Popularity and player satisfaction of video games: A case study of Xbox 360

This paper presents a large-scale study of video games by analyzing more than 1800 games published on the Xbox 360. The data was collected from the TrueGaming Network which tracks gamer play, game completion, voting behavior, and user rating. We characterized the game popularity distribution and studied the factors that could possibly contribute to player satisfaction including game difficulty, user voting behavior, and achievement design. From these results, the study suggests a method of achievement design that could help developers improve player satisfaction.