2022

Mangeloja, Esa; Auvinen, Tommi

Purchasing motives form a well-analyzed field within the academic scrutiny of marketing and economics. Consumption occurs if purchasing a product provides value for customers. Nowadays an increasing number of commodities exchanged in the market are digital and virtual in nature. Number of people playing online video games continues to grow rapidly around the globe. Fortnite is a free-to-play video game, but players can buy various virtual items, so called “skins”, inside the game. Interestingly, those skins are purely nonfunctional items, which provide no competitive advantage for players. Nevertheless, those items are very popular and game companies generate significant revenues through sales. In our sample of active Finnish Fortnite players, the average amount of money paid for skins was over 100 euros. We analyze different motives for buying virtual non-functional skins by using tri-dimensional motivation segmentation. We find that all traditional consumption motives, hedonic, social and utilitarian are also significant drivers amongst the Finnish Fortnite players. Interestingly, we also found some signs of charitable causes as active players like to reciprocate value to the game developers.