Esports Game Updates and Player Perception: Data Analysis of PUBG Steam Reviews

Game updates are essential because they usually contain critical patches to improve the players' experience. Compared with traditional online games, esports games abandon the storyline and emphasize the players' competitive motivation. As a result, esports games need to be updated more frequently to extend the game development life cycle. Meanwhile, developers get feedback from players' reviews on esports games to improve the game experience, services, or adjust operating strategies. However, there has been little research conducted on the influence of esports game updates on player reviews. In this study, we aim to determine the influence of the monthly update on the player community by carrying out an analysis of PUBG, one of the representatives of esports games, via topic modeling. In total, we collect approximately 300,000 reviews on Steam. Our contributions in this paper are: (i) we use the LDA model to infer and group reviews into 14 topics, (ii) we analyze the influence from esports game updates on topics prevalence over time, and (iii) we conduct sentiment analysis to reveal players' satisfaction levels with each topic.