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FEDERAL STATE EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTION

OF HIGHER EDUCATION

NATIONAL RESEARCH UNIVERSITY

HIGHER SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS

Saint Petersburg School of Economics and Management

Department of Management

Bachelor's thesis

Digital product quality versus customer expectations: Video game industry example

Polozova Ekaterina Ivanovna

Siliutina Daria Sergeevna

Saint Petersburg 2019

Abstract

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.

Keywords: Digital product quality, Video game development, Promotion factors, Latent Dirichlet allocation

Table of contents

Introduction

1. Theoretical foundation

1.1 Product quality and customer value

1.2 Video game as a digital product

1.3 Video game quality elaboration

1.4 Marketing strategy for digital products

1.5 5C of digital marketing

1.6 4S digital marketing mix model

1.7 Video games' promotion success factors

1.8 Video game design and principles of usability

1.9 Remarks on the ethical marketing issue

2. Statement of the research question

3. Methodology

3.1 Content analysis methods

3.2 Computer-aided text analysis

3.3 Descriptive statistics for the dataset

3.5 Game descriptions analysis

3.6 Reviews analysis

3.7 Assumptions check for regression analysis

4. Results & Discussion

Conclusion

References

Introduction

Nowadays the satiation of the market with a wide range of products or services raises an issue of meeting the needs of the customers and fulfilling their expectations. This is referred to the matter of the product or service quality that becomes crucial not only in the traditional markets but in the digital industry as well (Razak, 2016). The imbalance between the expected and perceived quality is increasing in its significance. The expected quality stands for the one anticipated by the customers before the product is purchased and utilized, and perceived quality refers to the one that replaces former when the product is used and assessed from the customer standpoint. The situation impairs intensifying rivalry among competitors on the market. This rivalry spurs companies to exaggerate the real product quality in order to remain strong players among the competitors (Salegna & Fazel, 2011). These gaps in the expected-perceived quality correspondence create customer dissatisfaction and raise the question concerning the methods employed by the companies to distort product quality (Tomaselli, 2008).

Among others, one of the industries that has experienced the influence of such misleading practices of companies is video game development (Wang & Nordmark, 2015). Without question video game industry has become increasingly popular in the recent years. The average player of video games is 34 years old, and more than 70 percent of players are 18 or older (Entertainment Software Association, 2018). According to the statistics provided by the Entertainment Software Association (2018), in America video game industry is considered to be a powerful engine that drives economic growth with sales of over 24.5 billion copies of games and generating over $30.4 billion revenue brought in 2016. Evidently, video games have become quite a mainstream type of entertainment and a huge industry.

Considering the mentioned state of the market of digital products on the example of video game industry, the first two research questions arise:

a) What are the promotion factors that impact customers' decision to purchase a video game?

b) Which factors are the most influential when making a customer buy a video game overlooking its quality?

With such a growing popularity of video games, a new phenomenon has emerged called `ludology' which studies games and specializes on development of scientific theories and approaches to the critical scholarly study of the video games (for example, Bogost, 2006; Juul, 2011). The emergence of new theories gave birth to scholarly studies and debates, most of which are taking place on the specific online platforms. For instance, there is a recognized scientific online journal in the academia that is focusing on video game research: Game Studies (gamestudies.org). It positions itself as an academic video game journal, placed in the second quartile in the cultural studies area (based on Scimago journal rank), that strives to establish and validate working theories that are applicable for the video games with the variety of topics from players' behaviors to feminism. The studies that concern video games are starting to exploit reviews more often for the analysis (Irwin, 2008; Garda & Grabarczyk, 2016). However, before the beginning of the research it is necessary to understand if reviews may serve as a feasible source of information that will allow to determine the reasons behind customers purchase of a digital product, which in this case remains the video game offered by developers.

The market of video games today offers a wide range of products that varies in plot, genre, graphics and other distinct features. A player is free to choose any game in accordance with their preferences, interests and current financial stand. This is what is promoted to the player once they enter the market of video games, or, in other words, this is what customers see from their side of the market. However, another side of the market that is occupied by the game developers differs. It becomes clear that the whole market of video game development is dominated by certain number of famous game-developing companies which have entered the market first and already gained their credit. Such situation makes small indie games developers overshadowed (Irwin, 2008). Indie games are those that are developed by independent companies or individuals but are not supported financially by the publisher which lowers their ability to compete with the famous giants on the market. According to Irwin (2008), indie games mostly depend on the online digital distribution channels.

