Predicting Player Engagement in Online Gaming: A Machine Learning Approach

The aim of this research is to make precise forecasts on player participation in online game using state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms. Player engagement plays a crucial element in determining the success of online games because it affects player retention, satisfaction and monetization. By understanding and predicting engagement levels, game developers and marketers can enhance the gaming experience and develop strategies to keep players invested. This research involves a comprehensive analysis of player behavior data from an online gaming platform. The dataset includes various demographic and behavioral features such as age, gender, location, game genre, playtime hours, in-game purchases, game difficulty, sessions per week, average session duration, player level, achievements unlocked, and engagement level. The data was preprocessed through handling missing values, normalizing numerical features, and encoding categorical variables. Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) was conducted to understand the distribution and relationships between different features. Multiple machine learning models were evaluated to predict player engagement levels, including Random Forest, Gradient Boosting, XGBoost, and Support Vector Machine (SVM). These models were then compared through the accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score metrics. In the comparison, XGBoost emerged as the best model. Since it is the best-performing model, we can make the feature importance analysis to identify the best factors for predicting engagement in the next step. The XGBoost model achieved the highest accuracy of 91%, demonstrating superior precision, recall, and F1-scores across all engagement levels (High, Medium, Low). Ensemble methods like XGBoost, Gradient Boosting, and Random Forest outperformed the SVM model, highlighting their effectiveness in handling complex datasets.