To in-game and beyond

With the recent successes in transmedia expansions of different games such as The Last of Us and Fallout, more companies are looking to implement transmedia strategies to maximize profits gained from their franchises. Additionally, as the current era of popular culture has become increasingly more character-driven, the use of characters has also become an essential strategic tool in these transmedia strategies. This is illustrated by the financially successful 2020 gacha game Genshin Impact developed by the Chinese company HoYoverse. HoYoverse continues to utilize their in-game characters and the parasocial relationships the players build with these characters to attach them to the game and entice them to invest in the franchise over different media. Therefore, it has become important to understand the role that these transmedia characters play in the success of transmedia strategies and understand how the parasocial relationships with them attach audiences to franchises and motivate them to invest into the franchise. Thus, this study set out to fill this gap in knowledge by answering the following research question: To what extent does the player's parasocial relationship with Genshin Impact game characters affect the success of Genshin Impact’s transmedia practices by engaging players in more transmedia behaviors? Based on existing literature and the transmedia engagement model, nine hypotheses were developed regarding the relationships between the constructs recognizability, parasocial relationships, character enjoyment and the newly defined transmedia behaviors, which was operationalized into the in-game purchase intention, outside game purchase intention, community engagement and co-production. It was mainly hypothesized that parasocial relationships would have a positive influence on the transmedia behaviors and that this relationship would be mediated by character enjoyment. To test these hypotheses, an online quantitative survey was conducted and was distributed to Genshin Impact players through Reddit. A sample of 210 respondents was collected and the data was analyzed with different multiple and hierarchical linear regression analyses as well as several mediation analyses. The results found that parasocial relationships with Genshin Impact characters had both a direct and indirect effect through cognitive character enjoyment on the different transmedia behaviors. While most of the dimensions of recognizability were found to not have significant relationships with parasocial relationships and character enjoyment, attitudinal recognizability was found to have a positive influence on both parasocial relationships and cognitive character enjoyment. Furthermore, none of the constructs were found to have a significant relationship with the transmedia behavior in-game purchase intention. Both of which prompted avenues for future research. In conclusion, based on these findings it could be concluded that strong parasocial relationships with Genshin Impact characters does affect the success of Genshin Impact's transmedia practices as it both directly and indirectly, through the cognitive enjoyment of the character, influences the players' engagement in transmedia behaviors.