Rapid Prediction of Player Retention in Free-to-Play Mobile Games
This addresses retention prediction for mobile game developers, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing methods with a focus on simplicity and early data.
The paper tackles the problem of predicting player retention in free-to-play mobile games by introducing heuristic modeling approaches, which achieve performance comparable to common classification algorithms using data from early player sessions.
Predicting and improving player retention is crucial to the success of mobile Free-to-Play games. This paper explores the problem of rapid retention prediction in this context. Heuristic modeling approaches are introduced as a way of building simple rules for predicting short-term retention. Compared to common classification algorithms, our heuristic-based approach achieves reasonable and comparable performance using information from the first session, day, and week of player activity.