Mining Player In-game Time Spending Regularity for Churn Prediction in Free Online Games

In the free online game industry, churn prediction is an important research topic. Reducing churn rate of a game significantly helps with the success of the game. Churn prediction helps a game operator identify possible churning players and keep them engaged in the game via appropriate operational strategies, marketing strategies, and/or incentives. Most churn prediction models are based on game-specific features, which limits their applicability to other games that do not share those features. In this paper, we consider developing universal features for churn predictions for long-term players. In particular, we mine player time spending regularity from data sets of two free online games. We leverage information from players’ in-game time spending regularity in the form of universal features for churn prediction. Experiments show that our developed features are better at predicting churners, compared to the baseline features. The performance of our developed features is satisfactory even without game-specific features.