Analysis of Pay-What-You-Want Donation Behavior in Game Communities on Social Live Streaming Services

Pay-what-you-want (PWYW) donation behavior on Twitch is examined in this study as a potential monetization model for digital games, particularly in the post-COVID-19 era. The central proposition is that real-time social density, measured as average concurrent viewers in a channel, drives donation activity more strongly than static indicators such as follower counts or overall community size. The analysis draws on public data from the top 100 Twitch Partners across 19 months, from October 2019 through April 2021, yielding 1,900 monthly observations. The sample is predominantly English-language (77%) and male (90%), a composition that bounds how far the findings can be generalized.

Using multiple regression with subscription gifting as the donation mechanism, the authors find that average concurrent viewers significantly predicts gifted subscriptions per hour (p < 0.001, Adjusted R² = 0.685). By contrast, changes in follower count do not add comparable explanatory power (Adjusted R² = 0.662 in the alternative specification). This result supports the claim that the immediate, visible presence of other viewers is a more meaningful driver of donation behavior than accumulated audience size. The analysis also reveals substantial differences across individual streamers, with roughly half of the streamer-specific dummy variables reaching statistical significance, indicating that community-level characteristics shape donation patterns considerably.

Taken together, the findings position social density as a central mechanism behind PWYW gifting in game communities. The study's theoretical grounding spans consumer psychology on crowding effects, platform economics of digital tipping, and research on gaming community dynamics, though its conclusions are most directly applicable to large, English-speaking, male-dominated audiences on a single platform during a specific period.