The Psychology of Video Games

I wrote just the other day about how loss aversion could be used to increase conversion rates on trial games. You can read that article for more details and a neat experiment illustrating the effect, but the gist of it is that people hate to lose things more than they like to gain them. Losing $10 is more painful than gaining $10 is pleasurable because “losses loom larger than gains.”

I kind of hate to dip back into the loss aversion well so soon, but Funcom recently provided such a textbook example that I couldn’t resist. Many players who had unsubscribed from the Age of Conan massively multiplayer game got an e-mail from the publisher stating, in part:

Dear customer,

Thank you for playing Age of Conan.

As part of our maintenance your account is now flagged to have your characters below level 20 deleted as part of maintenance. Please re-activate your account now to ensure that your characters progress and names stay intact.

In other words, “come back or your low level alt¹ gets taken out back and shot.”

A Funcom database administrator gets ready to subject your character to "maintenance."

I’d be fascinated to see what this did to Age of Conan’s resubscription rate. If I were in charge of these things at Funcom, I would have randomly separated that mailing list into two groups and sent the above e-mail to the first half. The second half would have gotten something along the lines of:

Dear customer,

Thank you for playing Age of Conan.

As part of our maintenance your account is now flagged to have your characters below level 20 saved as part of maintenance if you resubscribe. Please re-activate your account now to ensure that your characters progress and names stay intact.

And then I would have looked at the differences in resubscription rates between those whose message was phrased in terms of losing their character and those whose message talked about saving it. Which of those two messages would you, as a MMO player, respond to more strongly? My guess would be the former, especially if you weren’t the handsome and well educated person you are on account of reading about loss aversion here.

Note: A combination of this and my previous post on loss aversion appeared on GameSetWatch. Look for more of my writing to appear there in the future!

1. not to mention your bank and your mule characters [↩]