Consumer Brand Engagement and Video Game Media Brand Authenticity

ABSTRACT

Video game consumers are well-known for their brand engagement activities, but the interaction between brand engagement and brand authenticity in a video game context remains unknown. This study uses The Sims 4, an installment in a long-running, successful video game brand series, whose consumers are known for their particularly extensive engagement activities, to address this research gap. Thematic analysis informed by active story interpretation was used to analysis 2194 relevant online comments. The research identified that The Sims 4’s consumers had expectations that certain gameplay features, deemed authentic to the brand and included in previous games, would be included in the game. However, when they were not included, consumers lowered their evaluations of the game’s authenticity and value. Furthermore, consumers were frustrated that to get back these expected features they would have to create them themselves and they refused to do so. The findings advance knowledge of video game branding and provide practical implications for the industry. The industry cannot rely on consumers to create or fix a media brand’s authenticity, no matter how engaged or active their consumers might be. Instead, video game media brands must listen, engage, and communicate with their consumers to ensure they deliver brand authenticity and the features expected by consumers.

Introduction

Due to the financial significance and fast growth of the video games industry (Alpert, 2007; Teng, 2017), there have been repeated calls for better understandings and knowledge about the industry, and it’s consumers, from a business research perspective. In 2022/23, the global video industry generated over $187 billion USD in revenue from a continually growing consumer base (Newzoo, 2023). Despite these calls, understandings regarding various aspects of marketing, including video game brand management, within the video game industry are still emerging. The extant video game brand management literature has investigated brand continuations, for example sequels, spin-offs and other continuations of the intellectual property, within the video game industry (Butcher, Tang, & Phau, 2017), and video game brand communities (Weijo, Bean, & Rintamäki, 2017). However, there are important aspects of video game brand management that remain underexplored such as brand authenticity. Ensuring effective brand management and strong relationships with consumers is particularly important for the video game industry because the industry relies heavily on established brands for sales of continuations and tie-in merchandise (Burgess & Jones, 2020a). Furthermore, video games are examples of media brands; a term that encompasses a variety of brands and products from hedonic and factual media to media businesses and publishers (Baumann, 2015; Kim, 2018; Malmelin & Moisander, 2014). Media brands and branding represent a growing, but emerging area of research, with a variety of contexts and concepts awaiting further exploration (Burgess & Jones, 2020b) in part due to initial media brand research focusing on broadcast and media organization brands (Malmelin & Moisander, 2014). Therefore, further research into video game media brand management addresses knowledge gaps in brand management and media branding understandings.

Brand authenticity involves a brand being perceived by consumers as dedicated to ideals, having a core set of values (Johnson, Thomson, & Jeffrey, 2015). Brand authenticity is built-up in consumers’ minds by stable, consistent brand behavior (Moulard, Garrity, & Rice, 2015) and helps consumers with decision making and self-expression and identity via authentic consumption choices (Oh, Prado, Korelo, & Frizzo, 2019) much like how media brand consumption can form part of a consumer’s self-identity (Siegert, Förster, Chan-Olmsted, & Ots, 2015). Furthermore, brand authenticity is associated with various benefits such as greater trust and emotional attachment between the brand and the consumer (Fritz, Schoenmueller, & Bruhn, 2017; Moulard, Raggio, & Folse, 2016). As a result, brand authenticity is desirable for brands to cultivate and to understand the relationship between the consumer and the brand (Lude & Prügl, 2018; Preece, 2015). However, brand authenticity remains unexplored in a video game media brand context.

The consumer brand engagement activities of video game consumers is one of their most defining characteristics (Burgess & Jones, 2020a). Consumer brand engagement describes what occurs when a consumer meaningfully interacts with a brand or product outside of consumption or transaction contexts (Franzak, Makarem, Jae, & C Leventhal, 2014; van Doorn et al., 2010), and the video game industry is particularly adept at encouraging such behavior (Newman, 2013). This is important to understand given the highly productive nature of video game consumers, and that the industry is known for releases of incomplete or glitch-ridden games (PC Gamer, 2018, November 29), which their consumers often have to try to fix or find workarounds. However, how this example, altering video games to fix glitches or missing content, of consumer brand engagement might interact with or impact on perceptions of media brand authenticity and inauthenticity has also not been explored. Thus, this research aims to answer the following research question:

RQ: How does consumer brand engagement within a video game media brand context interact with perceptions of media brand authenticity?