The release of a new game developed by a famous company suddenly boosts the sales, increases its customer appeal for those who have been anticipating and those who got attracted later. This is mainly stipulated by the considered marketing campaign that tends to elevate the expected game quality for the customers and spurns its perceived one since most of the efforts are focused on the marketing component rather than the game elaboration one. (Tomaselli, 2008). Because of the such a thrill about the games by famous developers, indie games, on the contrary, experience comparatively less demand on the games of higher quality (Wang & Nordmark, 2015), which is a result of the inefficient marketing campaign happened due to the lack of financial resources needed for the game promotion. Therefore, the decision-making process that every customer goes through is widely influenced by the promotion of the game. The promotion factors that ensure the success of the game are not yet evaluated by the authors in the game development industry, therefore, this gap needs to be covered.

The success of the campaign is also explained by the access to the resources whether it is finance or knowledge which leads to the different choice of the marketing strategies and methods made by the independent game developers, who have no restrains in their decisions such as the choice of genre, plot or art style as they wholly rely on their will, and the famous companies, whose decisions are driven by the outside publisher's order or the needs of the market, to reach their target audiences with the most efficiency (Vulkan, 2003). This point is crucial to consider while identifying success factors that are used in promotion of a video game and while testing a difference between those two types of developers basing on the current trends that show the insufficiency of the games' quality of famous developers.

Current studies suggest the factors that impact the video game success in regard to its software development. As for the marketing research there are factors that impact the promotion activity of a certain digital product inside the whole marketing campaign developed by a company. However, there is little research that stressed the success factors influencing the video game promotion as a digital product. Hence, this research aims at unearthing the video games promotion success factors that fit video game development industry and spotting the most influential ones in the list. To detect the influential factors out of the whole list, it is crucial to compare the promotion of games which is done by the famous companies and the independent indie games developers.

This research is of potential importance because the imbalance created between customer expectations of the digital products and real quality that those products possess must be resolved and restored from the managerial point of view. Hence, it is vital to determine the key promotion factors used to distort the quality in the promotion activity that are significant in the digital industry in order to provide customers with the choice of digital products of better quality that they expect once entering the market of the video game industry.

To answer the set research questions, the authors of the research paper pose several objectives in the study and the tasks which help them to achieve each of the proposed objectives:

a) To determine digital companies` marketing strategy preferred types and techniques and its relation to the quality of the product and its promotion. To do that the researchers build profound theoretical background on the basis of the existing literature on product quality, customer expectations and unmet needs, marketing and video game development industry. Then, it is crucial to analyze each aspect of the marketing strategy to be able to connect the most suitable features in each aspect with the video game development industry in terms of the product quality.

b) To analyze the preferences of the famous companies and indie games developers in terms of the applied promotion methods within the marketing strategy. This can be done during the applied part of the research by analyzing the descriptions of the games made by both types of developers. This analysis includes different characteristics that must be evaluated such as the topics that arise from the description, the main stress in the description, and other information that the developers deemed necessary to include.

c) To distinguish the key promotion factors that are relevant for famous companies' video games and independent game developers. Key promotion success factors can be tracked through the analysis of the descriptions and reviews posted by the players that emphasize important features found. The comparison of topics found on the game description and those found in the reviews can help understand which factors brought the customers to their decision to purchase.

d) To analyze the relationships between the market response and promotional methods as well as their influence on the game quality, measured by consumers. This objective can be achieved by the analysis of the percentage of the positive reviews of the game, and the analysis of the association between the topics of the game description and their reviews.

Current research paper concentrates on the data retrieved from Steam (Steam.com) data base of the games produced by both market leaders of the mass-marketed games in the game development industry together with the independent developers of the indie games that have been released in the last two years (2016-2018). In addition to that, the study scope also includes the reviews of both types of developers that the customers leave for games they purchased in order to track and estimate the change in the mood of the responses left by the gamers. What is crucial to take into consideration is that the authors of the study strive to obtain the most helpful responses left by the gamers on the products purchased by them and compare the results with the expectations that are shaped by promotion campaigns of the companies. The helpfulness of the responses is measured on the basis of the number of players who marked the response as helpful.

