earticle

영어

Online game business has emerged as the most lucrative entertainment industry, with over 10 million players in South Korea and over 30million in Japan in 2005. While the interactive entertainment market continues to expand, with many new online game publishers entering the market, relatively little theory has been developed about which factors influence online gamers' behavioral intentions (i.e., loyalty, satisfaction, words of mouth, etc.) in this area. The purpose of this research is to investigate the relationships among the gamers' satisfaction, trust toward game publishers, the role of online game community, social reputation, and the managerial support of game publishers. We also examine the differences between Korean and Japanese gamers concerning the relationships of these key success factors. The structural model is tested with the data from entire data samples (i.e., Korean and Japanese gamers pooled together) and each of the sub-samples (i.e., Korean and Japanese gamers taken separately). Properties of the causal paths, including standardized path coefficients, the significance of difference, and variance explained for Trust and Satisfaction in the hypothesized model, are presented. Following the model test, we conduct a test of the differences in path coefficients between Korean and Japanese gamers. Statistical results show that, compared to Japanese gamers, Korean gamers had a greater salient effect on Social Reputation in determining. Trust, in addition to placing a greater emphasis on Support of Game Publishers in determining Social Reputation. Other interesting results concerning game Publishers' strategy are also presented.