A Survey on Game Analytics in Massive Multiplayer Online Games

Abstract

Massive Multiplayer Online games (MMOG or MMO games) can gather hundreds, thousands or even millions of players. They build persistent world games where social relationships are established to improve the performance of the users and their online, centralized and persistent nature facilitates the collection and analysis of user data. Since keeping players engagement is very important to the MMOG business model, the adoption of Game Analytics to better understand the player experience became widespread among game developers and researchers. This paper makes a survey of articles published over the last fourteen years that apply Game Analytics techniques on Massive Multiplayer Online Games. The objective is to outline the recent research conducted in this area: the type of MMOG that is the object of research; the most common game metrics adopted; the game telemetry used in the research. For this, 31 papers were selected from IEEE and ACM Digital Libraries and analyzed. Such selection was done by searching the keywords Massive Multiplayer Games on both libraries and Game Analytics on the ACM library. Many tendencies were found upon selecting and analyzing each paper. Such as World of Warcraft being the most researched game, while RPG was the most researched sub-genre. Other observations include that the improvement of the game was the aim of about one-third of the sample and the most common data source was the Game Log from each game.