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User Activities in Game Replay Sharing Communities and Their Implications for User Retention | IEEE Journals & Magazine | IEEE Xplore

User Activities in Game Replay Sharing Communities and Their Implications for User Retention


Abstract:

Online social games such as World of Tanks (WoT) have attracted hundreds of millions of users not only to play the games but also to share game replays and to watch games...Show More

Abstract:

Online social games such as World of Tanks (WoT) have attracted hundreds of millions of users not only to play the games but also to share game replays and to watch games played by others in online game replay sharing communities. To date, user retention, including player retention for games and uploader retention for replay sharing communities, remains a key challenge in game design and in maintaining the community prosperity. In this article, we revisit the user retention problem and we deal with the player and the uploader retention problem simultaneously, through leveraging both the in- and out-game features uniquely provided by online game replay sharing communities. To this end, we have collected a large-scale dataset from a replay sharing community named WoTreplays, which contains records of over 380 000 game replays and nearly 2 million users. For the player retention problem, we examine traditional factors including the activity level, the gaming performance, and the social relationships of players, and we include additional features that are intuitively informative, such as how many users have watched a player, which are provided uniquely by the game replay sharing communities. Similarly, for the uploader retention problem, we study the activity level and the popularity of uploaders in game replay sharing communities and additionally include their gaming performance and social relationships in the games as a supplement. Based on our findings, we build machine-learned classifiers that can accurately predict users who will play intensively and users who will share a large number of game replays in the future. Among other results, we find that: 1) for both game playing and replay sharing, the activity level and the popularity of the users are highly skewed; 2) the influence between the gaming activity and the gaming performance is mutual; 3) while the majority of users do not form long-term relationships, a small fraction of users connect very closely; and 4)...
Published in: IEEE Transactions on Games ( Volume: 13, Issue: 2, June 2021)
Page(s): 205 - 215
Date of Publication: 23 February 2021

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