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




Riikka Numminen, Markus Viljanen, Tapio Pahikkala

N/A

IEEE Conference on Games

PublisherIEEE Computer Society

2019

2019 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG 2019)

IEEE Conference on Computatonal Intelligence and Games, CIG

978-1-7281-1885-7

978-1-7281-1884-0

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

https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/43817179



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.


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