The context for this research is the The Sims 4 video game media brand. The Sims 4 is the most recent release of the long running and popular The Sims series. First released in 2000, the series gameplay involves life simulation, where consumers create a virtual person, known as a Sim, and play out their life (Sihvonen, 2011). The Sims consumers are known for their extensive engagement activities (Sihvonen, 2011), which range from making content for the games, adding features, fixing glitches to creating stories using images and video of gameplay. Thus, the series is an appropriate context within which to explore and advance knowledge about how perceptions of media brand authenticity and consumer brand engagement interact in a video media branding context. In doing, this research aims to address the research question and fulfill research gaps concerning a lack of understanding of video game media brands and brand management and the wider body of knowledge concerning business-orientated research into the video games industry.

Literature review

Media brands

Media brands are a vast category of brands and products that can range from fictional media such as video games and television series to factual media such as news programs and documentaries to media organizations, publishers and broadcasters (Baumann, 2015; Kim, 2018; Malmelin & Moisander, 2014). Originally, there was hesitation that media brands were indeed brands that required careful brand management processes and activities (Calder & Malthouse, 2008). However, it is now established that media branding and brand management is an important strategic activity (Riskos, Hatzithomas, Dekoulou, & Tsourvakas, 2021). Media brand management involves crafting and shaping associations, in consumers’ minds, that are directed at the media brand to achieve competitive advantage, a superior value proposition (Baumann, 2015; Riskos, Hatzithomas, Dekoulou, & Tsourvakas, 2021), and a distinctive and attractive offering for consumers when compared to other media brands on offer (Bange, Moisander, & Järventie-Thesleff, 2020). Consumers of media brands might not face the same risks from a poor media brand selection as compared to other products, for example a consumer is not likely to face physical injury if they select a poor-quality media brand as they might if they selected a poor-quality car brand (McDowell, 2006). However, consumers can form intense emotional attachments to media brands and engage in revenge behaviors directed at the brand, for example protesting, boycotting or spreading negative word-of-mouth, if they perceive that the media brand has let them down (Burgess & Jones 2020b; Siegert, Förster, Chan-Olmsted, & Ots, 2015). Despite the existence and importance of media brands being well established, research into media brands and especially those that focus on narrative or hedonic consumption is still an emerging area of work (Burgess & Jones, 2020b; Laaksonen, Falco, Salminen, Aula, & Ravaja, 2019). This includes research into video game media brands (Burgess & Jones, 2020b) which is the focus of this research.

Brand engagement and video game consumers

Consumer brand engagement explores the progressively interactive nature of consumer – brand relationships (Dessart, Veloutsou, & Morgan-Thomas, 2015; Hollebeek, 2011) and focuses on the consumer’s psychological passion for and immersion in the brand with which they are engaging (France, Merrilees, & Miller, 2016). Hollebeek’s (2011) definition of consumer brand engagement as “a consumer’s positive, brand-related, cognitive, emotional, and behavioral activity during or related to consumer/brand interactions” is increasingly accepted and utilized (Dessart, et al., 2015; Halaszovich & Nel, 2017; Kumar & Nayak, 2019). This means that consumer brand engagement involves consumers using their resources such as such as time, effort, or ability. For example, consumers might take part in a brand community and share experiences, user-generated content, and advice. Consumers are thus engaging in voluntary self-investment in the brand (Kumar, 2022). Consumers derive feelings of pleasure from consumer brand engagement, and the concept demonstrates and explores how consumer-brand relationships are increasingly passionate and immersive (Burgess & Jones, 2020a; Dessart, et al., 2015; France, Merrilees, & Miller, 2016; Hollebeek, 2011). Consumer brand engagement makes more intense bonds between consumers and the brand they are engaging with (Dwivedi, Johnson, & McDonald, 2015) and can develop stronger loyalty toward the brand (Fernandes & Moreira, 2019). Thus, if a brand can encourage consumers to take part in consumer brand engagement, the brand can create an emotionally loyal consumer base (Fernandes & Moreira, 2019).

