Why I Love This Online Game: The MMORPG Stickiness Factor

With the rapid growth of the gaming industry, keeping gamers loyal is the quintessential issue. Thus, our paper focuses on loyalty towards Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs). Our study incorporates the social identity theory, the theory of reason of action and gamer emotions into the equation of loyalty. An empirical study of 160 subjects was conducted to test our model. Our results demonstrated that perceived enjoyment, reputation and cohesion significantly affect loyalty. However, when all 3 are taken together, both reputation and cohesion overshadow perceived enjoyment, making the latter irrelevant in affecting loyalty