Towards Understanding Metaverse Engagement via Social Patterns and Reward Mechanism: A Case Study of Nova Empire

With the constant fusion of virtual and reality, a new vision of human beings has emerged—Metaverse. At present, the development of metaverse is still in its infancy, and although the industry has put feverish investment into it, there are still many problems that need to be discussed in academia. The first thing is user engagement. Metaverse relies heavily on massive online users to realize its social value. In other words, user engagement is the foundation of the metaverse ecosystem. Therefore, our research uses Nova Empire as a case study, aiming at understanding metaverse engagement via complexity analysis of social patterns and reward mechanisms. Specifically, the behavioral data of 46 954 players in September 2021 are used for analysis. Our observations show that social behavior is not the main factor for user engagement. Then, we perform a correlation analysis of trigger times for different gaming behaviors to verify the above observations. The results prove that the main factors affecting user engagement are game tasks and reward mechanisms in the early stage and social gaming behaviors environment with alliances in the middle and late stages. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings for the design of future games and propose operation strategies on user engagement to improve the metaverse ecosystem and other online social space.