Video game consumers are known for their immense consumer brand engagement productivity (Burgess & Jones, 2020a), which is often hosted and disseminated through active online communities and networks (Burgess & Jones, 2020a; Kim, 2014). The most commonly created and shared examples of video game consumer brand engagement are walkthroughs and detailed guides that explain to other consumers how to complete the game, and modifications to the game, termed mods, made by consumers and usually available for free to other consumers (Burgess & Jones, 2020a; Newman, 2013; Sotamaa, 2010). Other examples of video game consumer productivity include the creation of fanart, fansongs, and fanfiction as well as cosplay. Fanart and fanfiction are artworks and stories using the settings and characters of established works (Roth & Flegel, 2014), while cosplay involves creating costumes of video game characters. These costumes can be quite elaborate and often take months to handcraft or might involve a cosplayer purchasing a partial or complete costume (Lamerichs, 2014). Mods created by consumers (termed modders) are also common and can range from simple aesthetic changes to a video game. For example, changing the color of a character’s outfit to detailed extensions with new content taking many hours to create (Sotamaa, 2010). Many video game brands encourage consumer brand engagement behaviors (Kim, 2014) by providing resources to assist with cosplay or mod creation or posting such creations on their social and other media channels, because they derive economic, social, and technical benefits from these activities (Zimmerman, 2017). For example, The Sims series has encouraged modding by making mods fairly easy to create and install, and this has led to a large modding community for the series since its inception (Jackson, 2020, March 9). Indeed, access to these extensive modding resources can be why consumers purchase a particular video game over another.

Brand authenticity

Brand authenticity is built from consistency and comprehensibility of a brand’s activities (Moulard, Garrity, & Rice, 2015), while behavior that consumers perceive as being inconsistent reduces their perceptions of brand authenticity (Fritz, Schoenmueller, & Bruhn, 2017). This means that brand authenticity is influenced by both consumers and brands, and the more information that the brand gives its consumers, the easier it is for them to determine what is authentic for the brand and what is inauthentic (Preece, 2015). The internet and social media have enabled consumers and brands to disseminate what they believe are core and authentic values for brands faster than ever before (Preece, 2015). Brands that engage in consistent and stable behavior (Moulard, Garrity, & Rice, 2015) that meets consumer expectations (Athwal & Harris, 2018) are deemed by consumers to be authentic (Johnson, Thomson, & Jeffrey, 2015). However, behavior that does not meet consumer expectations may be deemed by them as inauthentic. Thus, brand authenticity is achieved by a brand consistently conforming to consumer expectations, which are based on previous behavior and is among the biggest challenges to maintain for brands.

Consistency and comprehensibility create brand authenticity, but consumers’ perceptions of inconsistent behavior will reduce their evaluations of authenticity (Fritz, Schoenmueller, & Bruhn, 2017). Thus, when a brand launches a new product or service, consumers will evaluate its authenticity by comparing the new product or service against their existing view of the brand (Alexander, 2009; Guèvremont and Grohmann, 2016). Consumers who perceive a new product is inconsistent with prior brand offerings will perceive a lack of brand authenticity and deem the brand inauthentic. If the brand has previously consistently been evaluated as authentic, consumers could view the brand as committing a brand transgression. A brand transgression occurs when a brand is seen to vary significantly from the rules and expectations guiding its performance and relationships with consumers (Aaker, Fournier, & Brasel, 2004). Consumers react to brand transgressions with a variety of negative emotions including anger, contempt, disappointment, or disgust and can take part in revenge behaviors such as boycotts and spreading negative word-of-mouth (Antonetti & Maklan, 2016; Kuchmaner, Wiggins, & Grimm, 2019). Silver, Newman, and Small (2021) suggest that there are three ways to provoke an evaluation of brand inauthenticity: (i) deception; (ii) ulterior motives; and (iii) adulteration. To be deceptive involves taking part in dishonest or misleading communication, while ulterior motives involve self-interest, and adulteration achieves an outcome or product in an unnatural or improper manner.

Other challenges when managing brand authenticity and inauthenticity include the considerable investments required to develop consistent brand behavior, and for older brands, the need to slowly update their designs to reflect modernity, while still maintaining their consumer perceptions of brand authenticity (Napoli, Dickinson, Beverland, & Farrelly, 2014). These challenges are deemed to be worth the costs for brands as brand authenticity has been found to have numerous positive effects. These include consumers viewing the brand as their brand of choice and being willing to pay a premium price (Napoli, Dickinson, Beverland, & Farrelly, 2014), the brand having reduced consequences if experiencing a scandal or transgression, increased credibility and trust (Moulard, Garrity, & Rice, 2015; Schallehn, Burmann, & Riley, 2014), awareness and perceptions of quality (Lu, Gursoy, & Lu, 2015), greater emotional bonds between consumers and the brand (Fritz, Schoenmueller, & Bruhn, 2017), and increased feelings of belongingness (Guèvremont and Grohmann, 2016). Brand extensions and continuations and brand communities have also been found to have greater success when linked to an authentic brand (Bagozzi & Dholakia, 2006; Johnson, Thomson, & Jeffrey, 2015). Furthermore, brands that have collaborated with consumers have been deemed more sincere and authentic (van Dijk, Antonides, & Schillewaert, 2014).

