A4 Refereed article in a conference publication

Predicting the monetization percentage with survival analysis in free-to-play games




AuthorsRiikka Numminen, Markus Viljanen, Tapio Pahikkala

EditorsN/A

Conference nameIEEE Conference on Games

PublisherIEEE Computer Society

Publication year2019

Book title 2019 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG 2019)

Journal name in sourceIEEE Conference on Computatonal Intelligence and Games, CIG

ISBN978-1-7281-1885-7

eISBN978-1-7281-1884-0

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1109/CIG.2019.8848045

Self-archived copy’s web addresshttps://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/43817179


Abstract

Understanding and predicting player monetization is very important, because the free-to-play revenue model is so common. Many game developers now face a new challenge of getting users to buy in the game rather than getting users to buy the game. In this paper, we present a method to predict what percentage of all players will eventually monetize for a limited follow-up game data set. We assume that the data is described by a survival analysis based cure model, which can be applied to unlabeled data collected from any free-to-play game. The model has latent variables, so we solve the optimal parameters of the model with the Expectation Maximization algorithm. The result is a simple iterative algorithm, which returns the estimated monetization percentage and the estimated monetization rate in the data set.


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Last updated on 2024-26-11 at 21:18