In existing research on new product development, it has been believed that the product development by companies needs to reflect the changes in customer needs. Particularly, for products in which continual development is a characteristic, customer needs must be addressed at multiple points in time. However, by comparing the cases of two companies from the online game industry, we found that long-term performance of a company which responded flexibly suffered a drop, with the ratio of new users dropping and the user attrition rate increasing. Therefore, we believed that too much attention was paid to the requests of lead users.
ABAS is supported by Grant-in-Aid for Publication of Scientific Research Results from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science.