In the recent years, online reviewing has shown significant influence on the box office revenues of popular films (Reinstein & Snyder, 2005). Even though there are not many studies that have shown the same effect of reviewing in the gaming industry, games are still the same type of `experiential good' as films, meaning that clients cannot assess the quality of the product before actually consuming it (Boatwright, Basuroy & Kamakura, 2007). Hence, reviews of the popular video games can possess similar strength of influence as movie criticism. Game reviews are becoming increasingly important when consumers make a purchasing decision (Wang & Nordmark, 2015), which makes it safe to expect relevant for the analysis results from investigating the nature of game reviews.

Current study exploits computer-aided text analysis to examine the reviews with unsupervised machine learning method. This method allows to automatically structure the document based on the patterns that can be met inside of the chosen corpus. This is possible with latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) that assigns topics to the documents on the basis of co-occurrence of the word patterns and probabilities with which words can be met in the topics. Moreover, LDA opens an opportunity to manually define the topics which is beneficial for the final interpretation. Such an exploratory approach allows to elicit quantitative variables from qualitative data by mathematically estimating the information inside a text corpus. The algorithm suits the research purposes best as it distinguishes the necessary number of topics from the corpus and the authors can then independently define them by looking at the lists of words in each topic. By calculating the Cohen's kappa coefficient, the decision of the topic's definition is made and then the definitions and examples are provided for each topic.

The results of this paper are relevant for the independent game developers as the created list of promotion success factors and the adjacent list of the recommendations on how to improve the marketing campaign will help the developers to get a fair advantage in delivering the game to the player efficiently. This, in turn, helps to attract more users to the game and create a fan base for the potential future games. This turn of events may lead to the fairer competition among the players in the market and more even distribution of the market share among the companies regardless of its size, reputation and the time of existence on the market.

Besides, this research paper may serve as a solid basis for further research in several directions since it is a first basic step in an area of improving the marketing campaign of a game. The paper may be utilized for the investigation of other deceiving techniques in the fields like advertising in the video game development industry and other digital industries. Other possible directions also include enhancing the awareness of customers of the problem and helping them to make proper and thoughtful purchasing decisions by better evaluating the existing responses.

The paper is divided into several parts and structured according to the following pattern. Section 1 provides a comprehensive overview of the existing literature on the topics of the product quality and customer value, digital marketing, overview of the game development industry and the subsequent allocation of the key promotion success factors applicable to the industry with the suitable marketing strategy and promotion activity. Section 2 includes the methodology that is applied for the purposes of the research. It starts with the overview of the existing methods and the reason of the authors` choice on the selected method and, then, continues with detailed explanation of the data collected and the process of the data analysis. In the end, the authors estimate the association between the factors and the market responses as well as find and measure the existence of the cause and effect relationships. Section 3 consists of the received results, their meaning and the conclusions that have been derived as a result of the theoretical analysis and the conducted research. As a result, the authors create a list of the most influential promotion factors, subsequent recommendations for independent indie game developers and give further directions of the perspective studies basing on this research paper.

1. Theoretical foundation

Customers' purchasing decision highly depends on the quality the products have to offer. (Golder, Mitra & Moorman, 2012). Consumers intention to buy a product bases on the expected quality first, which is formed by the price, brand perception and marketing campaign, then the decision to repeat the initial purchase is influenced by the perceived quality that occurs when the customer starts using the product. Because of the intense rivalry on the market, companies initiate competition for the customers by, among other things, improving the quality of the product offered. Based on the Euromonitor statistics, 61.2% of all titles published in 2017 relate to the games developed by famous companies and have the highest sales on the market (Appendix 1, Figure 1). With the development of marketing techniques, usage of aggressive promotion and implementation of different misleading techniques focused on increasing product awareness, video game developers turned to directing their efforts on marketing rather than working on the quality (Appendix 1, Figure 2). Hence, expectations of the players regarding the games produced industries have partially been unmet (Oliver, Ash, Woodley, Shade & Kim, 2014).

