What is it about?

Video game monetization plays a growing role in the gaming experience. Our study looks at how players experience paying in games across years of play and life stages. Most research captures only momentary experience, missing how it builds up and changes over time. We asked 26 players to retell their gaming lives, using experience curves, questionnaires and interviews. We show how expectations shift as pricing changes, dissatisfaction can keep people playing and paying, and generations judge the same systems differently.

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Why is it important?

Our findings show that players' experience of paying in games changes over time, and generations differ on what counts as fair. For designers, aggressive monetization may fund new content but slowly alienates the long-term players a live game depends on. For policymakers debating monetization regulations, what players accept is not fixed, so one-size-fits-all rules will miss this. For players, dissatisfaction does not always lead to quitting, so spending can continue after the fun is gone.

Perspectives

As a long-time player myself, I wanted to understand why the same payment system can feel fine at one point in life and unfair at another. Listening to players retell years of gaming, I was struck by how closely paying is tied to memory, friendship and growing up. I hope this long-term view helps designers and researchers look beyond single purchases or in-game behavior, but how video games have become a meaningful part of people's daily lives.

Zhiyu Chen

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Live, Play, Pay: Understanding Long-term Player Experience in the Games-as-a-Service (GaaS) Era from a Retrospective Approach, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, November 2026, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3831318.
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