An exploratory study for investigating loyalty in on-line games: Focus on interactivity and the sense of presence

Online game business has emerged as the most lucrative entertainment industry, with over 10 million players in South Korea. The popularity of online games can be attributed to the availability of broadband network and the presence of numerous PC Bangs and around the country, which have pushed online games into the mainstream entertainment culture. The age distribution of online game players is expanding and a variety of new games are under development to target certain age groups. While the interactive entertainment market continues to expand, with many new online game publishers entering the market, relatively little is known about which factors influence online game players' behavioral intentions to play continuously in this area. It appears that in this extremely attractive and growing services segment, academics, as well as practitioners, would benefit from investigating the relationships among the players' loyalty, interactivity, the sense of presence and the impacts of several other key game-related constructs. Several types of interaction in on-line games and their relationship with the flow construct are investigated, and the resulting conceptual model is proposed. Based on data collected from online questionnaire survey, the validity of the simultaneous equation model has been tested and interesting conclusions have been developed concerning the relationships between the players' loyalty to the sense of presence, flow, satisfaction and interactions. Other interesting results concerning game development strategy are also provided.