Against the backdrop of the transition toward a sustainable society, the green product market has expanded steadily. However, green skepticism poses a significant challenge to promoting sustainable consumption. This study develops a parallel mediation model to examine how green skepticism influences green purchase intention through information seeking and anticipated guilt among Chinese consumers. Survey data were collected from 511 Chinese respondents and analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) with IBM SPSS AMOS 30. While prior research typically assumes a direct negative effect of skepticism on green purchase intention, our results show that green skepticism does not exert a significant direct effect on green purchase intention. Instead, green skepticism indirectly undermines green purchase intention by reducing consumers’ motivation to seek green product information and weakening anticipated guilt. These findings challenge the prevailing “skepticism-as-verification” view and suggest that green skepticism may foster information avoidance and moral disengagement rather than deeper cognitive and moral engagement. By identifying these disengagement pathways, this study helps clarify previously mixed findings on the relationship between green skepticism and green purchase intention. It delineates important boundary conditions for the effectiveness of green marketing and policy interventions.

Background: Live-service games are continuously updated, requiring players to repeatedly evaluate whether the evolving system remains fair and balanced. How perceived game balance shapes player motivation and long-term engagement remains underspecified.,Objective: This study investigates how perceived game balance influences the intention to continue playing through two distinct achievement pathways: performance achievement and competence achievement. Immersion serves as the mediating mechanism, while learnability acts as the boundary condition.,Methods: Survey data from 207 online game players were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM), including CFA, bootstrap mediation analysis, and multi-group moderation testing.,Results: Perceived game balance positively predicted both achievement dimensions. However, only performance achievement significantly predicted immersion, which in turn positively influenced continuance intention. Learnability did not produce consistent moderation effects.,Conclusions: Perceived game balance operates as a motivational antecedent in live-service systems, channeling player engagement primarily through performance-oriented feedback structures. Findings inform HCI practice regarding entertainment economy, and live-service online games now sustain billions of active players and substantial annual revenue (Newzoo, 2025). In these live-service environments, perceived game balance is a central design and player experience issue, commonly defined as the absence of any single strategy, character, or mechanic holding an overwhelming advantage (Schell, 2008; Rollings & Morris, 2003). Because live-service games are continuously updated, players repeatedly re-evaluate whether the evolving system still offers a fair chance of success, and this update communication and achievement interface design.