EXPRESS: The Effect of Game Ad Outcome on Subsequent Mobile Gaming Experience: the Mediating Role of Inferred Difficulty

This study investigates the effect of game advertisement outcomes on a player’s subsequent gaming experience. Research on vicarious experience shows that individuals infer game difficulty to be higher when watching game advertisements where players lose (vs. win) the game. Building on the effort–paradox paradigm, the first of this three-part study shows that such higher inferred difficulty enhances enjoyment and engagement during subsequent gaming experiences, especially for advertisements featuring easy game levels. Solely manipulating the difficulty level, Study 2 confirms the underlying mechanism of inferred difficulty for the observed effect of game advertisement outcomes. Study 3a finds that the main positive effect of losing (vs. winning) ads does not hold for advertisements featuring difficult game levels. Study 3b further explores this by focusing only on advertisements with difficult game levels, investigating how variations in players’ self-efficacy might influence their response to losing advertisements depicting difficult game levels. The findings across four studies suggest that, when promoting easy game levels, marketers can use advertisements with losing outcomes to extend gaming sessions, thereby increasing revenue from in-game advertisements. However, for difficult game levels, advertisements with losing outcomes are effective only for those with high self-efficacy.