Helsinki Institute of Information Technology Researcher Vili Lehdonvirta last week released a pre-publication draft of his latest paper, "Virtual item sales as a revenue model: identifying attributes that drive purchase decisions." The new paper offers a detailed, if exploratory, look at the reasons why people choose to purchase virtual goods in a variety of different contexts, including MMORPGs, social networks, and virtual worlds. It is particularly noteworthy because it offers a more sophisticated alternative to the traditional model that describes how people ascribe value to virtual goods.
Traditionally, it is assumed that one of two factors motivate an online virtual goods purchase: a feeling that the good is useful in the context of its virtual community, or a feeling that the good is desirable because it is decorative. Lehdonvirta acknowledges usefulness, or functionality, as one of the attributes that makes a virtual good desirable to a buyer. In place of the vague "decorative" descriptor of the traditional model, Lehdonvirta offers the concrete alternative of describing a good as "social" or "hedonic" instead. A good valuable for social reasons will be rare or reference something seen as desirable in real-world culture, like nationality or a holiday. A good valuable for hedonic reasons connotes luxury, either by referencing real-world luxury items or referencing elite status within the community.
The paper cites much research and anecdotal evidence that is almost as interesting as the paper's main argument. Lehdonvirta quotes the overall revenue generated by the virtual goods market at 2.1 billion USD in 2007, as compared to online advertising revenues of 16.9 billion USD in 2006. CyWorld's sales from virtual goods are 300,000 USD per day, or 7 USD per user per year, while social network MySpace's total revenue per user per year amounted to 2.17 USD.
Lehdonvirta describes his new system of virtual attributes as being based on attributes currently used by advertisers to describe sales of virtually any type of good. The paper argues this is an advantage in approach to virtual goods marketing, because it makes it clearer how to immediately apply real-world advertising techniques to the marketing of virtual goods. The paper also offers a variety of anecdotes relating to various platforms that sell virtual goods, noting where incidents are more easily explained by Lehdonvirta's model than the traditional one.
A few of the anecdotes are extremely interesting in their own right. In the MMORPG Ultima Online, developers "decorated" certain stable areas with an item called "horse dung." The item had no in-game role and no value; however, once a player took horse dung from a stable, more would never be generated. The paper cites that as a result, there was roughly one piece of horse dung available for every 30,000 Ultima Online players. The horse dung, due to sheer rarity, became a valuable item that could be sold for hundreds of dollars in third-party RMT stores or displayed in homes as a status symbol.
Another anecdote describes a type of item valued by users of Habbo, rooms that can be identified as being several years old. While there is no obvious way in the Habbo interface to note a room's age, users can place virtual pets in rooms when they are created. Visitors can then check the room's age by seeing how old the virtual pet is. Older rooms are associated with the elite status enjoyed by long-term Habbo users and so are more highly valued than newer rooms that may otherwise be identical.
"This will by no means be the final word on the subject of why people by virtual items, but I think it's an improvement over the "useful vs. decorative" model of thinking," writes Lehdonvirta in the blog post announcing his new paper. "It codifies what I have learned from users, developers and other scholars over the recent years."
runescape money
runescape gold
runescape money
buy runescape gold
buy runescape money
runescape money
runescape gold
wow power leveling
wow powerleveling
Warcraft Power Leveling
Warcraft PowerLeveling
buy runescape gold buy runescape money runescape items
runescape accounts
runescape gp
dofus kamas
buy dofus kamas
Guild Wars Gold
buy Guild Wars Gold
lotro gold
buy lotro gold
lotro gold
buy lotro gold
lotro gold
buy lotro gold
runescape money
runescape power leveling
runescape money
runescape gold
dofus kamas
cheap runescape money
cheap runescape gold
Hellgate Palladium
Hellgate London Palladium
Hellgate money
Tabula Rasa gold tabula rasa money
Tabula Rasa Credit
Tabula Rasa Credits
Hellgate gold
Hellgate London gold
wow power leveling
wow powerleveling
Warcraft PowerLeveling
Warcraft Power Leveling
World of Warcraft PowerLeveling World of Warcraft Power Leveling runescape power leveling
runescape powerleveling
eve isk
eve online isk
eve isk
eve online isk
tibia gold
Fiesta Silver
Fiesta Gold
Age of Conan Gold
buy Age of Conan Gold
aoc gold
呼吸机
无创呼吸机
家用呼吸机
呼吸机
家用呼吸机
美国呼吸机
篮球培训
篮球培训班
篮球夏令营
china tour
beijing tour
beijing travel
china tour
tibet tour
tibet travel
computer monitoring software
employee monitoring
Posted by: field | January 12, 2009 at 07:25 PM