The Anatomy of a Large Mobile Massively Multiplayer Online Game

The authors describe a large-scale and long-term measurement study of a popular mobile Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG), called Parallel Kingdom, which has over 600,000 unique users distributed across more than 100 countries. Their study covers important aspects of the game including characteristics of its population, players' game usage behavior, and correlation between players' interest and the money spent by them in the game. Their measurement study spans almost the entire life of the game staring from its inception on October 31, 2008 to November 10, 2011 (1104 days in total). To perform this paper, they instrumented the game's client software (IOS and Android) to interact with their measurement server.