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Thanks to the rapid popularization of smartphones which provides us much easier access to internet technologies and interactive design, the burgeoning mobile games industry has experienced explosive growth in consumers, who, showing gradual acceptance of mobile games and gaming services, have turned from passive consumers to active consumers (Merikivi, Tuunainen, & Nguyen, 2017). According to I-research, in 2016, China created a 102.28 billion yuan mobile games market with 521 million consumers, up 81.9% and 14.5% respectively over the previous year (Iresearch, 2017). A surprising fact is that today, most mobile gamers are female not male as thought by many. Mobile analytics company Flurry recently released a report, claiming that based on a sample of games that reached a total of 1.1 million devices on its platform, they have found that women make 31% more in-app-purchases than men, spend 35% more time in gaming apps than men, and have 42% higher 7-day retention on average versus males. The constantly growing number of female gamers has increased their position and importance, and of course, their value in the eyes of game developers. A consumer segmentation now, existing and potential female gamers have become an important force driving the development of the mobile games industry (Wang, Lee, & Hsu, 2017). Women tend to spend more money on in-app-purchases. Compared to men, they also spend more time in gaming and social apps during break and travel times, and before sleep, obtaining aesthetic experiences in this process. Even though, factors affecting women’s continuance intention for mobile games have seldom been studied at present.
In previous studies, models and theories for using mobile games were mostly based on a specific model, and less introduction was provided to other theories; thus, a more comprehensive analysis of influencing factors was lacking. Moreover, limited research was conducted on the continuous usage intention of females. Hence, focusing on the continuous usage intention of female mobile game users and combining the scenarios and satisfaction theories, this study comprehensively investigates the influencing factors of the effective and continuous usage intention of female mobile game users, determines manners to engage users and increase user loyalty, thereby attracting and retaining more users and promoting the development of the mobile game industry.
In this study on the mobile games usage intension, the factors affecting the mobile games usage intention are summarized into three major factors—personal, technical, and social. Besides, based on the consumer acceptance theory, studies have also summarized the key factors for the success of mobile games—content innovation, game time, social network experience, and convenience of operation. Mobile games are associated with flow, and girls reported higher flow experience scores than boys (d = 0.30) (Bressler, 2019).
A summary of previous reports concluded that in the measurement indicators covered by the technology acceptance theory, perceived entertainment and perceived usefulness are two determinants of the mobile games usage intension. Perceived efficiency and perceived interest exert a direct and positive impact on the adoption of mobile games. In addition, perceived entertainment plays a key role in the attitude of users, and age is a key factor in the adoption of mobile games. Furthermore, studies have suggested that performance expectation, expectation effort, social impact, and promotion conditions affect usage intension of users by determining the attitude of users to play games on mobile phones.