Playtime Measurement With Survival Analysis

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 measured using survival analysis. These methods include visualizations, metrics, and an AB-test based on the survival curve. All these methods work on censored data and enable computation of confidence intervals. This is especially important in time- and sample-limited data that occurs during game development. Throughout this paper, we illustrate the application of these methods to the development of the Hipster Sheep mobile game.