A long-term study of a popular MMORPG
Over the last decade, Massively Multi-player On-line Role Playing Games (MMORPGs), have become big business. In typical MMORPGs, players pay a monthly subscription to the game publisher who hosts the game and provides periodic content updates. To be successful, game publishers must characterize their player population so that they can provision sufficient resources to support the game and so that they can update the game in a timely manner. To this end, this paper provides the first, long-term study of a popular MMORPG from its launch. Our dataset encompasses the entire lifetime of "EVE Online" [1, 2], a science-fiction based MMORPG that has supported nearly 1 million unique players, 67 million player sessions, and 17,000 player years of gameplay since its launch in May 2003.
Abstract This paper aims: (i) to characterize the priorities designed and implemented by grocery retailers concerning relationship marketing with customers; (ii) to analyse customers’ relationship with their grocery store and to evaluate store format and loyalty programs as key determinants of this relationship. Exploratory interviews were conducted with grocery store managers. Two independent samples of Portuguese customers answered a questionnaire and collected data were analysed using Structural Equation Modelling. Main results suggest that supermarkets lead to higher levels of customers’ trust (directly) and customers’ loyalty (indirectly). Furthermore, the positive effect of customers’ satisfaction on customers’ loyalty is higher for members of grocery store loyalty programs.