Consumer brand engagement is usually considered beneficial for brands because it can provide both the brand and their consumers with benefits and value ranging from feedback to a superior value proposition. This research explores the interaction between brand authenticity and brand engagement by focusing on consumers of a new release for a long-running, successful video game series The Sims. It seeks to explore how brand engagement and brand authenticity interact when consumers deem a video game media brand to be authentic and if consumers will engage in consumer brand engagement to fix or restore the brand authenticity thus addressing the research question. In doing so, it will add to the body of knowledge concerning brand management in the video game industry and media branding.

Methodology

Research context and design

This research utilizes The Sims 4 video game developed by Electronic Arts (EA), which was launched in September 2014 and is a continuation and the most recent edition of the successful The Sims video game series which was first launched in 2000. The gameplay of The Sims, regardless of edition, involves life simulation, where consumers create a virtual person, known as a Sim, and play out their life from progressing in a career, to developing friendships and romance, and having and raising children. The Sims 4 was the first game in the series to be available on video consoles as well personal computers (PCs). Now in addition to spin-offs and mobile games, The Sims has also released various expansion packs, game packs, and stuff packs for each game in the series. These add new gameplay features and cosmetic content; the expansion packs provide the greatest amount of new content, and the stuff packs provide cosmetic content, such as new outfits, hair styles, or furniture for use in the game. As of May 2020 (when the data collection took place), The Sims 4 had released for purchase nine expansion packs, eight game packs, and sixteen stuff packs, which is many more than each of the three previous games (Electronic Arts, 2023). The original Sims game released seven expansion packs, The Sims 2 released nine expansion packs and ten stuff packs, and The Sims 3 released eleven expansion packs and nine stuff packs. The Sims series has been a critical and commercial success selling over 200 million products as of 2016 (Rhinewald & McElrath-Hart, 2016, May 5). However, The Sims 4 received more mixed reviews upon its release because it had less gameplay features compared to the previous three games (Ashraf, 2020, May 21). Among the gameplay features removed were the ability to have swimming pools, a feature that had been in all of the previous three games, and the omission of toddlers that had been a feature present in the previous two games (Ashraf, 2020, May 21). Pools and toddlers were added to The Sims 4 by Electronic Arts (EA), the developer, in November 2014 and January 2017 respectively as free updates.

Brands encourage two-way communication on their online platforms (Halaszovich & Nel, 2017) and online forums are a good way to understand consumer opinion of brands and products, especially video game consumers because they often engage in online discussions (Newman, 2013). Between May 19 and May 24, 2020, consumers created 14 threads on The Sims subreddit that discussed the quality and value of The Sims 4, consumers purchasing decisions regarding The Sims 4, the features that were missing, and the content that The Sims 4 expansion packs, game packs, and stuff packs provided. A subreddit is a forum or community on the social networking site Reddit that focuses on a specific topic. The collection of threads represented an organic and spontaneous spike in discussion that focused on missing content and content availability. These 14 threads containing 2194 comments were downloaded using a custom python script and comments relevant to the research inquiry were coded. Ethics approval (approval number A201458) for this research was granted by the authors’ institution. The dataset is not publicly available due to ethical restrictions.

Data analysis

The data analysis method combined non-participatory netnography (Scholz & Smith, 2019), phenomenographic (Åkerlind, 2012; McCosker, Barnard, & Gerber, 2004), and thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) to investigate consumer feelings about the brand authenticity of The Sims 4 and how that related to their consumer brand engagement behaviors. Thematic analysis was chosen as the data analysis tool because it is highly flexible and can be used to explore consumer reactions in various contexts across multiple disciplines and methodologies (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Guest, MacQueen, & Namey, 2012). A theoretical, rather than an inductive, coding approach (Braun & Clarke, 2006) was used to provide a better understanding of the specific themes related to consumer brand engagement and brand authenticity, the concepts at the heart of this research. During the analysis, themes, sub-themes, and groupings were identified and adjusted, if necessary, as comments were returned to and reexamined as the analysis progressed, which ensured an accurate understanding of the collective meaning of the data (McCosker, Barnard, & Gerber, 2004). The approach utilized thus involved iterative familiarization, analysis, and interpretations to consider the collective meaning of the dataset (Åkerlind, 2012; McCosker, Barnard, & Gerber, 2004). To ensure sufficient familiarity with the data, all of the downloaded comments were read prior to beginning the data analysis (Åkerlind, 2012; Burgess & Jones, 2021; McCosker, Barnard, & Gerber, 2004) to enable an understanding and knowledge of them as a whole.

