Title
Measuring Player Retention and Monetization Using the Mean Cumulative Function
Abstract
Game analytics supports game development by providing direct quantitative feedback about player experience. Player retention and monetization have become central business statistics in free-to-play game development. Total playtime and lifetime value in particular are central benchmarks, but many metrics have been used for this purpose. However, game developers often want to perform analytics in a timely manner before all users have churned from the game. This causes data censoring, which makes many metrics biased. In this article, we introduce how the mean cumulative function (MCF) can be used to measure metrics from censored data. Statistical tools based on the MCF allow game developers to determine whether a given change improves a game or whether a game is good enough for public release. The MCF is a general tool that estimates the expected value of a metric for any data set and does not rely on a model for the data. We demonstrate the advantages of this approach on a real in-development free-to-play mobile game <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Hipster Sheep</italic> .
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1109/TG.2020.2964120
IEEE Transactions on Games
Keywords
Field
DocType
Game analytics,metrics,monetization,retention
Econometrics,Retention rate,Artificial intelligence,Analytics,Customer lifetime value,Simulation,Video game development,Business statistics,Monetization,Game Developer,Censoring (statistics),Machine learning,Mathematics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
12
1
2475-1502
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Markus Viljanen171.92
Antti Airola276339.79
Anne-Maarit Majanoja311.39
jukka heikkonen424948.76
Tapio Pahikkala5100570.68