Beyond Sentiment: The Influence of Game Pricing on Player Feedback in Steam Reviews

The vast amount of user-generated content in the gaming industry presents a challenge for developers seeking to understand player feedback. This study investigates the relationship between a game's pricing and the focus of user discourse in reviews. We address the question of whether a game's price influences player sentiment and the topics they discuss. After using BERT [1]-based sentiment analysis on a large-scale dataset of 730,945 Steam [2] reviews across 743 games to classify the user sentiment, we employed a manual, keyword-based topic analysis to classify review content and analyzed these findings across different price segments. The study reveals that price explains only a negligible fraction ($\approx 0.2\%$) of sentiment variation, suggesting that pricing alone does not determine overall positivity or negativity in reviews, but it significantly shapes player expectations. Topic analysis reveals clear shifts in the aspects players emphasize across price tiers: low-priced games elicit detailed reviews focusing on value and story; mid-priced games concentrate on gameplay and immersion; and high-priced games generate fewer reviews and narrower discussions. These findings highlight that while price does not predict sentiment, it serves as a signal that frames how players evaluate and articulate their experiences.