Publication
Predicting Purchase Decisions in Mobile Free-to-Play Games
Rafet Sifa; Fabian Hadiji; Julian Runge; Anders Drachen; Kristian Kersting; Christian Bauckhage
In: Arnav Jhala; Nathan R. Sturtevant (Hrsg.). Proceedings of the Eleventh AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment. AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2015), November 14-18, Santa Cruz, CA, USA, Pages 79-85, AAAI Press, 2015.
Abstract
Mobile digital games are dominantly released under the freemium business model, but only a small fraction of the players makes any purchases. The ability to predict who will make a purchase enables optimization of marketing efforts, and tailoring customer relationship management to the specific user's profile. Here this challenge is addressed via two models for predicting purchasing players, using a 100,000 player dataset: 1) A classification model focused on predicting whether a purchase will occur or not. 2) a regression model focused on predicting the number of purchases a user will make. Both models are presented within a decision and regression tree framework for building rules that are actionable by companies. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study investigating purchase decisions in freemium mobile products from a user behavior perspective and adopting behavior-driven learning approaches to this problem.