The investigation of online reviews of mobile games

Abstract

The increasing computing capacity and popularity of smartphones has stimulated great demand for mobile applications, especially for mobile games. When consumers have a variety of choices of mobile games, online reviews become critical information for consumers in making decisions. Online reviews show the important characteristics of mobile games that consumers care most about. Therefore, the objective of this study is to identify the critical characteristics of mobile games from the online reviews. We conducted content analysis and analyzed 1,485 online reviews of 38 mobile games and identified and classified 2,145 terms into 20 characteristics. We found that the important characteristics of mobile games include fun, information richness, perceived value, after sales services, stableness, and challenge. Our findings provide empirical evidence of the critical determinants of purchasing mobile games which can serve as a precursor of future text mining research. In addition, this study provides practical insights for software developers and for smartphone manufacturers. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.