Reigniting the flame: Sustaining Usage Through Intermittent Releases of In-game Content

Presenter Information

Shyam Prasad Ghosh, Indian Institute of ManagementFollow
Soumyakanti Chakraborty, Indian Institute of ManagementFollow

Paper Number

2350

Paper Type

Completed

Description

Downloadable contents (DLCs) are additional in-game contents that developers release periodically to sustain the interest of users. In this paper, we study the effect of these DLC releases on the usage of a game by analysing actual usage data from 241 DLCs released over a period of 12 years. We use a quasi-experimental analysis to determine the effect on usage, and also investigate the effect of different DLCs categories on usage. We also study the effect of the different categories of game developers, indie and AAA, on the relationship between DLC release and usage. Results indicate that different categories of DLCs have distinct effects on usage. We also find that the release of DLCs of indie games have a greater impact on usage as compared to AAA games. We compare and contrast our results with the extant literature and provide insightful guidelines to game developers on managing DLC releases.

Comments

21-UserBehavior

Recommended Citation

Ghosh, Shyam Prasad and Chakraborty, Soumyakanti, "Reigniting the flame: Sustaining Usage Through Intermittent Releases of In-game Content" (2023). ICIS 2023 Proceedings. 25.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2023/user_behav/user_behav/25