The gap between the expectations of the customers and the perceived quality of the offered good has become an issue that needs to be thoroughly researched. Thus, the first part of the literature review is devoted to the quality and customer expectations problem and marketing along with promotion impact. The second part contains game development industry overview in order to outline success factors relevant for the video game promotion. Because of the fact that game development industry is still evolving and progressing, there is not much literature available on the topic as it sometimes can be of undisclosable nature. The authors, however, strive to identify the features in marketing theory that could be applicable for the gaming industry. This literature review does not emphasize the games that are developed for mobile Android or IOS platforms, it rather aims at PC, Play Station or Xbox platforms, as these types of games receive more and more recognition (Entertainment Software Association, 2018).

1.1 Product quality and customer value

Two main drivers of the purchasing decisions made by customers have been the quality of the product or the service and the cost (Eckert & Hughes, 2010). Kotler and Amstrong (2012) describe product quality as the characteristic that makes the product possess an ability to satisfy the needs of a customer that may be articulated or not. Since product quality is a subject of individual`s judgement, it cannot be fairly reviewed by the company that produces the product. On the contrary, it may only be estimated from the standpoint of the customer. At the same time, customers cannot understand the product or the service from the standpoint of the company that offers it. On that basis, product quality is taken as expected quality from the perspective of the producer and as perceived one that is viewed by the customer. The compatibility between these two forms of the product quality - the expected and perceived - is crucial for the company because of the necessity to stay strong on the market in terms of satisfying customers` needs (Wirtz & Chung, 2003). The customer remains satisfied when the expected and perceived quality correspond which in turn makes the product quality company's competitive advantage (Salegna & Fazel, 2011). The situation where the two types of quality are not met creates dissatisfaction of the customer and hinders the company`s operations.

Expectations of the customers are important for another reason as well. They drive the behavior of the customers that defines their pre-purchasing decisions and post-purchasing experience. Pre-purchasing decision forms the ideal of the product or the service while the post-purchasing experience allows customers to compare different options and understand the level of their satisfaction (Oliver, 1980; Berry and Zeithaml, 1991). The pre-purchasing decision is crucial from the standpoint of creating a pattern customer seek to get and shaping the beliefs towards certain brand and the company. Post-purchasing experience may affect formed customer ideal in a negative way (Wirtz & Chung, 2003). First, it gives a customer a room to think and compare the existing alternatives which may become detrimental for the company if the expectations are not met (Wang, Wang & Yao, 2005). Second, the match of the formed ideal and the real post-purchasing experience form together the satisfaction level. The fulfillment of the level defines further perspective customer behavior and their decision to continue the relationships with the company (Lee & Benbasat, 2004).

Expectations become harder to meet on the market of digital products. Tomaselli (2008) states that markets of digital products focus on the customer value as the performance and the viability of the products they offer highly depends on the way they serve their initial purpose and how well those products facilitate the customer's life. Digital customer value seems hard to measure and evaluate due to its intangibility and vulnerability, and in comparison to the physical product that are easy to get judged by its physical functionality (Wang, Wang & Yao, 2005). Nonetheless, meeting customer expectations and needs is not a new challenge for the companies. Even though customers tend to get more demanded with time and with the appearance of new digital products, companies keep practicing new methods and ways of how to improve the customer experience (Dobele, 2015).

Today`s digital market is abundant with an infinite number of strong players in a variety of markets and corresponding niches that have been competing with intense rivalry for many years. To stay competitive and afloat on the chosen market, a company has to appeal to large numbers of customers in an attempt to cultivate as many new ones as it can, take care of the existing ones and stay a strong player on the market (Schneider, 2007; Vulkan, 2003). Apart from opening new markets and creating niches with the brand-new products and services in it, companies switch to sticking to the existing well-known product or service but with improved business model. To make it possible, a company is in need to identify the most suitable promotion strategy of market to keep competing (Stone & Desmond 2007).

Since this paper targets video game development industry, it is crucial to get acknowledged with the industry first and, then, move further to the promotion types and techniques exploited by companies.

1.2 Video game as a digital product

In the recent years, video game development industry has become increasingly competitive, levelling with movie making and music recording businesses (Kasurinen, Maglyas & Smolander, 2014). Various companies that occupy the video games market offer the customers an intangible product with the help of physical retailing (for example, via GameSpot stores) or different e-commerce platforms like Steam.com, Origin, GOG.com and others. Nowadays online distribution prevails and has experienced steady growth by reaching $7,7 billion in 2018 (according to the Euromonitor statistics) and with Steam.com occupying the largest market share among other platforms that offer PC games with 67 million monthly active users.

