Challenges And Retention In Games:research On Game Design Elements That Affect Player Retention

Difficulty is the main motivation that game companies and game designers believe players will play a certain game,and when the game is designed to be too complex and difficult,players will choose to quit due to frustration.Although challenge is the core content for players to enjoy the game,little attention has been paid to its impact on players' retention rate,because the definition of game difficulty is often specific to the game type.Accurate measurement of retention requires real data,which is often difficult to obtain;Difficulty is often interwoven with other factors,such as social interaction in multiplayer games,and retention is difficult to determine accurately for three reasons.Therefore,to solve these three limitations,it is necessary to use the hybrid method,the holistic study and the cross-game method to pay close attention to the game mechanism.Therefore,this paper chooses to adopt a variety of data sources,from offline interviews to online questionnaire survey and telemetry log,to explore player behaviors in the following three kinds of games: fairyland OL,world of warcraft and jelly explosion.The data from these surveys show that difficulty does have an effect on retention,as do background factors such as player groups,social interactions,and subtle differences in time and money.