How to retain users in the metaverse: Exert technological affordances through psychological ownership mechanism

Metaverse platforms often experience initial popularity but struggle to sustain long-term user engagement. This study investigates how technological affordances—social interactivity, co-creativity, and meta-mobility—influence user stickiness through the mediating mechanism of psychological ownership, which comprises intimate knowing, self-investment, and perceived control. Utilizing a multi-method approach, we conducted two online surveys (n1 = 112; n2 = 312) analyzed through structural equation modeling (SEM) for mediation mechanisms, supported by a 3 × 2 × 2 factorial offline experiment (n = 346) employing concurrent randomization and ANOVA to establish causal relationships. Our findings reveal that three affordances significantly enhance user stickiness, with psychological ownership mediating these effects. And individual differences—self-construal and technology propensity—moderate this dynamic. For interdependent (vs. independent) users, social interactivity (co-creativity or meta-mobility) affordance is more likely to stimulate psychological ownership but impede (facilitate) user stickiness. Interestingly, users with low (vs. high) technology propensity are more likely to form psychological ownership by co-creativity affordance. As the first study to propose a user-stickiness model for metaverse platforms, this research integrates the affordance theory and psychological ownership into technological innovation discourse, offering actionable insights for designing personalized affordances to ensure user retention.