Investigating Entry Barriers and Player Retention
For my biggest project so far, I wanted to contribute research towards what I am passionate about, which led me to creating research on the Video Game Industry! More specifically League of Legends and MOBA Games. This is a very passionate project that sought out to understand why people play, stay and leave MOBA Games, specifically League of Legends.
Research Proccess
Ideation
This is the initial start of the project that involved a culling of ideas for the basis of the projects grounds, ultimately it was a passion project and I wanted to choose a topic close to my interests, while exploring uncharted grounds within that subject.
Gathering Participants
This involved Opportunity & Snowball sampling reaching out to potential participants across various platforms, for this study, spaces such as; Discord, Reddit and Twitter/X were opportune places to gather potential participants, which were then interviewed via. Microsoft Teams.
Interview Process
The interview process was conducted by me, via a questionnaire that was made by looking at previous research and their questions, along with pilot interviews done for testing purposes that were then used for the main study and changed accordingly as the study progressed when necessary.
Secondary Research
This is the stage of gathering information that is necessary to scope out before starting ones own project, this process eliminates your work from conflicting with any previous studies and lets you find what is missing and what it is that makes your study unique, while also having references for any shared ideas or results that you may find.
Analysis and Report
After compiling the data, through recordings, note taking and Excel Spreadsheets, the data was then disseminated into a final report that gave findings based on the answers of participants of the study in correlation with one another but also reflected on by previous and current academic literature.
Research Philosophy
When it comes to research I believe that it is very important to understand the emotional and personal data to why people act and think. This comes from my background in Sociology Undergrad and growing up in a diverse and multi-cultural environment. Understanding the in-depth analysis beyond the surface level actions are important to uncovering why we get the results that we do, without speaking for others or making predictions. Using Triangulation we can kill two birds with one stone and get both the statistical qualitative data and the qualitative data, which can be used to put in place actionable changes into our designs and products.
Research Findings
“Connections with other people that I built through the game […] if I hadn’t met these
people through League, I would have stopped playing a long time ago. Long time ago.”The study uncovered that the main reasons players play League of Legends is due to playing with their friends, which also happened to be the main reason why players started, making it the biggest entry barrier and player retention requirement. Players were most likely to quit playing due to the reported toxic environment of the game and players would not recommend League of Legends to new players, which is worrying considering League of Legends is a game that thrives of existing players introducing the game to others.
Parris Duplan 