An empirical study on the adoption of mobile games under MBWA (Mobile Broadband Wireless Access)

Abstract

Computer-based games are widely distributed throughout the world. As wireless communication technology has been developed during the past decade, the area of games has reached the mobile environment. Although cellular phones aim at voice communication, a wide variety of other services are also provided through the mobile device. Many mobile service providers have competitively launched new mobile services, generating huge proofs. Among them, many had high expectations that the mobile game would be highly successful. Thus, more than 500 mobile game service corporations were established to capture the mobile game market in Korea. Although some managed to enjoy a fair amount of success, in general usage rate did not meet expectations. It is assumed that the major reasons for this are high service usage fees and low data transmission speed, since current mobile devices target not data communication, but voice communication. In the meantime, the MIC (Ministry of Information and Communication) of Korea declared that proper wireless network providers could utilize 2.3-GHz frequency for commercial purposes, calling it WiBro (Wireless Broadband Internet), which is one of the candidates for an international standard of MBWA (Mobile Broadband Wireless Access) technology, MBWA promises to demolish the price burden for network usage because it has only been developed for data communication through genuine IP communication. Under the MBWA environment, customers can access Internet contents, regardless of time and space. This study intends to establish a technology acceptance model specific to mobile games under the MBWA environment, uncovering significant factors that influence the potential user``s adoption of mobile games under the MBWA environment by extending the technology acceptance model (TAM). In addition, this study is dedicated to analyzing the differing insights of potential users adopting mobile games under the MBWA environment by segmenting potential custome...