Gaming, eSports, and Spanish Consumer Behavior

Introduction

In the age of online leisure activities, over-information and over-stimulation are so prevalent that the question of knowing how many types of advertising currently exist and their impact on a young population conditioned to find all their answers on the Internet, claims as to reach for a bottom ground in the effects of media on mental health effects and gaming perceptions.

The aim of this study is to analyse, by means of quantitative tools, the reality of the neo-advertising that sneaks into the controls of video games (Bacovsky, 2021). It's a new way of socializing and identifying with a tribe that many brands are encapsulating so followers not only relate but create their own responses to frame their way of thinking around a core style, happening in video games, such as the iconic Animal Crossing.

Social Networks and communication, on the other hand, are also affected by the effect of gaming. Of course, there is the example of Twicht, whose evolution has been remarkable and very significant (Woodcock, J. & Jhonson, M., 2021). Many users/gamers and non-users know Ibai, who started timidly and whose way of expressing himself is part of the slang of many people in Spain and Spanish-speaking countries. For this reason, there are many brands that seek, just as the player identifies with the best-known gamers and with the most followers, to generate a powerful and lasting engagement with players over time. The openness of this new connection creates a natural effect, that differs from the tone and expressions of traditional advertising, makes this exchange more natural, consolidated and without the artifice or bombardment as striking as before.

As a result of all these changes that have occurred in recent times, due, first, to ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) and new forms of entertainment, advertising has been reinvented in advergame and in-game advertising. Because of this, the behavior of the consumer, whose leisure is based on video games, has changed and has little or nothing to do with that of the traditional consumer focus platforms, in terms of digital acculturation (Dey at al., 2020) .

All the above makes us rethink some of the most important questions about why young people consume video games, what skills they develop with them, what associations they make through video games and the values they perceive from the position of eSports viewers. Consumer behavior began to be analysed by authors such as Acar et al. (2007), Parreño (2010) and Chang et al. (2013) in relation with the impact of video games, just barely a decade ago. For this reason, there are not many detailed studies as of present year, 1924, after the studies carried out by Ríos and Almeida (2019), Martínez and Vizcaíno (2021) and Vourre et al. (2022).

Therefore, with the aim of enriching the somehow scarce information offered in recent studies, the present study investigates new factors that are directly affecting consumer behaviors and purchaser decision-making, through a process of interviewing users; the results obtained after the survey (530 young people between 18 and 30 years of age) are localized to Spain, featured as a pioneering country and one of the leaders in the video game sector. This information provides to this book a rich and solid perspective about consumer behaviour in new digital platform boosting the transfer of knowledge from researching to business world, which along the previous literature has not been treated in deep.