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Updated: May 21, 2026
14:02
Measuring Engagement of Spectators of Social Digital Games
Published on: July 3, 2021
Using a mixed opinion dynamics and innovation diffusion model to explore the 'best game no one played' phenomenon
Chung-Yuan Huang1, Sheng-Wen Wang2
1Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Chang Gung University, Taoyuan City, Taiwan, Republic of China.
Plos One
|May 19, 2026
Summary
Innovative products sometimes fail commercially due to coordination failures, not just opinion dynamics. This study uses combined adoption and opinion models to explain why "best games no one played" occur, highlighting agent adoption threshold as a key factor.
Area of Science:
- Computational Social Science
- Innovation Diffusion Studies
- Agent-Based Modeling
Background:
- Many high-quality innovations fail to achieve commercial success despite positive reviews.
- Existing models often focus on opinion dynamics or adoption thresholds separately, neglecting their interplay.
- Understanding the gap between positive opinions and actual product adoption is crucial for innovation diffusion.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate why certain innovative products with favorable reviews fail to gain consumer traction.
- To integrate adoption threshold and opinion dynamics models to simulate product acceptance.
- To identify key factors influencing the success or failure of innovations in social networks.
Main Methods:
- Utilized an agent-based simulation approach on four theoretical network structures (regular lattice, random, small-world, scale-free).
- Combined an adoption threshold model with an opinion dynamics model to simulate agent behavior.
- Conducted sensitivity analysis and mechanism decomposition experiments to identify influential factors and dynamics.
Main Results:
- Computational agents dynamically updated opinions and made adoption decisions based on neighbor interactions and individual thresholds.
- Agent adoption threshold mean, agent attitude mean, and bounded confidence were identified as highly influential factors.
- The testimony effect was found to counteract opinion clustering, with coordination failure emerging as the primary driver of the opinion-adoption gap.
Conclusions:
- Coordination failure, rather than opinion dynamics alone, significantly contributes to the failure of innovations to achieve widespread adoption.
- The integrated model provides a nuanced understanding of the opinion-adoption gap, differentiating it from information cascades and network externalities.
- Findings offer insights into managing innovation diffusion and improving commercial success rates for new products and ideas.
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