An Analysis of WoW Players' Game Hours
Journal
7th ACM Workshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames2008)
Pages
47-52
Date Issued
2008-10
Author(s)
Abstract
Online gaming has become increasingly popular in recent years. Currently, the most common business model of on-line gaming is based on monthly subscription fees that game players pay to obtain credits, which allow them to start or continue a journey in the game��s virtual world. There-fore, from the perspective of game operators, predicting how many players will join a game and how long they will stay in the game is important since these two factors dominate their revenue. This paper represents a pilot study of the predictability of online gamers �� subscription time. Specifically, we study the gameplay hours of online gamers and investigate whether strong patterns are embedded in their game hours. Our ulti-mate goal is to provide a prediction model of online gamers, which takes a player��s game hours as the input and predicts whether the player will leave in the near future. Our study is based on real-life traces collected from World of Warcraft, a famous MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game). The traces contain the gameplay histories of 34, 524 players during a two-year period. We believe that our study would be useful for building a prediction model of players �� future game hours and unsubscription decisions; i.e., decisions not to renew subscriptions. 1.
Type
conference paper