A video game is a kind of an electronic entertainment which inherits the same basic foundations that can be found in traditional games (Juul, 2005). A game usually includes a set of ground rules that a player has to follow, describes a fictional narrative for the player and lead the player through the story to a certain outcome that holds emotional value. Some games may lack the final goal of winning by providing just a simulation of some process to which a player forms attachment but at the same time cannot `beat' the game such as SimCity, Tropico or The Sims series. A video game requires an input from the player in order to proceed. Otherwise, most games have a penalty system in place which grounds the player for playing insufficiently well by the mission failure, death of a character or other possible form that would be perceived as a loss. Video games can also be considered from the point of modes they can offer, such as single-player or multiplayer modes (with the inclusion of massive multiplayer online video games that are called `MMOs') and offline and online modes. The most popular genres of video games include adventure, action, indie, puzzle, shooter, role-playing and sports, with the opportunity of the single playthrough or in a multiplayer (Juul, 2011).

Another significant feature that differentiate the video games from other forms of digital entertainment is the variability of the experience each player gets. In modern games such as Fallout series or Mass Effect different consumers can make different choice inside of the game and come to different endings or go through differing settings and scenarios. Games also vary in the levels of difficulty, amount of optional sidequests, modes of play (such as campaigns, single-player, cooperative (co-op), challenges and others) and different approaches to playing (for example, stealth, solving a mission by negotiating or initiating a fight, using different weaponry or classes of characters). One of the most recent games that offered such a variation the way a player may progress in the game in Detroit: Become Human, where each decision of the player would impact further story development immensely.

For current analysis it is also important to point out the different types of developers of video games. The players generally have two broad options of developers to choose from. According to Grada and Grabarczyk (2016), the independent developers can be characterized as financially independent from the publisher. They have their own funds for the production or pulling the money from the future players with crowdfunding and other ways which are mostly limited. They also possess creative independence (meaning that they can develop any genre, any plot, for any platform), publishing independence (which signifies that they are executing all of the operations connected to publishing themselves) and single authorship (which means that the idea of a game originally comes from one person or a very small team). Moreover, the games produced independently, were developed by a close-knit team, in which people can perform multiple tasks in different areas. On the other hand, there are famous companies that rely on publishing agencies, often comply with the outside order for the game (it can be a request for a particular genre or theme of the story, depending on what is popular on the market) and a comparatively large amount of employees that undertake clearly defined tasks and roles (Grada & Grabarczyk, 2016). This point is supported by the research of Rice (2008) that found out that in the Valve corporation, which created Half-Life and Portal, the production of games is facilitated by interchangeable groups of people, or teams, each of which is responsible for their own part of the game production. The final publishing efforts for the developed games were allocated to outside publishers such as Sierra Entertainment or Electronic Arts along with local publishing agencies such as Buka in Russia, for example. Thus, the main difference between independent developers and famous ones lies in the opportunities to distribute games through publishing agencies that had no part in the development of the game itself. Famous developers often sell part of the rights on the game to publishers to distribute the game all over the world, whereas independent developers do not form connections with publishing agencies relying on their own channels of distribution (Grada & Grabarczyk, 2016).

The main challenge of game development lies in creating a unique product that is distinct from other games on the market. Therefore, the developer's success highly depends on the quality of the games produced; otherwise the consumers would switch to other games or other developers (Oliver et al., 2014). To support this point, Ramaseshan, Ishak and Kingshott (2013) prove in their research that consumer choice of the product influences firm's performance not only in the financial aspect, but also concerning strategic operations. They state that customer choices define the future capabilities of the hypothetical company in terms of customer retention. If consumers can appreciate the quality of the product, they are more likely to come back for another one branded under the same company name. This is also applicable in the game development industry, as the research signified. The selection of the game by consumers establishes the reputation and the amount of trust players are ready to bestow to a developer, which as the result enhances player base and the overall well-being of the developer (Oliver et al., 2014).

