Virtual Marketing Mix. Marketing applied for Virtual Goods in Free2Play Games

      Аннотация: The primary research question is how marketing is done for virtual goods in F2P games and how marketing influences consumers' past purchase decision and future purchase intention. In particular it is argued if a traditional model like the marketing mix (4Ps) is suitable and rather effective for shaping the games' vendors offerings for the players. For this purpose this research studies both, the producers' perspective regarding the development studios' perspective of marketing of virtual goods and the consumers' perspective regarding the players' perception of the applied marketing mix for virtual goods. Therefore two kinds of empirical approaches were chosen: (1) Explorative, qualitative interview with eleven German F2P games' professionals to get producers' perspective, and (2) a quantitative cross-sectional online survey collecting data about demographic data, F2P preferences, and perception of marketing mix components drawing a convenience sample by over 400 consumers of virtual goods.

Ключевые слова: computer games, Online Games, video games, virtual goods, Virtual Items, F2P, Free-2-Play free2play, free to play, MMO, digital goods