Mobile Games Success and Failure: Mining the Hidden Factors

Authors

Abdulrahman Kerim, Lancaster University, a.kerim@lancaster.ac.uk

Burkay Genç, Hacettepe University

Abstract

Predicting the success of a mobile game is a prime issue in game industry. Thousands of games are being released each day. However, a few of them succeed while the majority fail. Toward the goal of investigating the potential correlation between the success of a mobile game and its specific attributes, this work was conducted. More than 17 thousand games were considered for that reason. We show that IAPs (In-App Purchases), genre, number of supported languages, developer profile, and release month have a clear effect on the success of a mobile game. We also develop a novel success score reflecting multiple objectives. Furthermore, we show that game icons with certain visual characteristics tend to be associated with more rating counts. We employ different machine learning models to predict a novel success score metric of a mobile game given its attributes. The trained models were able to predict this score, as well as the expected rating average and rating count for a mobile game with 70% accuracy.

Citation

• Journal paper published at Neural Computing and Applications Journal.
• Conference paper published at International Conference on Soft Computing and Machine Intelligence (ISCMI).

@article{85e99300ae4243cc9528c44cd1e8a26a,
title = "Mobile games success and failure: mining the hidden factors",
keywords = "Data mining, Mobile games, Game features, Machine learning, ANN",
author = "Abdulrahman Kerim and Burkay Genc",
year = "2022",
month = apr,
day = "2",
doi = "10.1007/s00521-022-07154-z",
language = "English",
journal = "Neural Computing and Applications",
issn = "0941-0643",
publisher = "Springer London",
}

@inproceedings{2f7fbd248ae649a2a9bdfb80e053c2e4,
title = "Mobile Games Success and Failure: Mining the Hidden Factors",
author = "Abdulrahman Kerim and Burkay Genc",
note = "{\textcopyright}2021 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. ",
year = "2021",
month = jan,
day = "7",
doi = "10.1109/ISCMI51676.2020.9311587",
language = "English",
booktitle = "2020 7th International Conference on Soft Computing & Machine Intelligence (ISCMI)",
publisher = "IEEE",
}