Identifying the Key Success Factors of Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game Design using Artificial Neural Networks

Abstract

Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games(MMORPGs) headed by some Korean game companies such as NC Soft, NHN, and Nexon have exploded in recent years. However, it becomesone of the major challenges for the MMORPG developers to design their games to appeal to gamers since only a few MMORPGs succeed whereas they require a huge amount of initial investment. Under this background, our study derives the major elements for designing MMORPG from the literature, and identifies the ones critical to the users’ satisfaction and their illingness to pay among the derived elements.
Though most previous studies on the design elements of MORPG have used analytic hierarchy process(AHP), our study adopts artificial neural network(ANN) as the tool for identifying key success factors in designing MMORPG. The results of our study show that the elements of the game contents quality have a bigger effect on the user’s satisfaction, whereas the ones of the value-added systems have a bigger effect on the user’s willingness to pay. They also show that user interface affects both the user’s satisfaction and willingness to pay most. These results imply that the strategies for the development of MMORPG should be aligned with its goal and market penetration strategy. They also imply that the satisfaction and revenue generation from MMORPG cannot be achieved without convenient and easy control environment. It is expected that the new findings of our study would be useful forthe developers or publishers of MMORPGs to build their own business strategies.