Investigating the Affecting Factors on Mobile Games Purchase Intention: An Expectation-Confirmation Model (ECM)

As a proper example of cultural technologies, digital games have been under a vast range of studies. In addition, the daily growth in the market and production of games have turned them into a huge industry. In the meantime, Mobile platform gained the largest amount of the growth in revenue. As there is an extending revenue in Mobile platform, it is important to understand game audience's preferences & tastes for developing mobile games into an even bigger industry. Therefore, in this article, the technology-based Expectation-Confirmation Model (ECM) is developed to investigate the affecting factors on mobile game's purchase intention. The model explains when gamers face an in-app purchase, free to play mobile game, they try to compare their perceptions with their expectations and when the confirmation of the expectations happens, a mix of values including monetary, performance, emotional, social, and innovation values will be perceived, which they lead to satisfaction and purchase intention. In addition, this study has investigated the effects of habit, trust, free alternatives, and online reviews on purchase intention. For this purpose, an online survey has been implemented for the players of "Clash of Clans" and a sample size of 766 people made it possible to test the hypotheses in both 95 and 99 confidence levels. The results show that perceived value for money, emotional perceived value, trust, and habit have a positive effect on purchase intention of mobile games. On the contrary, no relations have been identified between satisfaction, free alternatives, and online reviews with PI.