An investigation of the smartphone user's in-game purchase intention

Abstract

The in–game sale strategy is considered one of the most promising business models for mobile gaming application industry. However, little knowledge has been found about the antecedent factors of a smartphone user's consumption intention. We integrate the hedonic use perspective with value based theories to investigate the effects of influential factors on the smartphone user's in–game purchase intention (IGPI). We find that a user's perceived playfulness and the user's perceived added value of gaming applications on smartphones both have significant positive effects on the user's IGPI. We also instantiated five factors according to the mobile fun framework and empirically validated their influences on the user's perceived playfulness of gaming applications. The findings will contribute to the future gaming application commercialisation research, and provide several practical implications to gaming application developers.