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If you build it they might stay: retention mechanisms in World of Warcraft

Published: 29 June 2011 Publication History

Abstract

We analyze mechanisms of player retention and commitment in massively multiplayer online games. Our ground assumptions on player retention are based on a marketing model of customer retention and commitment. To measure the influence of gameplay, in-game sociality, and real-life status on player commitment, we use the following metrics: weekly play time, stop rate and number of years respondents have been playing the game. The cross-cultural sample is composed of 2865 World of Warcraft players from North-America, Europe, Taiwan, and Hong-Kong who completed an online questionnaire. We differentiate players in terms of demographic categories including age, region, gender and marital status.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
FDG '11: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Foundations of Digital Games
June 2011
356 pages
ISBN:9781450308045
DOI:10.1145/2159365
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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  • SASDG: Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 29 June 2011

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Author Tags

  1. MMO
  2. World of Warcraft
  3. demographics
  4. game design
  5. games
  6. retention

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  • Research-article

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FDG'11
Sponsor:
  • SASDG
FDG'11: Foundations of Digital Games
June 29 - July 1, 2011
Bordeaux, France

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FDG '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 31 of 107 submissions, 29%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 152 of 415 submissions, 37%

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  • (2023)Trends and Future Directions in Artificial Intelligence-based Customer Churn Prediction TechnologyJournal of Digital Contents Society10.9728/dcs.2023.24.7.161724:7(1617-1627)Online publication date: 31-Jul-2023
  • (2023)Playing on life's termsEludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture10.7557/23.711514:1(125-145)Online publication date: 14-Dec-2023
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