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Predict Live-Service Game Retention

MediumMachine Learning00:00
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Problem

Business Context

NovaForge Studios operates a live-service mobile RPG with 8M monthly active players. The growth team wants a model that predicts whether a new player will still be active on day 7 so they can trigger CRM campaigns, in-game offers, and onboarding interventions.

Dataset

The training data is built at the player-install level using behavior from the first 48 hours after install. The label is whether the player is retained on day 7.

Feature GroupCountExamples
Session behavior14session_count_48h, total_minutes_48h, avg_session_length, last_session_gap_hours
Progression10levels_completed, tutorial_completion_pct, deaths_per_level, quest_completion_rate
Economy & monetization8soft_currency_earned, hard_currency_spent, first_purchase_flag, ad_views
Social & engagement6guild_joined, friends_added, chat_messages, push_opt_in
Device & acquisition7platform, country_tier, install_source, device_ram_gb
Temporal features5install_hour_local, weekend_install, day1_day2_play_delta, recency_hours
  • Size: 1.2M player installs over 6 months, 50 features
  • Target: Binary — retained on day 7 (1) vs not retained (0)
  • Class balance: 28% retained, 72% churned before day 7
  • Missing data: ~12% missing in acquisition metadata, ~6% missing in device specs, sparse missingness in social features for players who never unlocked them

Success Criteria

A good solution should achieve strong ranking quality for intervention targeting, with ROC-AUC >= 0.82, PR-AUC >= 0.58, and top-decile lift >= 2.2 on a strictly future holdout set.

Constraints

  • Predictions must be generated in a daily batch for up to 500K new installs
  • Marketing and game design need feature-level explanations for why players are flagged
  • The model should be robust to changing acquisition mix and live-ops events
  • Retraining budget supports weekly retraining, not continuous online learning

Deliverables

  1. Define the target and leakage-safe feature window
  2. Build and justify a retention prediction model
  3. Describe preprocessing and feature engineering choices
  4. Evaluate the model with business-relevant metrics and thresholding
  5. Explain how you would deploy, monitor, and retrain the model