FiT Publishing

Associating esports teams with a particular city has gained significant attention, with the assumption that esports teams receive benefits from the local fanbase as traditional sports teams take advantage of the local community. The researchers examined whether team identification was important in esports as it is in traditional sports and tested if local and nonlocal fans showed different levels of team identification after localization. The results of path analyses revealed that team identification had a positive impact on team loyalty and consumer behavior. Additionally, team loyalty...Read more

The purpose of this study is to expand the theoretical knowledge of consumer learning by testing both the single and sequential effects of indirect, direct, and virtual sport experiences on sport brand knowledge, attitudes, and choice behavior in two laboratory experiments. Experiment I shows that virtual experience is as effective as direct experience in consumer learning. In Experiment II, designed to explore the impact of sequential combinations of sport experiences on consumer learning, the sequential combination of direct and virtual experiences results in greater brand knowledge than...Read more

The purpose of this study was to examine the gender differences in the formation of esports gameplay intention. To this end, the determinants and esports gameplay intention were adopted from the Esports Consumption Model (ESC; Jang & Byon, 2020a). A total of 498 respondents (male = 54.2%; female = 45.8%) who were adults and had experienced esports gameplay responded to the online survey. We examined the measurement invariance to examine if the constructs were being measured equivalently across gender. Also, we tested for structural invariance to examine if causal relationships exist...Read more

This study provides readers with new information about key drivers of performance in the emerging area of eSports. Competitive computer gaming (eSports) is becoming increasingly popular, and the number of gamers and amount of prize money is growing. We therefore explore some key country-level characteristics that may contribute to players’ success, measured as money won. We use gamers’ prize earnings aggregated by country and a hurdle model to understand the determinants of performance. The results show that a 1% increase in GDP per capita leads to a 2.2% increase in prize money per capita...Read more