Achievement and Friends: Key Factors of Player Retention Vary Across Player Levels in Online Multiplayer Games
This addresses player retention challenges in the game industry by showing adaptive design needs, though it is incremental as it builds on prior snapshot views.
This study analyzed in-game logs of 51,104 players in an online multiplayer game to understand how retention factors change across player levels, finding that achievement features are key for initial to advanced phases, while social features become most predictive at the highest level.
Retaining players over an extended period of time is a long-standing challenge in game industry. Significant effort has been paid to understanding what motivates players enjoy games. While individuals may have varying reasons to play or abandon a game at different stages within the game, previous studies have looked at the retention problem from a snapshot view. This study, by analyzing in-game logs of 51,104 distinct individuals in an online multiplayer game, uniquely offers a multifaceted view of the retention problem over the players' virtual life phases. We find that key indicators of longevity change with the game level. Achievement features are important for players at the initial to the advanced phases, yet social features become the most predictive of longevity once players reach the highest level offered by the game. These findings have theoretical and practical implications for designing online games that are adaptive to meeting the players' needs.