| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中興大學 === 電子商務研究所 === 93 === Because of the development of Internet technology and people’s attention to the recreation activity, the population of the online game grows up apparently in recent years. It is also because of the rapid growth of online game market, more and more companies involve into this market. According to the statistics of the relevant website, there are more than 200 online games in Taiwan’s market and the competition is extremely sharp. Companies must understand the characteristic of their customers in many aspects in order to win out from the war-like market. And market segmentation is one powerful tool for them to understand the market. Especially, most of Taiwan’s online game companies are agents for foreign online games. Without the designing part, marketing becomes a much critical component in selling online games.
This research utilizes three dimensions which are composed of critical gamers’ selection criteria to segment the market, and these three dimensions are: (1) online gamers’ perception, (2) online game design, and (3) the influence of social environment. We use 19 questions with Likert scale to represent these three dimensions and measure the importance of each variable through online questionnaire. Besides, we employ six of Internet marketing 8Ps to evaluate each cluster’s preferences of marketing strategies.
We got 610 valid samples and put them into principal component analysis to reduce the complexity. There are five principal components are extracted: ease of play, company performance, art design, sociality, and the involvement of virtual community. Based on the result of principal component analysis, SPSS and SAS are utilized to run the two-level clustering method to construct the market segmentation. After the segmentations forming, we used MANOVA and discriminant analysis to confirm the accuracy of segmentations. And then we compared the difference cross each cluster’s preferences of marketing strategies in order to provide meaningful information for companies as references.
According to the result of this research, there actually exists a gap between gamers’ expectations and companies’ understanding of gamers. The difference is the key point that companies should notice. This research also provides other marketing information for companies to realize the characteristics of online game market.
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