Predicting Player Disengagement in Online Games

Game engagement, as one of the most fundamental objectives for game designers to achieve, has become an attractive industrial and academic topic. An important direction in this area is to construct a model to predict how long a player could be engaged with a game. This paper introduces a pure data driven method to foresee whether a player will quit the game given their previous activity within the game, by constructing decision trees from historical gameplay data of previous players. The method will be assessed on two popular commercial online games: I Am Playr and Lyroke. The former is a football game while the latter is a music game. The results indicate that the decision tree built by our method is valuable to predict the players’ disengagement and that its human-readable form allow us to search out further reasons about what in-game events made them quit.