Title: Playtime Measurement with Survival Analysis,
Abstract: Maximizing product use is a central goal of many businesses, which makes
retention and monetization two central analytics metrics in games. Player
retention may refer to various duration variables quantifying product use:
total playtime or session playtime are popular research targets, and active
playtime is well-suited for subscription games. Such research often has the
goal of increasing player retention or conversely decreasing player churn.
Survival analysis is a framework of powerful tools well suited for retention
type data. This paper contributes new methods to game analytics on how playtime
can be analyzed using survival analysis without covariates. Survival and hazard
estimates provide both a visual and an analytic interpretation of the playtime
phenomena as a funnel type nonparametric estimate. Metrics based on the
survival curve can be used to aggregate this playtime information into a single
statistic. Comparison of survival curves between cohorts provides a scientific
AB-test. All these methods work on censored data and enable computation of
confidence intervals. This is especially important in time and sample limited
data which occurs during game development. Throughout this paper, we illustrate
the application of these methods to real world game development problems on the
Hipster Sheep mobile game.