Is there a correlation between the type of audience that plays a certain game and the word length of Steam reviews? GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless highlighted this connection by comparing four games from different categories.
Totally accurate combat simulator
This research is based on an analysis carried out by Steve Stopps, director of development of the Excalibur Games studio. Carless released the results in his latest newsletter.
Together, they chose four Steam games with varying levels of “casualness”: Hypnospace Outlaw, Registration, ranch simulatorand Totally accurate combat simulator.
- It turned out that the share of reviews of one word for TABS is over 30% – the highest of all these titles.
- Hypnospace Outlaw has the highest share of reviews with more than 100 words, with many reviews also containing between 20 and 100 words.
- It seems that the more casual a game, the shorter the user reviews. This could indicate that hardcore gamers in general tend to leave longer texts on Steam.
- To prove their point, Carless and Stopps also looked at the number of games held by different types of players. For example, TABS players own only 38 titles on average, while Registration players have over 200 games in their libraries.
- There is also a correlation when looking at the stats of certain games. Hypnospace Outlaw players who left 100-word reviews own an average of 519 titles, with that number decreasing with word length.
“Either way, I think you might make different discovery or marketing decisions for games, based on information like this,” Carless noted. “It affects what kind of information you might put on its Steam page, how you think about your player characters, etc.”
Full data and all tables can be found here.
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