Is there any correlation between the type of audience that plays a certain game and the word length of Steam reviews? GameDiscoverCo founder Simon Carless has highlighted this connection by comparing four games of different categories.
Totally Accurate Battle Simulator
This research is based on an analysis made by Excalibur Games studio development director Steve Stopps. Carless published the results in his latest newsletter.
Together they picked four Steam games with different levels of “casualness:” Hypnospace Outlaw, Inscryption, Ranch Simulator, and Totally Accurate Battle Simulator.
- It turned out that the share of one-word reviews for TABS is over 30% — the highest among all these titles.
- Hypnospace Outlaw has the largest share of reviews with 100+ words, with many reviews also containing between 20 and 100 words.
- It looks like the more casual a game is, the shorter reviews users tend to write. It could indicate that hardcore players in general usually leave longer texts on Steam.
- To prove their point, Carless and Stopps also looked at the number of games owned by different types of players. For example, TABS players own only 38 titles on average, while Inscryption players have over 200 games in their libraries.
- There is also a correlation when looking at the stats for certain games. Hypnospace Outlaw players that left 100-word reviews own 519 titles on average, with this number decreasing proportionally to the word length.
“Anyhow, I do think you might make different discovery or marketing decisions for games, based on info like this,” Carless noted. “It affects the kind of information you might put on its Steam page, how you think about your player personas, and so on.”
The full data and all the tables can be found here.