Customization Drives Loyalty?

Video games often let you customize your in-game character. This may enable bonding with it and, in turn, increase your loyalty towards the game. The same may be true when the avatar is physically and psychologically closer to the player, and customizable items could add to it as well. The following study shows how appearance, inner features, and customizable items impact game loyalty.

For (gaming) companies, customer loyalty is key. In the gaming realm, the longer your eyes are glued to the screen and your game, the higher the chance of making money, e.g., from micro-transactions.

The scientific literature has identified factors that drive gamer loyalty, such as player enjoyment, trust, achievements, gamer-game relationship, status, and avatar identification (the degree to which gamers regard avatars as themselves).

"... gamers may make the avatars similar to themselves (appearance similarity) and/or perceive sharing inner features (homophily). [1]"

Another aspect is avatar customization (choosing how your in-game character looks), which was shown to strengthen the attachment of players to their avatar. One step further is item customization.

"... customization enables users to extend themselves into the customized products (i.e., avatars). [1]

However, from the developer perspective, implementing such items is resource-consuming (time and money). At the same time, customizable items may not even be important enough (to drive loyalty to the game) to the players. The researchers went out into the wilderness of video games to find out if avatar item customization impacts appearance similarity, homophily, avatar identification, and gamer loyalty. In total, data from 751 gamers were analyzed. Noteworthy, the data are from 2018.

🧎 Loyal Toward The Game

Let's start with the, for me, most surprising finding: appearance similarity (gamers make the avatar look similar to themselves) was not related to avatar identification, meaning how similar you felt to your in-game self has nothing to do with how much you identified with the avatar.

The same was found for annual income, years spent playing, and weekly hours spent playing. None of them are significantly related to the loyalty gamers have towards a game.

Interestingly, the study also found that female gamers reported higher loyalty scores than male gamers. So basically, men aren't attached to one game and (likely) switch games more often.

Now, let's look at avatar item customization: the study found that it, indeed, is positively related to appearance similarity (how similar you look to your in-game character) and homophily (the extend to which you perceive your inner features to be similar to the avatar). In turn, both of them are positively related to avatar identification. The more your character's inner features and look correspond to you, the more you identify with it—increasing the loyalty towards the game.

For developers this means that "AIC [Avatar Item Customization] should be effective when AIC can instill a sense of homophily, i.e., avatars are perceived to share the beliefs, values, and attitudes of the users." [1]

Have a great week. Best,

Christian 🙂

References

[1] Teng, 2021