Purchasing digital items in free to play games : Investigating personality theory through an explorative study of League of Legends

Abstract: The continuous growth of the gaming industry develops a highly competitive environment, which provides an incubator of innovation. These conditions lead to the emergence of new business models. Free to play as one of those newly and still developing models is currently trending among the game developing and publishing companies. Delivering skyrocketing profits, the full potential of the model is yet to be revealed. At first sight, the model has a simplistic structure on the business side, however, on the user side it is unclear what motivates players to become customers through the purchase of digital items in the games. This research uses an exploratory and qualitative approach to collect data and identify purchasing behaviour stimuli. It also proposes an option of connecting personality theories as a possible explanation to the purchasing behaviour of players. As a focus for this study, the currently most successful free to play game, League of Legends, was selected and twelve interviews with League of Legends players were conducted. The interviews consisted of two parts, one semi-structured and the other one structured. The semi-structured interview aimed at identifying purchasing behaviour and finding reasons for the purchase of digital items in League of Legends. The second was a personality assessment test, Keirsey Temperament Sorter2. A conventional content analysis of the interviews identified the theme “personal satisfaction” as the main motivation for purchasing digital items. The investigation regarding the proposed connection to personality theory, the research’s results fail to show any connection. However, answering research question number one unveils the importance of the personality factor remains valid and a subject of future research. The research discusses possibilities and direction for future research in the face of testing other than the applied Keirsey personality theory.