Game development involves four stages: concept elaboration, pre-production, production process and post-production activities (Aleem, Capretz & Ahmed, 2016). At each step of the process of game-making, marketing and promotion play a crucial role in raising players' awareness regarding the innovations used by the developer in the game design, gameplay, graphics, character or plot. Aleem et. al. (2016) state that the perception of games depends on the solutions the developer strives to implement and by the mentioned characteristics players judge the quality of the game. Thus, the process of managing development of the game has become even more challenging.

Since today's video game market is overwhelmed with different kinds of games, it is becoming increasingly harder for players to choose a game of high quality (Aktas, & Orcun, 2016). Aktas and Orcun (2016) prove that because of that fact, gamers tend to base their choice on the promotion and marketing materials. In terms of the current study it is crucial to delve deeply into the nuances of marketing techniques in the game development industry. Most of the literature that focuses on the game elaboration regards technical and software issues (Robins, 2003; Anderson, 2011; Wang & Nordmark, 2015). It is acknowledged, however, that marketing plays a huge role in future revenues of the game production company which is stated in the research by Tiago (2012).

Since the rise of digital era provokes new methods of reaching its customers, the bulk of advertising and marketing campaigns is released through the Internet. The evidence of this lies in the research conducted by Tapscott, Lowy and Ticoll (2000), who state that Internet marketing is generally used with products that imply technology-intensive components exploitation in production. At the same time, Tschang (2003) defines the video gaming industry as the one that pertains to use technology-dependent elements such as game platforms, engines and coding modules. The authors emphasize the importance of Internet advertising in the video game development industry as it allows to fully cover the properties the game possess and to convey them to the potential customer. Hence, it is concluded that Internet marketing is the most efficient procedure to promote newly elaborated video games. Based on this, current research utilizes Internet-based sources when identifying game development companies' marketing strategies and operate through websites to find players' reviews as consumer response to the product launched on the market.

Marketing is not the only thing that helps to build trust with the customers. Customer retention depends on the quality of the final product, which in the entertainment industry is essential (Delmestri et al, 2005). Delmestri et. al. (2005) uncovered that if the product quality does not comply with what was promised to consumers during marketing in the pre-production period, then all of the promotion efforts will be in vain as customers who were unsatisfied with the product quality based on the expected marketed properties did not come back to selling companies. According to Aleem et. al. (2016) higher quality of the product in video game industry is achieved through collaborative endeavours of game developing teams that strive to make the game better than that of their competitors by implementing game technology enhancements. Under the conditions of severe competition, game developers struggle to foster better content, graphics and software know-hows (Kasurinen, Maglyas, & Smolander, 2014). Wang and Nordmark (2015) identified a trend in game developing companies that involves extensive marketing campaigns over justifying the video game quality. Players' unmet expectations caused significant declines is developers' revenues, even though the games were on the top of the charts with best games. Wang and Nordmark (2015) notice that in such a way, marketing campaigns granted an opportunity for game developers to boost sales of such games on the early stages, with their subsequent drastic decline due to customers unsatisfaction. This trend was identified among companies with huge turnovers and well recognized brands. Such developers can spend enormous amounts of money on marketing in order to present games in the best light (Wang & Nordmark, 2015). Several studies determine the game development phenomenon and promotion factors found the basis of the success of a potential game in the market. The authors conclude that this is generally achieved by exploiting marketing techniques, thus, it is important to investigate how marketing is exploited in the industry.

As was mentioned earlier the video games advertising is mostly conducted through the Internet which is done because of the widespread online retailing. Tapscott, Lowy and Ticoll (2000) prove that in the era of digital markets taking over the Internet marketing remains the fastest way to reach the target audience. The research by the mentioned authors also includes proof that advertising through the Internet is used in order to promote technology-intensive products such as video games. Hence, it becomes evident that the most efficient was to promote video games is through the Internet.

Increasing digitization process is also what makes Internet marketing relevant for the gaming industry (Appendix 2). According to the Euromonitor statistics (2018) famous companies such as Activision Blizzard, EA or Take-Two Interactive start to relocate developed games purely into digital space by facilitating more and more in-game purchase opportunities. Due to the fact that contemporary video games do not entail any additional installation of physical software, the digitization trend is only logical. One more reason for the game developers to evade physical copies production is the amount of additional costs that can be generated by the need for storage places as some games require several compact discs. Digitization assumes high customer involvement (Dobele, 2015) which makes game development industry even more significant for current research because in such a way it is easier to follow customer expectations towards the digital product and the influence of the marketing strategy.

