If You Let Them Build It, They Will Stay! An Empirical Study of Add-on Content and User Engagement

Abstract

This study aims to uncover the effects of two \ types of add-on content –namely, user generated and developer \ generated content– on user engagement with software. Utilizing \ a novel dataset from a major online game distribution platform \ covering 7323 products between January 2015 and February \ 2016, the findings reveal that both types of add-on content \ increases the engagement with software. However, we observe \ substitutive patterns between different types of add-on content. \ Our results suggest integrating social features to the base \ product reduces these substitution effects. The results of this \ study contribute to the literatures on user engagement and \ add-on content by uncovering hitherto overlooked substitutive \ relations between user generated and developer generated add- \ on content.