Patches and Player Community Perceptions: Analysis of No Man’s Sky Steam Reviews

Abstract

Current game publishing typically involves an ongoing commitment to maintain and update games after initial release, and as a result the reception of games among players has the potential to evolve; it is then crucial to understand how players’ concerns and perception of the game are affected by ongoing updates and by passage of time in general. We carry out a data-driven analysis of a prominent game release, No Man’s Sky, using topic modeling based text mining of Steam reviews. Importantly, our approach treats player perception not as a single sentiment but identifies multiple topics of interest that evolve differently over time, and allows us to contrast patching of the game to evolution of the topics.