Mobile Games: Analyzing the Needs and Values of the Consumers

Mobile games are one of the largest mobile application areas and one where users are often willing to pay for services. Furthermore, the market for mobile games is expected to grow dramatically as most phones sold now are capable of running games. Despite this, there is surprisingly little research concerning user expectations from mobile games. In this exploratory study, we examine the consumers’ values, needs, and objectives related to mobile games. Based on earlier literature on mobile services, we developed a preliminary set of issues and did an exploratory survey of mobile game users to find the key needs and values of mobile gamers. The results of the study are especially interesting for mobile game developers and mobile phone operators as they shed light on the demographics and choices of mobile gamers. We argue that if mobile games are ever to be diffused in greater extent to the market, then a deeper understanding of the values and needs of the potential mobile game users must be obtained. This understanding can then be used to guide the development of new game offerings

Smartphones

Many of the research approaches to smartphones actually regard them as more or less transparent points of access to other kinds of communication experiences. That is, rather than considering the smartphone as something in itself, the researchers look at how individuals use the smartphone for their communicative purposes, whether these be talking, surfing the web, using on-line data access for off-site data sources, downloading or uploading materials, or any kind of interaction with social media. They focus not so much on the smartphone itself but on the activities that people engage in with their smartphones

The Industry and Policy Context for Digital Games for Empowerment and Inclusion:Market Analysis, Future Prospects and Key Challenges in Videogames, Serious Games and Gamification

The effective use of digital games for empowerment and social inclusion (DGEI) of people and communities at risk of exclusion will be shaped by, and may influence the development of a range of sectors that supply products, services, technology and research. The principal industries that would appear to be implicated are the 'videogames' industry, and an emerging 'serious games' industry. The videogames industry is an ecosystem of developers, publishers and other service providers drawn from the interactive media, software and broader ICT industry that services the mainstream leisure market in games, The 'serious games' industry is a rather fragmented and growing network of firms, users, research and policy makers from a variety of sectors. This emerging industry is are trying to develop knowledge, products, services and a market for the use of digital games, and products inspired by digital games, for a range of non-leisure applications. This report provides a summary of the state of play of these industries, their trajectories and the challenges they face. It also analyses the contribution they could make to exploiting digital games for empowerment and social inclusion. Finally, it explores existing policy towards activities in these industries and markets, and draws conclusions as to the future policy relevance of engaging with them to support innovation and uptake of effective digital game-based approaches to empowerment and social inclusion.JRC.J.3-Information Societ

Characteristics of Mobile Payment Procedures

Companies are not going to invest into the development of innovative applications or services unless these can be charged for appropriately. Thus, the existence of standardized and widely accepted mobile payment procedures is crucial for successful business-to-customer mobile commerce. The acceptance of mobile payment procedures depends on costs, security and convenience issues. For the latter, it is important that a procedure can be used over the different payment scenarios mobile commerce, electronic commerce, stationary merchant and customer-to-customer. Current payment procedures can be categorized with strategic, participation and operational criteria, using the morphological method. The proposed scheme allows to unambiguously identify and characterize any given mobile payment procedure. The design of today's mobile payment procedures should less try to optimize on the future mobile commerce problems but focus on the ease of spreading in the electronic commerce setting as lead-in scenario.

Paving the way to e-services: Innovation through online games

The transformative power of organizational and service innovations on value or supply chains has been the object of several studies. The question identified in this paper is how disruptive trends in the videogames world can have spill-over effects in the broader realm of e-services. Section 1 opens with a brief review of literature. Section 2 proposes a description of the on-line games industrial ecosystem, the characteristics of the production process and the value chain in the online video games industry. The main techno-economic models for the production and distribution of online games are described in a third section with an emphasis on service creation, and illustrated by some case studies. The last part highlights the trend of innovative paths towards an economy of e-Services which are driven by the evolution of online games in a converged environment. --Online value creation,virtual world,virtual good,value chain,digital content convergence,new business models,services

Factors Influencing User's Intention to Play in Innovative Mobile Gaming Usage

Abstract.The games industry changed in the last decade from a market dominated by consoles and online gaming publishers, to the new and increasing shifts in the mobile gaming sector. Based on the research report by various research firms such as Newzoo and Digi-Capital, the mobile gaming industry made $29 billion in 2015 and it’s going to continue growing (with the estimation could produce as high as$49 billion by 2018). This study was examining the factors influencing customers’ mobile game preferences, and factors affecting users’ intention to play. This study also examining the customers’ enthusiasm toward Valve (a game developer company) if they decides to launch their games into mobile game platforms, due to the increasing trends in mobile gaming industry. The findings of the study can be used to provide the mobile game developer companies better understanding about the consumers’ behavior regarding the mobile gaming. The variables that was used in this study was constructed by combining the variables from previous research about intention to play mobile games. Perceived enjoyment, behavior, subject norm, time flexibility, network externalities, and flow experience are the predicted variables that influences customer intention to play. Judgmental and snowball sampling was performed to 420 respondents in Bandung, Jakarta, Solo, Semarang, Yogyakarta, Surabaya, Medan, and Jambi, which mostly consists of high school and university students. Online questionnaire was developed to gather the data. Data processed through confirmatory factor analysis, linear regression, and ANOVA. This research finds that the factors that influences customers’ preferences are the price of the game, game genres, and the reputation of the developers. While the genre of the games that people like to play the most is casual games. Time flow has the strongest influence to intention to play, and followed by subject norm, perceived enjoyment, and behavior. Meanwhile, network externalities and flow experience have no influence towards intention to play. The mobile game developer companies should pay attention about these factors, since it could enhance customers’ level of intention to play, and by understanding the customer preferences, it could generate more profits and revenue. Furthermore, based on the research conducted before, Valve has good brand awareness and the consumer enthusiasm level is high. So if Valve decides to launch their games in mobile platform, while at the same time also pay attention to the factors affecting customers’ preferences and factors influencing customers’ intention to play, they should be successful.Keywords: mobile gaming, customer enthusiasm, influencing factor, intention to us

User Intentions of Downloading Games on Mobile Phones: An Empirical Evaluation using Consumption Value Model

In recent years, there have been some discussions in the scholarly literature about using Consumption Value Model (CVM) for explaining the adoption and usage of hedonic information technologies. As CVM is a relatively new theoretical lens, limited empirical evaluation of this model has so far been reported. In this article, we thus report an empirical evaluation of CVM for games downloading by students on their mobile phones context. We observe partial support for the applicability of CVM as only two value dimensions of CVM (performance/quality value and emotional value) are related to students’ intentions to download games. We further find mixed influence of students’ demographic characteristics on their value perceptions. The implications of these findings are discussed