Abstract:

World of tanks in an massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, where players use their tanks to compete within two different teams. This game is gaining and loosing players, as each other MMO-type game. However, the number of players reached 24 mil on the European server, 45 mil on the Russian one, and over 10 mil on the United States server[1]. As each MMO game World of Tanks has many advantages and disadvantages and has been used to illustrate different phenomenons, such as player behavior (Shen et. al. 2020; Esmaeili, and Woods 2016), gender-performance gap among players (Ratan et. al. 2020) or even education value of the game (Kowalczuk 2013). In the World of Tanks player may earn two types of currency – silver, the usual one, earned or lost after each battle, event, etc., or gold – that is a premium currency for World of Tanks. The premium currency can be earned though events, challenges or bought via microtransactions. Microtransactions are small amounts of money that are spent by players to buy different things (like premium equipment, bonus resources, premium tanks, etc.) in games. Such microtransactions usually appear in free-to-play-games, where there is no cost to download and install or play the game, but it costs to buy virtual products. Microtransactions are widely discussed in the literature at different levels, and from different points of view. Some authors analyze what pushes people to spend money (Liblik and van Berlo 2016; Evers et. al. 2015). Other very important issue is the impact of microtransactions on video games industry (Tomić 2017), self-regulatory challenges in video game boxes (McCaffrey 2019) and the general model of microtransactions (Tomić 2018).

[1] Data accoring to https://wot-news.com/stat/server/eu/norm/en (1.11.2021)