Behavioral Economics in Video Game Design and Marketing
Rundgren, Oskari (2025)
2025
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2025121938509
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:amk-2025121938509
Tiivistelmä
This thesis will explain the psychological principles that influence consumers of video games, and the merchandise attached to them. The analysis includes how game developers and marketers leverage and utilize these insights to get better engagement, retention, and monetization.
There are some business practices that work extremely well in the gaming industry and are highly profitable, but they propose some ethical concerns that this thesis will be tackling. These practices include, for example, loot boxes and microtransactions that exploit cognitive biases. This can lead to compulsive spending as well as video game/gambling addiction. The thesis will delve into how these practices, though profitable, can be seen as manipulative.
The purpose of the thesis is to bring awareness to these predatory methods the modern gaming industry uses to keep consumer retention. For the sake of simplicity, I will be focusing on mainly two game companies and their games, Blizzard Entertainment and MiHoYo Co., Ltd. There will also be an empirical part in a form of questionnaire survey that will ask gamers on social media how they would like this issue to be handled in a manner that makes both parties satisfied, or if there is a way to do it to begin with.
There are some business practices that work extremely well in the gaming industry and are highly profitable, but they propose some ethical concerns that this thesis will be tackling. These practices include, for example, loot boxes and microtransactions that exploit cognitive biases. This can lead to compulsive spending as well as video game/gambling addiction. The thesis will delve into how these practices, though profitable, can be seen as manipulative.
The purpose of the thesis is to bring awareness to these predatory methods the modern gaming industry uses to keep consumer retention. For the sake of simplicity, I will be focusing on mainly two game companies and their games, Blizzard Entertainment and MiHoYo Co., Ltd. There will also be an empirical part in a form of questionnaire survey that will ask gamers on social media how they would like this issue to be handled in a manner that makes both parties satisfied, or if there is a way to do it to begin with.