This article is in response to the critique of our work by Jeff Hwang in the October 2019 issue of Global Gaming Business Magazine.

Given the number of Hwang’s inaccuracies and mischaracterizations of our findings (and his own), we will not be able to address all of them in a single rebuttal. Before we respond to the details of his take on our work, we need to clarify a few key points in order to help Hwang and others better understand the results from the research in this domain.

For starters, the context, the specific aims of inquiry and the research questions of the cited research must be clearly understood. For example, if you are looking at aggregated results such as game-level data, those values are comprised of many outcomes produced by many individual players. So, if you are looking at the mean (i.e., average) coin-in, then it will not provide a meaningful measure of the average time on device, especially for the population of players who… read more.