DynaMoLTV: A Cross-Game Dynamic Mixture Model with Weighted Sub-Distributions for Player Lifetime Value Prediction

Online game advertising is a prominent class of Web-mediated interactive services, where understanding and predicting player Lifetime Value (LTV) is a core scientific challenge in Web-scale user modeling, personalization, and digital economy optimization. However, the LTV prediction task poses severe challenges to traditional methods, which include data sparsity and complex distribution characteristics (such as zero-inflation, long tail, multimodal distribution, and cross-game). Existing methods struggle to capture the realistic and complex LTV distributions and exhibit limitations in leveraging cross-game data. We propose the first cross-game dynamic mixture framework with weighted sub-distributions for LTV prediction, DynaMoLTV. DynaMoLTV primarily models complex distributions via a zero-inflated mixture of lognormal (ZIMLN) loss, incorporates a game expert for cross-game data adaptation, employs a hierarchical payment classifier to capture consumption pattern variations, and integrates coarse and fine-grained losses to balance high-value user identification with LTV prediction accuracy. We conduct comprehensive experiments. The results demonstrate that DynaMoLTV achieves the best performance compared to five state-of-the-art baselines across metrics, including paid user identification, high-value user recall and LTV prediction accuracy. Specifically on three gaming datasets, DynaMoLTV reduces RMSE by 0.76%–46.65%, improves AUC by 0.94%–7.11%, and improves Norm-GINI by 0.63%–11.77% compared to five state-of-the-art baselines. DynaMoLTV also significantly improves ranking capabilities, with Recall@50K increasing by 17.64%–577.78%. We validate DynaMoLTV's effectiveness through two online A/B tests: (1) In the scenario of churned user re-engagement, DynaMoLTV increases online LTV by 20.3%-142.6% and downloads by 22.6%-37.7%. (2) In the scenario of online game advertising, DynaMoLTV increases GMV by 1.89% and GMV(ROI) by 27.31%. Our method has been fully deployed in a Web-based online game advertising platform, which ensures that LTV predictions remain personalized for online gaming ad delivery, supporting smarter and more inclusive decision-making on the Web.