The Impact of Virtual Reality on Gaming Experience: A Perspective from Half-Life on Steam

As a new form of human-computer interaction, Virtual Reality (VR) introduces new opportunities for game development. Nevertheless, research conducted on the influence of VR on player reviews data was limited. This paper analyzes the influence of VR on the player community of the Half-Life series, including Half-Life 2 (non-VR edition) and Half-Life: Alyx (VR edition) by topic modeling. Particularly, a dataset of approximately 100,000 reviews was first collected from Steam. Then we used the topic modeling, and three experts were involved in analyzing these topics to categorize reviews into 11 topics of Half-Life: Alyx. We also detected the pivotal insight that most game players are concerned with only five topics of fundamental game elements. Furthermore, players' positive ratings were compared on these five topics, and the p-value of the two-sample t-test reveals VR has no significant impact on these fundamental game elements.