The analysis also utilized non-participatory netnography, a variation of netnography, that does not involve the researcher having contact with the participants (Scholz & Smith, 2019) and so does not influence them. This method allows the researcher to understand communities and discussions without influencing them. The researcher conducting the coding took on the non-participatory netnographic role of the active story interpreter (Reid & Duffy, 2018) to help inform thematic analysis of the dataset. This role involves immersion in the context surrounding the data to better explore, understand, and decode the data, and the cultural insights of the context under investigation (Burgess & Jones, 2020a; Reid & Duffy, 2018). For example, implicit meanings, inside references, and jokes within the community were able to be identified and understood (Burgess & Jones, 2021; Scholz & Smith, 2019), which enabled a more accurate representation of the feelings expressed by The Sims 4 posters (Mittell, 2015). The immersion involved lurking on the The Sims 4 and The Sims subreddits, reading reviews of The Sims 4 games, playing the various The Sims games, watching The Sims gameplay videos, browsing The Sims wiki, and reading The Sims gameplay guides. Although the software program, NVivo, was used to help organize the coding, all comments were manually read and coded by the first author (Arvidsson & Caliandro, 2016) which was appropriate given the size of the datasets, the importance of familiarization with the research context and iterative coding approach. Peer debriefing at multiple points in the coding process, in addition to the immersion within the context surrounding the data, was used to validate the analysis (Creswell & Miller, 2000). Braun and Clarke (2013) note that a single coder is not necessarily less reliable because coding agreement can simply indicate all of the coders have been trained to code the same way. Such an approach has been used effectively in prior media brand research (Burgess & Jones, 2020a).

A codebook was developed as part of the coding process with the definitions and counts of each theme and sub-theme and a simplified version is presented, Table 1. Multiple themes could be present in each individual comment.

Table 1. Theme frequency counts.

Theme or Sub-Theme Name	Definition	Code Count Frequency
Desire For More Competitors	Describes how consumers wanted more competitors to enter the market to pressure EA to improve The Sims 4 and further involve consumers in the process.	188
Unable to Provide Feedback	Describes how consumers felt they were unable to provide feedback to EA and that they did not want to listen to or accept their feedback.	37
Game Features	Describes themes that focused on gameplay features in The Sims 4.	507
Desired Features	Describes conversations about the various features that consumers hoped would be added to The Sims 4 by EA and The Sims brand rather than mods.	303
Missing Features	Describes conversations about features that were missing in The Sims 4 that were present in past The Sims games. These features were often considered essential and superior to what was offered in The Sims 4.	204
The Sims Community	Describes themes that focused on The Sims 4 community during the discussion around value and missing features.	269
Whining	Describes how consumers that were perceived to be complaining or criticizing The Sims 4 were labeled as negative and whining.	41
Customers Should Complain	Describes how consumers felt that they should complain as they had paid money to buy the game and wanted to provide feedback.	61
Brainwashed Community	Describes the perception that The Sims 4 community was “brainwashed” by EA and would accept anything branded as The Sims without checking its quality and value.	167
Value	Describes themes that focused on consumer perceptions of The Sims 4’s value.	518
Lack of Value	Describes how consumers felt that The Sims 4 was lacking in value for the price asked.	399
Lack of Value Compared to Previous Games	Describes how consumers compared The Sims 4 to prior The Sims games when determining their value perceptions and found it lesser and not satisfactory as they perceived it was unfinished.	119
Value and Fun in the Games	Describes how consumers still found The Sims 4 fun and worth purchasing and did not perceive it as lacking value or authenticity.	47

Results

Establishing authenticity

The Value and Game Features were the two most populous themes coded. These themes explain how consumers evaluated both the value of The Sims 4 and its authenticity. The majority of the posters expressed the view that The Sims 4 products, including the various expansion packs, game packs, and stuff packs, did not offer value for money. For example: “I have all the packs you mention excluding Island Living, and it really is not worth 40 dollars, no matter how anyone tries to justify it.” (Lack of Value). Some posts went further and explicitly compared The Sims 4 content to that sold in the previous games in the series, The Sims 2, and The Sim 3. For example: “The Sims 4 just feels woefully incomplete even with every expansion. The Sims 3 feels so much more like a complete game, even with just a couple expansions.” However, a small number (47) of posters did find value and enjoyment in The Sims 4. Some were quite defensive and annoyed that the value of the game was being questioned, while others were very positive about the game, finding the game suited them. Overall though, posters felt that The Sims 4 did not offer sufficient value compared to previous The Sims games. Furthermore, this lack of value was due to its missing features that were standard in previous The Sims games making it not feel like an authentic The Sims game. Consumers were thus comparing prior products released by the The Sims brand to establish value, and also the game’s authenticity.

