Study On Consumption Behavior Of Online Game Users’ Based On Social Network

With the enrichment of network elements and the constantly increasingnumber of internet users, online games, as the most important pillar in Chinesenetwork economy, have gradually become the first consideration for entertainmentfor internet users in China. The value of online games lies in that they extend thedevelopment of both the network and the computer industry in China. Onlinegames have created a great amount of social wealth and a large number ofemployment opportunities, and therefore promoted economic development inmany areas. After the growth and evolution for nearly twenty years, however, theonline industry in China in now facing the problems of short cycles lifetime, lowproduct quality and poor profitability. A lot of online game companies caught sightof the value and potential of online games while they neglected the quality of thereproducts. Lacking of the elecments and contents of the players’ interest, theregames can live for only a short period before disappearing from the market. Theloss of cost and the defective development caused lots of failures in the field. Inthis paper, based on the dating needs of game players and starting with the analysisof the their social capital, we discuss and analyze the effect of their social networkon their consumption behavior, in order to offer some suggestions on productsinnovation and improvement of profitability.In this paper, the significance and purpose of the research are raised after theanalysis of the status of recent online games.Through the search and analysis ofliteratures, the author found only a little research on the social capital of onlinegame players. It was also noticed that most literatures focus merely on the productaspect when studying the users’ consumption behavior, but ignore the effect of thevirtual social network in the games. We applied in this paper consumer behavior,sociology, marketing, and other relavent theory, to study the relation of the so cialnetwork of game players and their consumption behavior from both theoreticalanalysis and empirical research. We measured the players’ social capital from thestructural dimension, the relational dimension and the cognitive dimension, and presented the mediate factors that affect the users’ consumption, the flowexperience and social criterion, to construct a model for the social capital of gameplayers and their consumption behavior. We also considered life cycle as amoderator variable and discussed the consumption difference of game players whoare in different life cycles,in order to provide the manufactures with propermarketing suggestion for players with different life cycles.This paper adopts questionare investigation to empirical research, an d appliesSPSS15.0to statistically analyze collected data to reveal the relation of variables.The investigation results were also utilized to verify the model and the hypothesis.Through the discussion of the results, suggestions are given for both the productsdevelopment and marketing aspects.