| dc.description.abstract | With the fast development of technologies, the gaming industry becomes more and
more diverse, profitable, and competitive. With the unprecedentedly growing
gaming industry, the game streaming industry also expands and develops
constantly. The previous research agrees that game streaming tends to benefit the
game companies by increasing game’s popularity, either directly through
promotionally demonstrating game contents to the audiences, or indirectly through
benefiting game’s word-of-mouth. However, they did not consider that game
streaming may also hurt the game companies. For instance, the streaming audiences
may feel less interested and motivated to play the games after watching the game
streaming because the game streaming may spoil too much game contents, which
is known as the cannibalization effect.
As a result, in order to accurately express and reflect the potential cannibalization
effect of game streaming, this research needs to study and consider the relationships
between game streaming, game’s popularity, and word-of-mouth of the games in a
big picture jointly. In short, this research quantifies these three areas of interest and
studies their interactions between each other. Firstly, this research uses the Vector
Autoregression model which allows for the simultaneous treatment of game’s
popularity, game streaming, and word-of-mouth regarding each game instance.
However, this research expects that the existence of cannibalization effects depends
on the game categories, including “single-player” and “multi-player” which the first
model is not able to capture. Therefore, this research proposes a Linear Mixed-
Effects Regression model, which can better incorporate such a moderation effect of
game categories as well as other game characteristics.
After relevant hypothesis testing, our results show that although game streaming in
general helps to improve game’s popularity, we observe an obvious existence of the
cannibalization effect of game streaming for “single-player” games. Besides, this
research also reflects on the implications of the results. For instance, this research
recommends game companies to strengthen positive reviews of the games to
increase game’s popularity, because the result also suggests a strong positive effect
of word-of-mouth on game’s popularity, especially when the game genre is
“Racing”. | en_US |
