How People Reflect On The Usage Of Cosmetic Virtual Goods: A Structural Topic Modeling Analysis Of R/Dota2 Discussions

Abstract

With virtual purchases being a leading source of revenue for game developers, it is still unclear how players evaluate non-functional goods and the experiences those goods grant. With the use of structural topic models, this work demonstrates the dimensions of players’ experience extracted from discussions in association with price changes. This work contributes to the field by decomposing virtual goods values into experience dimensions in their relationship between extracted experience dimensions and the item’s price, and by a detailed description of expectation mismatch.