How immersive design features and relational cohesion jointly form consumer game loyalty

Online games are popular services that immerse consumers visually and mentally and help them forge cooperative relationships with other consumers. However, game providers do not yet know what visual immersion or mental immersion elements are more effective in securing consumer loyalty, indicating a knowledge gap. Moreover, consumers build close and cooperative relationships during gameplay to form relational cohesion, but it is not known whether and how relational cohesion affects the influence of immersive design features on game loyalty, indicating a second knowledge gap. These gaps hamper effective game design. To address these gaps, we adopted escapism theory and relational cohesion theory and collected and merged survey data from two sources—576 game consumers and 59 game experts. Our findings uniquely indicate that mental immersion impacts game loyalty but visual immersion does not. Moreover, “idle” game design features are the most effective for strengthening game loyalty, and relational cohesion amplifies the negative impact of puzzle game design features on loyalty. Theoretically, we adopt relational cohesion theory and escapism theory as the theoretical lens through which to explain how immersion and relational cohesion jointly influence game loyalty. Practically, our findings offer game providers novel and useful insights for making effective game design decisions with regard to immersion and the integration of relational cohesion. The analytical results can be applied to the contexts of gamified systems and digital games.