, team participation and network externalities to identify the antecedents of player stickiness in the context of MMOG. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is employed for data analysis. Analysis of 265 valid responses to a survey questionnaire indicate that attitude, a medium factor, has great positive effect on stickiness. Among the antecedents of attitude, perceived enjoyment is found to have the strongest effect. In addition, team participation, weak-link influence and strong-link influence have a positive correlation with attitude. But aesthetic design and telepresence have no significant influence on attitude. Also, implications are discussed in the paper.