Study on Game Engagement
Mathias Bauer and I worked on a study to identify if Lootboxes increase Game Engagement in Video Games or not. First lets clear what a Lootbox is (you can skip this part if you are familiar with this Term).
A Lootbox is a common way of monetization in Video Games espacially in mobile gaming. Lootbox contains a set of Items where you get a random Item upon pruchase. The more valueable an Item is the lesser the chance it will have to be obtained. Now you think why should i buy a Lootbox if i can obtain the desired Item by directly buying it? Simply you cant. Most Games that use Lootboxes as their Monetization give you only this way to obtain certain Items. Some Games even bind their Player progression to Lootboxes, where you can only progress by opening Lootboxes (Clash Royal for example). This is extremly popular in mobile gaming. If you now think that this sounds a bit like gambling, it is and most of the research that compares Lootboxes to Gambling suggest that Lootboxes have the same psychological effects on our brains like Gambling.
But what most research does not compare is the Game Engagement between Lootboxes and other Progression / Monetization systems. This is what our Research aimed to find out. By comparing Lootboxes to a linear progression System like an old shop, where you can buy one upgrade after another. Since Lootboxes give Items in a random Order and the linear Shop not this could change the Player Experience drasticly. So in order to compare both System with little to none intereference the Lootbox would give the Items in the same Order as the Shop would. This would mean that the Player would have the same Experience in both Version.
Since there was no Game that offered these two Systems, Mathias and I developed a simple brick breaker Video Game. The Game genre was chosen because it is a simple game concept where the amount of variables is relativly small and can be played by anyone without much knowledge about the game. In this Blog i want to go more into details on how we developed the game rather than on the study. If you are more interested on the study follow this Link to the paper.