How does media richness foster online gamer loyalty?

The online game market is highly popular, resulting in fierce competition among game makers and prompting them to find ways to strengthen gamer loyalty. Online gamers enjoy interacting, socializing, and building quickly formed relationships, i.e., swift guanxi, which greatly rely on games as media through which to exchange rich messages. However, it is not known how these aspects foster gamer loyalty. To fill this gap, we examine how media richness aspects form gamers’ perceptions of presence, interactivity, and swift guanxi, which help foster gamer loyalty. We used a total of 1350 online gamers’ responses to test our model. The results show that two of the four aspects of media richness effectively enhance presence, interactivity, and swift guanxi, which in turn strengthen gamer loyalty. We extend media richness theory by identifying some novel consequences of media richness, i.e., presence, interactivity, and swift guanxi, and establishing their interrelationships. We also ascertain the mechanism that leads from media richness to gamer loyalty. Our findings identify the drivers that game makers can use to strengthen user loyalty to online games, software games, and gamified systems.