1.3 Video game quality elaboration

It is important for further analysis to understand how actually the product is developed in the gaming industry. It is best to investigate the techniques that bring success for the product. Game development process success factors are not thoroughly researched in the literature. There is only one study that attempts to combine all of the factors scattered in the literature in one framework. Aleem et al. (2016) propose seven key success factors of game development projects that allow to achieve the best quality of the game, which were also found in the works of other authors:

- Team configuration & management. Team management refers to the procedure that focuses on coordinating and administrating groups of employees in order to fulfil team's objectives. The managements of the game development process are separated on the pre-production, production and post-production stages and implies integration of heterogenous disciplines in the game development process by fulfilling discipline-specific workflows aimed at a rapid iteration adjusted by everyday check-ups (Musil, Schweda, Winkler & Biffl, 2010). This factor does not involve marketing activities, but it allows to build a basis of the promotion operations as it is developed and regulated by teams of people.

- Game design document management. Game design document is the result of the finished pre-production stage of game elaboration. It allows the team of game designers to structure and organize their operations. This document allows to formulate a plan that describes in detail all of the necessary steps that define the quality of the future game (Kasurinen et al., 2014). Document management outlines the basis for future strategic planning which is highly crucial for marketing development.

- Game engine development. Game engine is closely connected with software mechanics that define game logic and testing for its accurate work. This includes rendering technology, the opportunity to reuse programming code, which allows to reduce costs and shorten the time for development (Sherrod, 2007). Game engine development initiates the process of game quality creation that serves as the first step to enable game recognition and following customer retention.

- Game asset management. Virtually anything that is not related to the code of the game can be called a game asset: visual look of the game, artwork, textures, music, dialogue, contents of the text, etc. (Llopis, 2004). These assets create an overall atmosphere associated with the game which adds to emotional value that can be elicited by consumers. Visuals are pertained both to the quality of the game and the main feature of the marketing campaign. Most of the branded game developers rely heavily on visuals and use that as the means of promotion to attract new players.

- Quality of game architecture. Game architecture is used as the support measure of the gameplay, serving as a mean to align gameplay and technical prerequisites that form the code (Wang & Nordmark, 2015). According to Wang and Nordmark (2015) this includes processing system of the game logic and graphics (such as interface) and input processing system (such as event manager or controller). This factor is important as it refers to the in-game experience of the player and their perception of the content produced by the developer.

- Game test management. Game testing allows to evaluate the quality of the game on all of the development stages. Charles, Schultz and Langdell (2005) argue that the opportunity to test the game and control every stage of production complies with the process of verifying the gameplay, reveals possible problems with stability or the flow of the game, as well as issues connected with game mechanics, graphic assts integration and user interface. Quality control on each step of game development endows the end user to gain better overall experience with the game.

- Programming practices. Programming is considered as a core of the game development process, facilitating the architecture of the game and its basis (Robins, 2010). The approach selected to code the game defines its characteristics and the response it will get from the players, who judge the games by the way the programming code performs (flawlessly or with errors).

In their research, Aleem et al. (2016) conclude that to successfully develop the game, companies need to consider and investigate all of the factors identified. However, the most influential factors identified by the authors that can change the game's quality are team configuration and management, game engine development, game design document management, game test management and programming practices. All of them are closely connected with game quality development and establishment of the marketing campaign and based on them it is possible to predict future game success as was proved by the research of Kasurinen et al. (2014).

The proposed framework provides a useful insight of the developers' perspective on the successful practices of the game production. As there is no disagreement found of this issue, in the current research the researchers will exploit this framework further to analyse game development production success factors - the other side of the coin - from the consumer perspective. In order to understand the reasons behind consumer choices it is crucial to examine marketing and promotion strategies implemented in game development industry.

