Game Data Mining Competition on Churn Prediction and Survival Analysis Using Commercial Game Log Data

Game companies avoid sharing their game data with external researchers. Only a few research groups have been granted limited access to game data so far. The reluctance of these companies to make data publicly available limits the wide use and development of data mining techniques and artificial intelligence research specific to the game industry. In this paper, we developed and implemented an international competition on game data mining using commercial game log data from one of the major game companies in South Korea: NCSOFT. Our approach enabled researchers to develop and apply state-of-the-art data mining techniques to game log data by making the data open. For the competition, data were collected from Blade & Soul, an action role-playing game, from NCSOFT. The data comprised approximately 100 GB of game logs from 10 000 players. The main aim of the competition was to predict whether a player would churn and when the player would churn during two periods between which the business model was changed to a free-to-play model from a monthly subscription. The results of the competition revealed that highly ranked competitors used deep learning, tree boosting, and linear regression.