What Are the Points of Concern for Players about VR Games: An Empirical Study based on User Reviews in Different Languages
Jiong Dong, Kaoru Ota, Mianxiong Dong · Games Research and Practice · 2024
In recent years, the boom of Virtual Reality (VR) technology has signaled fruitful applications in various fields, such as education, industry, animation, entertainment, and game. The global VR games market is projected to grow to $53.44 billion in 2028 at a CAGR of 31.4% in the 2021–2028 period. Therefore, what players care about most about VR games is a topic worthy of research. In this article, we conduct an in-depth study of 1,362 VR games and 484,070 reviews on the Steam platform. Unlike other literature focusing only on monolingual reviews (e.g., English), we apply the topic clustering model (BERTopic) to comprehensively analyze multilingual user reviews, including English, Simplified Chinese, and French. We find that the three features people praise the most are the music, the gaming experience, and the gameplay. Meanwhile, gamers’ most common complaints are bug issues, insufficient content, and excessive pricing.