Two faces of freemium strategy in social games: The interplay between perceived enjoyment, envy, and in-app purchase intention

In freemium social games, disparities between paid and free players could evoke negative experiences, particularly when paid players gain significant advantages by purchasing in-game items. Drawing on affordance theory and social comparison theory, this experimental study reveals that both positive (e.g., perceived enjoyment) and negative (e.g., benign envy) experiences strengthen players’ willingness to make in-app purchases. Perceived enjoyment is positively associated with skill–challenge balance, social interaction, and control, while both benign and malicious envy are induced by fairness. Notably, a state of skill–challenge imbalance is also found to drive perceived enjoyment, providing a critical extension to the existing literature on enjoyment experiences in gaming contexts.