Deciphering the determinants: What guides creators in choosing their metaverse platforms?

This study aims to investigate which factors influence third-party developers' choice of metaverse platforms. As the metaverse has garnered considerable attention, many metaverse platforms have explosively launched. The intensified competition among metaverse platforms is increasing the value of third-party developers, who play a role of complementors in platform ecosystems as creating virtual properties. Despite the significant role of developers in the sustainability of these nascent metaverse platforms, our understanding of their choice of platforms remains sparse. The study employed an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), which is widely recognized for its efficiency in evaluating and ranking criteria at various levels within a hierarchical structure, aiding in systematic decision-making. The study scrutinizes not only the weights of three evaluation criteria (market attractiveness, technological readiness, and platform readiness), which have been commonly used in research on platform complementors, along with their sub-criteria, but also probes into developers' ultimate choice of specific platforms. Findings show that while user size, a sub-criterion of market attractiveness, emerges as the most crucial factor, the support of the developer community is less significant, differing from previous research findings. The study not only significantly enhances our understanding of the contemporary metaverse ecosystem, but also enriches knowledge of platform complementors.