Press play, pay fast: Quality signals, flow, and dual FoMO as drivers of impulsive buying in LiveOps Mobile games

Live Operations (LiveOps) transform mobile games into always-on services whose millisecond feedback loops and revolving scarcity cues compress decision windows and intensify in-app purchases. While prior studies often model FoMO as an antecedent of flow, the affective route to spending in hyper-dynamic contexts is not well integrated. Building on the DeLone and McLean IS Success Model, flow theory, and dual-dimensional FoMO, we propose a Quality-Flow-FoMO-Impulse mechanism and test it using PLS-SEM on survey data from 557 Taiwanese players of Garena Realm of Valor (RoV) and Brawl Stars (BS). System and information quality significantly enhance flow, whereas service quality shows no meaningful effect. Flow subsequently amplifies External FoMO (status/competition) and Internal FoMO (belonging/continuity), which fully mediate flow's influence on impulsive microtransaction intention (R 2 = 0.352). Multi-group analysis indicates stability across the two games. These results (i) explain when service quality loses salience in real-time LiveOps, (ii) reverse the conventional FoMO-before-flow sequence by showing flow as a trigger of FoMO, and (iii) translate into design guidance that prioritizes low-latency, transparent patch information, and calibrated scarcity cues to support conversion without undue pressure, thereby aligning monetization with ethical and regulatory expectations.