earticle

영어

As online games become one of the most popular Internet services, hacking has also emerged as a noticeable and important phenomenon in recent gameplay on the Internet. In regards to this potential threat, game companies focus on their efforts to protect their game from unauthorized acts throughout hacking tools under the assumption that the use of hacking tool could be particularly harmful for success of games. However, surprisingly, there has been little rigorous research to analyze whether, and how much, online game hacking affects firms’ sales and users’ behavior. In this paper, we analyze this question using data gathered from a Korean online game company. We find that there are 207 cheaters (0.25% of registered users) and they hold approximately 12% of the whole revenue. Moreover, the usage of hacking tool causes an 102% and 79% increase in playtime and purchase respectively right after users start to use hacking tools. Also, the effects of hacking tools are not just short term. We show it is possible that cheaters can provide an online game company with more leverage and loyalty in aspect of playtime and purchase. This is exactly a contrary result to the conclusions of numerous previous studies on piracy on digital contents. We believe that these results give useful business implications to both policymakers and game industry managers informing the impact of hacking tools on sales and users’ behavior. Moreover, it also contributes to the growing academic literature on impacts of hacking behaviors in online games.