The Sims 4 was also commonly called “unfinished” by posters due to its perceived lack of expected features and thus value. The removal of expected, core features was deemed so impactful that it led to evaluations that the game could not be considered complete until they were added and was deemed unenjoyable unless expansions were purchased, which was in contrast to previous games. For example: “The base game should be full and in depth on its own and DLCs should just be extra add on. Not required for it to be slightly enjoyable” (Lack of Value). Features of The Sims that in previous games were not necessarily standard and were added in via packs, were also criticized as being too broken up and distributed across multiple packs for The Sims 4 so requiring more purchases to obtain. Several posters listed the amount of The Sims 4 expansion packs, game packs, and stuff packs that a consumer would have to purchase to get the equivalent of one The Sims 2 expansion pack: “TS2 Nightlife ALONE gave us downtown neighborhood, drivable cars, bowling alleys, dance floors, discos, vampires, restaurants, and karaoke. In order to have ALMOST all of these objects in the Sims 4, you’d have to purchase City Living, Vampires, Bowling Stuff, Get Together, and Dine Out” (Lack of Value Compared to Previous Games). The price of The Sims 4 expansion packs, game packs, and stuff packs were also compared to the price of purchasing a brand-new game or DLC produced for other games with unfavorable evaluations and conclusions being drawn. The Sims 4, due to its lack of perceived value and missing features, was even described as lacking “soul” or “heart” and being a “cash cow.” Posters even express the desire for more competitors to release similar simulation games to both given players an alternative and force The Sims to listen to consumers and improve (Desire for More Competitors).

Posters considered The Sims 4 game was missing too many features compared to the previous games. For example: “When I heard how much stuff the base game was missing (toddlers? Really?) (…) I happily passed and continued playing my laggy Sims 3” (Missing Features). Posters repeatedly posted lists of the missing features: “pools, toddlers, burglars, police, firemen etc” (Missing Features). Posters also cited the examples of core features such as toddlers that were added for free but years after the game’s release, while hot tubs were placed in a stuff pack. Both toddlers and hot tubs had been included in The Sims 2 and The Sims 3 games at release as part of the core game, and the community felt their removal violated their expectations about what should be standard in a The Sims game. The lack of expected features that were present in prior The Sims games led to dissatisfaction with the game and evaluations it was not an authentic The Sims release.

Engagement behaviours

Several posters also expressed the view that EA did not desire their feedback regarding the expected, missing features thus denying or rejecting their consumer brand engagement. For example: “EA has never cared about improving a feature, only adding new half arsed ones. That’s easier to advertise” (Unable to Provide Feedback). Posters believed that EA wanted them to passively accept whatever The Sims content they released. For example: ‘The Sims community is literally the only one in the gaming community that lets the devs get away with giving very little content for a huge price just so they don’t offend the devs and their “hard work” (Brainwashed Community). In fact, some went further and felt that consumers of The Sims 4 had been “brainwashed” or “normalised” into accepting sub-standard value and products. These posters felt that The Sims 4 expansion packs, game packs, and stuff packs were lacking in value, but the community continued to purchase them, praise them, and be grateful for them. For example: “They technically brainwashed the entire community into believing that those are things that require so much hard work to program and implement to the point they can’t be basic features.” Consumers also expressed a wish that more competitors would enter the market so EA would have to improve its marketing, products, and listen to their feedback. A small number of posters also defended the developers, believing that they were made by EA to release sub-standard content, and then were criticized by the consumers for doing so putting them in a difficult position.

