Loyalty Based On The Conversion Costs Of Network Games

With the quick development of the Internet, people have more and more entertainment and experience styles. As one style of the entertainment, when connect to the net, pc games have become more popular by people. Online games have special experience, good intercommunion and sociality, they attract many people to involve in, and now they become one of the most popular entertainment industries. Because of the broad profit, many companies involve this industry, so the competition become very fiercely. Faced the competition, how to keep the customer, and enhance their loyalty, cares the developer most.This paper is focused on MMORPG, the favorite game by players. This paper is on the basis of loyalty and switching costs theory, also combined with customer satisfaction, customer value and flow theory, a model is developed to verify the connection between switching costs and loyalty. We also examine the antecedents of switching costs from the product, service, relationship and the characteristic of players. The model is tested by SPSS.The results from the empirical research suggested that players" switching costs can be divided into four types: financial switching costs;psychology switching costs;relational switching costs;procedural switching costs, and it also indicated all four switching costs significantly influence consumers' loyalty. Furthermore, consumers' perception of product quality, service quality, the relationship between providers and players, player involvement and experience drive the switching costs they perceive. The results aslo indicted that the psychology swithing costs are different between four types of players, the achivers and killers have higher psychology swithing costs than socializer.