Most revenues of the MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) industry come from the sale of subscriptions and virtual items, especially to loyal "hardcore" players who would stay in a game for more than a year. Understanding the players' behavior and how long will they stay in the game is hence vital to game operators. If a player's departure is predictable, measures can be taken to prevent that from happening.

This paper strives to develop a practical scheme for predicting player unsubscription. The players have various degrees of predictability, hence we approach the task first by classifying them with support vector machine, then use the same tool to model their playing pattern before and after a given date. In the case of hardcore players, the scheme allows us to predict two months prior with a compound accuracy of over 80%. We have also conducted generalizability analysis to show that our scheme is generalizable across different MMORPGs and can be also applied to avatar usage predictions.

Pin-Yun Tarng, Kuan-Ta Chen, and Polly Huang, "On Prophesying Online Gamer Departure," In Proceedings of ACM NetGames 2009 (poster), 2009.

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