How do people evaluate virtual goods in social media? The case of Dota 2

Sammanfattning: Virtual purchases are the main source of revenue for developers of F2P games being a market with expected 17.4 billions of dollars volume in 2019. Despite the broad scope of research of virtual purchases, it is still unclear how the player evaluate non-functional goods. Based on analysis of discussions of virtual decorative items this work what experiences nonfunctional items grants players with and how those experiences discussions reflect in the item’s price.  With the use of Structural Topic Modeling framework this work demonstrates the dimensions of players’ experience in their association with price change on the case of Reddit.com subreddit /r/Dota2. Analysis reveals three main categories of discussions: dimensions of hedonic value, dimensions of social value, expectations mismatch. This work contributes to studies of virtual purchases by decomposing each category into experience dimensions and by revealing the relationship between extracted experience dimensions and items price.