For proper understanding of the effect of the marketing strategy, it is first crucial to delve into the marketing theory and its appliance to the digital industry. When operating on the market, a company adopts a certain marketing strategy while promoting a product or a service (Stone & Desmond 2007). Providing that marketing concentrates on identifying the human needs and social ones and meeting them in the end (Kotler, 2003), marketing strategy estimates how well it has been achieved. In other words, marketing strategy determines how successful the performance of the company is in regard to its promotion activities (Ramaseshan, Ishak & Kingshott, 2013).

Ramaseshan, Ishak and Kingshott (2013) in their research examine several factors that affect the performance of the firm. Among all, some are the external business environment, its formulation of the strategy as well as its viability, the implementation of the strategy employed and others. By applying an integrated approach, the authors were able to estimate the influence of each factor. The results of the study emphasize that some factors affected the strategy credibility in a negative way such as the technological change or competition on the market, while some had a positive impact such as attractiveness of the market. In addition to that, the researchers stress that although possessing the initial negative effect, market competition, nonetheless, spurs the managers to work on the current strategy to improve it and, hence, elaborate the firm`s performance. Besides, the innovative culture presence is required to make the executive plan viable. As a result, the authors conclude that in order to ensure the successful performance of the firm, an elaborated marketing strategy in needed. Researching marketing approaches will also allow to establish a ground for promotion techniques analysis of video games.

1.4 Marketing strategy for digital products

In order to choose the proper strategy for the marketing campaign, there is a necessity to distinguish the existing typologies and classifications. Although there is no strict classification of the approaches used, there are, nonetheless, three core broad categories identified by Stone and Desmond (2007) where most well-known approaches fall:

- Product-centred approaches;

The category focuses on the approaches that aim product development as a main direction for improvement. The vital tool used while implementing this kind of approach remain the 4P concept that helps the company understand the directions of product development properly. Kotler (2003) emphasizes that this approach is mainly used by the companies that strive to achieve an inexpensive mass production and cut distribution costs. As for the case of the video game industry, this approach does not seem to be effective as even though the quality of the product remains the priority, it is achieved by putting the customer and the feedback received from the user in the first place.

- Functional approaches;

Functional approaches tend to create equilibrium between the demand and the supply of the market. Hence, most suitable approaches here are defined as goal-driven and systematic relying to the behaviour of the people responsible for the choice of the approach. To increase the effectiveness of the approach, the activity undertaken within its scope is supposed to be kept in balance with the environment (Schneider, 2007). Video game development industry may not be described as a one that strives to satisfy the needs of the market as its main priority. Although while the analysis of the market the researches pay attention towards the current situation regarding the demand, the foremost idea lies in fulfilling the creative part of the developer.

- Managerial approach;

This category is known for the customer behaviour that defines the actions of the company. Video game development industry determines customer behaviour as the primary tool for making decisions within the strategy choices. From this perspective, it becomes clear that the created customer expectations regarding the product, its quality, features and others should match the impulses created by the behaviour (Hunt, 2000).

The choice of the approach leads to the further choice of the marketing strategy that determines the whole company`s performance. Strategy may also vary in terms of the company`s goals, methods of their business activity and the product offered.

The pillars in the field of business strategy remain two dominant views on the marketing strategy. These are Miles and Snow`s (1978) typology that aims at the roles that a company accepts while being on the market, and Porter`s (1980) typology that focuses on the certain facets or, - as in the case of this research - factors, of the strategy that have to be emphasized mostly during the promotion. The latter typology is preferred for the purposes of this research as it aims at the game development industry where the authors explore the success factors of the promotion campaign. Each factor will be evaluated separately in order to detect the most influential ones.

The Porter`s typology includes three strategies: aggressive marketing, price leadership and product specialization. The core of each strategy is presented below:

- Aggressive marketing;

This strategy targets the high quality of the product as the basis of the further actions. Constant innovation, close customer relationships, in-depth research of the market, its segmentation and precise analysis of the distribution channels are the aspects that define the aggressive marketing along with the significant investment into two spheres which are advertising and marketing support (Slater, & Olson, 2001).

- Price leadership;

The main focus remains on the any activity of the firm related to the price in case it is undertaken to stay as a strong player on the market. In order to offer the best customer experience, firm practices price machination by different legal means such as discounts making sure that a product is not underestimated in its price. To execute this strategy, companies shift to much lower margins that a firm might have and to high volumes of the product (Jaworski, 2018).