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Player retention in league of legends: a study using survival analysis

Published: 29 January 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Multi-player online esports games are designed for extended durations of play, requiring substantial experience to master. Furthermore, esports game revenues are increasingly driven by in-game purchases. For esports companies, the trends in players leaving their games therefore not only provide information about potential problems in the user experience, but also impacts revenue. Being able to predict when players are about to leave the game - churn prediction - is therefore an important solution for companies in the rapidly growing esports sector, as this allows them to take action to remedy churn problems.
The objective of the work presented here is to understand the impact of specific behavioral characteristics on the likelihood of a player continuing to play the esports title League of Legends. Here, a solution to the problem is presented based on the application of survival analysis, using Mixed Effects Cox Regression, to predict player churn. Survival Analysis forms a useful approach for the churn prediction problem as it provides rates as well as an assessment of the characteristics of players who are at risk of leaving the game. Hazard rates are also presented for the leading indicators, with results showing that duration between matches played is a strong indicator of potential churn.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
ACSW '18: Proceedings of the Australasian Computer Science Week Multiconference
January 2018
404 pages
ISBN:9781450354363
DOI:10.1145/3167918
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Published: 29 January 2018

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Author Tags

  1. business intelligence
  2. churn
  3. churn prediction
  4. esports
  5. game analytics
  6. league of legends
  7. prediction

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  • EPSRC
  • InnovateUK
  • AHRC

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ACSW 2018
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  • CORE
ACSW 2018: Australasian Computer Science Week 2018
January 29 - February 2, 2018
Queensland, Brisband, Australia

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ACSW '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 49 of 96 submissions, 51%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 204 of 424 submissions, 48%

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  • (2024)Are stress and engagement in toxicity associated with sleep quality? A study with League of Legends playersProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36771018:CHI PLAY(1-17)Online publication date: 15-Oct-2024
  • (2023)Quantifying and Leveraging User Fatigue for Interventions in Recommender SystemsProceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3539618.3592044(2293-2297)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023
  • (2022)Definitions of Esports: A Systematic Review and Thematic AnalysisProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/35494906:CHI PLAY(1-45)Online publication date: 31-Oct-2022
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