Motivation and decision making in eSports spectatorship in China

With eSports gradually growing into a large and competitive industry, a plethora of literature has investigated eSports from various aspects, such as performance, wellbeing, sponsorship, or motivation for participants and spectators. Despite the widely acknowledged importance of eSports events, limited effort has been seen in the field of service quality and its impact on the level of spectators’ satisfaction and revisit behaviours. In addition, motivation of off-line eSports spectators who visit physical stadiums have received considerably less academic attention, compared to online spectators. China, as the largest and leading eSports market in the world, hosts a significant number of eSports events every year, including some of the highest-level international events. Using China, which is likely to remain the pioneer in eSports development around the world, as the context to investigate eSports events and spectators could provide insights for eSports researchers and practitioners in other countries. 

In order to delineate the psychological pathway to explain and predict eSports events off-line spectators’ behaviours, a plethora of relevant literature was thoroughly reviewed to develop a measurement model of perceived service quality of eSports events and to establish hypotheses on relationship with its antecedent constructs (i.e., psychological needs and motivation) and consequent constructs (i.e., satisfaction and revisit intention). To test this psychological pathway, three research purposes were to be achieved. Firstly, the measurement model of perceived service quality was tested following a thorough and systematic scale development process, supporting the reliability and validity of the scale. Secondly, as the measurement of other constructs were adopted from different scales, their overall and internal model fits were tested using a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) technique. Finally, the relationships among basic psychological needs, motivation, perceived service quality, satisfaction, and revisit intention were examined using structural equation modelling (SEM). 

This research takes a shallow realist ontological position and an empiricist epistemological position, which forms the positivism research paradigm. Accordingly, a deductive strategy is adopted. Three rounds of data collection were completed from the 2020 S10 League of Legends World Finals in Shanghai, the 2021 and 2022 seasonal professional eSports events in multiple cities in China, respectively. The first dataset (N = 272) was used for Phase One in EFA to identify the dimensions for the proposed service quality model, which are competition quality, physical environment quality, event execution quality, and interaction quality. There were 20 items retained in total. The second dataset (N = 485) was used for Phase One in CFA tests. The results supported the four-dimensional measurement model in Phase One. The measurement models for the other constructs were also tested in Phase Two, and the CFAs supported the psychometric properties of the proposed measurement models (three-dimensional needs satisfaction, two-dimensional motivation, and unidimensional satisfaction and behavioural intention). The third dataset (N = 217) was used for Phase Three to test the hypothetical relationships in the structural model. The path analysis results supported 15 out of 19 hypotheses. This thesis makes significant contributions to the current spectating sport service quality literature and eSports studies by conceptualising and developing the measurement model for perceived service quality, which also empirically presents a full picture of the psychological process behind eSports offline spectators attendance behaviour. For practitioners, this thesis provides practical instruments to evaluate eSports event quality and to understand or predict eSports spectator future attendance, which potentially enables event organisers to better manage or improve eSports events.