Game and Application Purchasing Patterns on Steam using K-Means Algorithm

Abstract

Online games are visual games that utilize the internet or LAN networks. With the growth of the gaming industry, platforms like Steam offer a wide variety of games, making it challenging for users to decide which game to play. This study employs the Cross-Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM) methodology to address this issue by understanding user preferences. The k-means algorithm clusters game data based on similar characteristics, helping users and developers identify the most popular game types. Data sourced from Kaggle, obtained through the Steam API and Steamspy, consists of 85,103 entries. A normalization process is applied to enhance calculation accuracy. The elbow method determines the optimal number of clusters, resulting in three clusters from the k-means algorithm. The evaluation includes the silhouette coefficient, which measures the proximity between variables, and precision purity, which compares labels by assigning a value of 1 (actual) or 0 (false). The study finds an average silhouette coefficient of 0.345 and a precision purity value of 0.734, indicating that the k-means algorithm performs optimally based on the precision purity metric. The findings reveal that free-to-play games are the most popular among users, while the "Animation Modelling" category is the most expensive based on price comparisons

Keywords

• clustering
• crisp-dm
• game
• k-means
• purity
• silhouette coefficient