The complaints aired by the posters also attracted a small number of negative reactions from others, who felt the complainers were being “entitled” and “whining.” For example: “I feel like a lot of people in the sims community just complain too much and want more and more instead of just appreciating what they get and finding the good in it”, (Whining). This minority of posters felt that there was still value to be had in The Sims 4 (Value and Fun in the Games). In response, posters felt they had a right to complain about a brand they had purchased that did not live up to expectations (Customers Should Complain) indicating that they wanted to provide feedback and take part in consumer brand engagement for the benefit of The Sims media brand. There were extensive posts providing suggestions of desired gameplay features that the consumers wanted EA to add. Many of these features actually came from prior The Sims games. For example: “I wish there was a way to create a townscape like build your own town as opposed to only being able to create what’s in empty lots” (Desired Features). These suggestions included features from prior games that were considered essential but were missing demonstrating how important the prior The Sims games were to players and to their evaluations of value and authenticity. Interestingly, the consumers rarely offered mods or substitutes from other sources as a solution to other posters gameplay suggestions and desires, despite the popularity of modding within The Sims player community (Sihvonen, 2011), and sometimes explicitly asked EA to provide the feature. For example: “also the ability to paint the damned ceiling! EA, please!” (Desired Features). The consumers wanted and expected content and gameplay features from EA and The Sims brand, not from fellow video game players. They did not want to have to rely on consumer brand engagement; they wanted the media brand itself to address their concerns and requests,

Discussion

The majority of posters can be understood as viewing The Sims 4 as an inauthentic The Sims game. The game did not align to the consistency (Fritz, Schoenmueller, & Bruhn, 2017) regarding gameplay features established and present in previous The Sims’ games, and as a result of this lack of consistency, consumer expectations (Athwal & Harris, 2018) were not met and The Sim 4 game was evaluated as inauthentic (Silver, Newman, & Small, 2021). The comments left by the posters indicate they viewed the response to their concerns, the eventual restoration of some missing features, and The Sims 4’s subsequent expansion, game, and stuff packs as substandard. These results underscore the need to ensure that even for brands that have built up brand authenticity over time, it is still important to continue to maintain brand authenticity and communication with consumers to ensure the brand authenticity of any new planned brand extensions and continuations (Johnson, Thomson, & Jeffrey, 2015). Furthermore, adequate, prompt responses to transgressions (Guèvremont & Grohmann, 2016) resulting from consumers’ perceived lack of authenticity needs to be provided. Consumers, who have complained about a brand transgression but have not received an appropriate remedy can engage in revenge behaviors such as calling for boycotts or spreading negative comments online (Kuchmaner, Wiggins, & Grimm, 2019). This was the case for The Sims 4’s consumers and many posters displayed these revenge behaviors by calling for boycotts and spreading negative word-of-mouth in their comments. The Sims 4’s consumer evaluations of brand inauthenticity due to missing expected features and therefore value appeared to result in a brand transgression or at least revenge behaviors directed at The Sims media brand.

Posters wanted to take part in consumer brand engagement that involved them offering feedback to The Sims 4 brand, but they rejected consumer brand engagement that required them to fix perceived authenticity problems with mods. Furthermore, posters’ comments indicate that they believed EA viewed them, at least partly, as passive consumers, despite their high level of productivity and engagement. Therefore, even in a highly engaged and productive industry, signals still need to be sent to consumers to ensure that consumer brand engagement is valued. The posters did want to provide feedback but were not prepared to create mods and engage in consumer brand engagement to “fix” or add back in the features that they believed were lacking as was suggested. Instead, they expected and wanted EA to generate and add official features and changes to maintain its The Sims 4’s brand authenticity, despite the fact that video game consumers, especially The Sims consumers, have a rich modding and consumer brand engagement history. This is significant because of the acceptance mods have in the video game industry; their creation is enjoyable for the creator (Postigo, 2007) and is a normalized video game consumer brand engagement behavior (Burgess & Jones, 2020a; Newman, 2013). Mods are often created to fix bugs and glitches or add desired content to video games, but despite the benefits that consumer brand engagement provides to consumers (Fritz, Schoenmueller, & Bruhn, 2017; Moulard, Raggio, & Folse, 2016), posters did not see the value in taking part in fixing The Sims 4’s perceived problems. Therefore, even companies including media brands operating in industries with highly normalized consumer brand engagement behaviors should be aware that consumers will not find it acceptable to take part in engagement to fix a brand’s self-created problems of perceived inauthenticity.

Furthermore, the video game industry has been criticized for releasing “unfinished” games; video games that are deemed to have too many glitches, bugs, and other issues at launch (PC Gamer, 2018, November 29) and require updates from developers and modding engagement behavior of consumers to fix. Posters had discussed ways they had attempted to rectify their problems with The Sims 4. Mods were suggested as ways to fix the issues that posters had with the game, since they could be used to add desired features into the game for free. However, this was not acceptable to posters as they wanted official content and felt that it was wrong in their view for The Sims 4 to be sold the way it was: lacking basic, expected content and then dividing this content across extra multiple packs that consumers would have to purchase to obtain it. Instead, there were repeated calls for a boycott of The Sims 4 and its expansion, game, and stuff packs as well as lamentations that posters’ feedback and complaints did not seem to be listened to.

