Improving the length of customer relationships on the mobile computer game business

Abstract

Long lasting customer relationships have proven to be beneficial to the success of a company. The computer game business has traditionally been about developing and then selling products to the customers, but today the games apply different marketing strategies such as free-to-play model, which changes the role of a customer. The Existence, Relatedness and Growth (ERG) theory provides a model to assess how the customer could be understood, and why the game companies should implement features that support growth of the customers’ presence and make them a critical component to the developer. In this article we compare five game companies to find out how they understand their customers, how they build their relationships and let customers to grow their online identity. The results show that the growth is still minor concern, but companies have plans to improve this aspect.