Level Up: Study Reveals Keys to Gamer Loyalty
For topic maps that aspire to be common meeting places, there are a number of lessons in this study. The study is forthcoming but quoting from the news coverage:
One strategy found that giving players more control and ownership of their character increased loyalty. The second strategy showed that gamers who played cooperatively and worked with other gamers in “guilds” built loyalty and social identity.
“To build a player’s feeling of ownership towards its character, game makers should provide equal opportunities for any character to win a battle,” says Sanders. “They should also build more selective or elaborate chat rooms and guild features to help players socialize.”
In an MMORPG, players share experiences, earn rewards and interact with others in an online world that is ever-present. It’s known as a “persistent-state-world” because even when a gamer is not playing, millions of others around the globe are.
Some MMORPGs operate on a subscription model where gamers pay a monthly fee to access the game world, while others use the free-to-play model where access to the game is free but may feature advertising, additional content through a paid subscription or optional purchases of in-game items or currency.
The average MMORPG gamer spends 22 hours per week playing.
Research on loyalty has found that increasing customer retention by as little as 5 percent can increase profits by 25 to 95 percent, Sanders points out.
So, how would you like to have people paying to use your topic map site 22 hours per week?
There are challenges in adapting these strategies to a topic map context but that would be your value-add.
I first saw this at ScienceDaily.
The study will be published in the International Journal of Electronic Commerce.
That link is: http://www.ijec-web.org/. For the benefit of ScienceDaily and the University of Buffalo.
Either they were unable to find that link or are unfamiliar with the practice of placing hyperlinks in HTML texts to aid readers in locating additional resources.