Fourth Year Honour's Project - Frustrations impact on player's use of microtransactions

INTRODUCTION:
I was interested by a wave of frustration occurring in player bases for games like destiny 2, Killing Floor 2 to name a few, who over the past year kept themselves afloat fairly easily despite such a surge of backlash. You look across to games like gigantic, Paragon as well who did gain such a backlash yet struggled to keep there check books in the green.

So I Curious about this discrepancy and wanted to understand if frustration's part in this and better understand ways of creating monetary systems that are more consumer friendly that still keep studios afloat.

METHOD:
I conducted academic research into monetary practices in games to better understand what methods work in game for making revenue of your game. I also created a prototype of a tower defence game but as a board game with microtransaction's, I used this to see if player frustration impacted how they used

FINDINGS:
I found through my research and experiment that frustration is not the contributing factor but in fact pushed players away from using microtransactions.

It was in fact Anxiety in players that lead to them to using microtransactions, this anxiety also lead to enjoyment both in game and with using the microtransactions available in the game.

The frustration player's felt earlier on while in and of it self did not contribute, made it easier for player to feel anxious later in the game, so it could be is the stepping stone in the experiment to just anxiety.