Digital Product Quality versus Customer Expectations: Video Game Industry Example

The gap between the expected quality of products or services and the perceived one has taken a significant place in the studies of different researchers (Giese & Cote, 2000; Golder, Mitra & Moorman, 2012). This match between expected product quality, which is created before the purchase, and perceived one, formed after the purchase, creates customer satisfaction. With the appearance of digital markets and products, reaching this match has become difficult and more complex due to the intangibility of the products whose quality cannot be properly evaluated. Recent trends displayed that video games industry holds particular interest as it is subjected to the decrease in quality of games produced by famous companies with no change in their demand that is mainly explained by extensive promotion. On the other hand, there are independent developers that do not experience the increase in sales even though they produce games of better quality. The goal of the current research is to evaluate the promotion success factors that famous companies employ as a part of their marketing strategy and detect the most influential ones. Through the content analysis of 650 games` descriptions and 3250 reviews (5 per each game) of famous game developers and independent developers, it was possible to identify the promotion factors employed by both types of developers. The factors used by companies were determined with the topic modelling and application of latent Dirichlet allocation method. Another outcome of the analysis became the reveal of the most influential promotion factors on the number of purchases and percentage of positive reviews that showed how customers perceived purchased games. This was achieved with multinomial logistic regression and finding associations with Cramer’s V. As a result, the research proposes a set of promotional factors that have the strongest impact on customers` decision to purchase a video game. The list of those factors is designated for independent developers to help them elaborate their promotion effectively. This study provides new opportunities for further investigation of promotion factors in other digital industries as well as other techniques used by companies to convince customers in products’ high quality.