Limitations

This research was limited by investigating one video game brand continuation and also by using secondary data. However, the findings would appear relevant to other video game media given the overall high level of consumer brand engagement within the video game industry and that video games can be released with so many glitches that consumers consider them unfinished. Additionally, this research analyzed comments and reviews posted online (2194), which are usually written by the most engaged consumers of a brand (Dessart, et al., 2015). These consumers would also likely be the target of consumer brand engagement thus making their use appropriate. Further research could examine how brand authenticity is generated by video games that focus on narrative, and whether problems relating to a lack of brand authenticity are the only ones that consumers will not fix via consumer brand engagement.

Conclusion

Video game consumers of The Sims’ games are known for their highly productive consumer brand engagement behaviors such as modding (Sihvonen, 2011) making The Sims an appropriate research context to explore how engagement might interact with brand authenticity. It was found that the absence of video game features that were expected by consumers, due to their inclusion in previous games in the series, led to feelings of annoyance, perceptions of a lack of value and a lack of brand authenticity of the game. Therefore, consumers’ perception of a video game media brand’s authenticity, or inauthenticity, appears to be at least in part generated and evaluated by the features expected and included in it compared to previous installments in the same series.

Although The Sims 4’s consumers valued their consumer brand engagement behaviors and wanted to provide feedback to the brand’s developers and EA about the game, they felt their consumer brand engagement behavior was not appreciated. They also believed that fixing the game and brand to make it authentic and enjoyable should be done by EA, the developers, not themselves. They did not appear to have an interest in consumer brand engagement behaviors to restore the authenticity to The Sims 4 brand. Therefore, even companies operating in industries with highly normalized engagement behaviors, where these behaviors are enjoyable for consumers (Postigo, 2007), should be aware that consumers will not find it acceptable to take part in consumer brand engagement to fix a brand’s problems and brand authenticity. EA restored some of the missing features, but it took years in some cases, or they were restored as paid content, which did not prevent revenge behaviors typical of consumers’ responses to a brand transgression. For example, pools and toddlers were added to The Sims 4 in November 2014 and January 2017 respectively as free updates. However, in the case of toddlers this took three years after the release. Other features were part of paid expansion, stuff and game packs. The wait and/or the need to spend consumer money to access features that consumers deemed essential to authenticity negatively impacted the way consumers perceived the game and it’s brand. The results of this research underscore the need for media brands to ensure they release authentic brand continuations, particularly brands that have built up their brand authenticity over time (Johnson, Thomson, & Jeffrey, 2015), and they need to communicate with their consumers about any planned continuations and sequels and provide timely responses to dissatisfaction to prevent revenge behaviors (Guèvremont & Grohmann, 2016).

This research identified how changing or removing the expected features included in a successful, long running video game brand continuation, The Sims 4, diminished consumer evaluations of the brand’s authenticity and value and created the perception of the brand being inauthentic. This highlights the need for video game developers and media brand managers to ensure consistent communication with their consumers about what they want and value in their games as the removal of popular features in continuations can lead consumers to view the brand as lacking authenticity and take part in negative behavior, such as spreading negative word-of-mouth, directed at the brand. This is significant for the video game industry as continuations and sequels of established video game brands provide the majority of sales (Burgess & Jones, 2020a). Furthermore, it was identified that signals still need to be sent to consumers, even in a highly productive and engaged industry such as the video game industry, to ensure they feel included, and their opinions and engagement are valued. Most significantly, it was found that these video game consumers would not accept being expected to engage in consumer brand engagement to fix a lack of perceived brand authenticity.

This research explored how brand authenticity and consumer brand engagement interacted in the context of a long running, successful video game brand continuation, The Sims 4. In doing so, it answered repeated calls for business research in these areas (Alpert, 2007; Teng, 2017) and advanced knowledge of video game media branding and brand management. This research marks the first exploration of brand authenticity and consumer brand engagement in a video media brand context and found that video game media brand consumers use video game features to evaluate the brand authenticity of a video game media brand. It was also found that video game consumers did not want to engage in consumer brand engagement to address the lack of authenticity and game features; they only wanted to provide feedback despite the modding culture of video game and The Sims consumers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).