The Moderating Role of Virtual Community Cohesion and Critical Mass on the Link between Online-Game Website Service Quality and Play Satisfaction

The online game market in Taiwan is close to saturation. The sudden emergence of online community games has lead to a change in the type of game players, and online game providers are forced to deploy new strategies to cope with this change in trend. Meanwhile, literature research reveals a mixed result of the impact of virtual community cohesion and critical mass on online game platform service quality and satisfaction. Therefore, this research further investigates the moderating roles of online players´ virtual community cohesion and critical mass on the link between website service quality and player satisfaction. The result indicates that virtual community cohesion does play a moderating role while critical mass does not. Discussions and implications are also provided in this paper.