Business Intelligence in World of Warcraft

Games have evolved from the arcade coin slots of the 70s to Massively Multiplayer Online games (MMOs) costing hundreds of millions of dollars to develop. Often, MMO budgets only start to break even years after they launched. Hence the need to acquire and retain players, and have them spend extra money in the game by buying virtual items. Hence the need for business intelligence (BI) in MMOs. Beyond its economic and marketing use, BI can also provide feedback and guidance to game designers about their systems and the players they are designing these systems for. From a cross-cultural dataset of 2865 World of Warcraft players, we look at two BI aspects of importance to MMOs: retention and (virtual) gold buying. We introduce three retention metrics: the weekly play time, the stop rate, and the number of years playing WoW. The typical gold buyer is a middle-aged competitive man with a full-time job who does not play with real-life relatives.