In recent years, the gaming industry has experienced rapid growth, further bolstered by the pandemic. Today, games are being utilized beyond entertainment, finding applications in education, health, training, and various industries. Understanding trends and analyzing games and their user base is therefore crucial for game developers, stakeholders, business analysts, and researchers alike. With over 60,000 games, Steam stands out as a major game distribution platform that collects valuable data about games and their users. To simplify the analysis of current trends in the gaming world, we have developed SteamVis: an analysis and visualization tool that efficiently crawls, displays, and analyzes game-related information from Steam. In this paper, we present the tool’s details, conducted case studies, and a qualitative evaluation by domain experts. SteamVis facilitates the study of games and game-related information by providing powerful analytical and visualization tools, enabling the discovery of important trends and insights.

People approach video games for a multitude of reasons, such as connecting with others, escaping reality, or challenging their abilities. As a consequence, video games have reached an increasingly broader audience and their consumption was even more pronounced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Recent studies have shown how playing video games together improved the well-being of people during period of movement restriction and how video games were an important tool for connecting with physically distant people. However, little is known about how the relationships of people with video games have changed across the years. In order to answer this question, we collected data from the Steam platform and analyzed players’ opinions about multiplayer video games as stated in the respective reviews. The reviews analysis showed that players had played more and in addition their reviews had not been influenced by the difficulties of this significant moment. Their contribution, however, had been less relevant for the community when compared to the situation in the years before the pandemic. Finally, an increase in players choosing to play more casual and amusing games became evident.

Virtual Reality (VR) is increasingly being used as an education medium also enabled by advances in the consumer market, making the devices less expensive and the setup easier. The hardware is more accessible, and players can use Steam as the leading distribution platform for VR applications. Hence, more and more VR applications are being published, also for educational purposes. However, the VR educational games panorama is yet to be described due to the recent rise of this area, as well as users’ perceptions (both learners and educators) and issues specific to each learning domain. Towards this, we provide a first analysis of the Steam educational VR applications. We report an analysis of user reviews describing the positive and negative characteristics of VR experiences. Finally, we give an overview of popular educational VR experiences and what we can learn from reviewers about the design requirements for specific learning fields.

Researchers study the user experience in Virtual Reality (VR) typically by collecting either sensory data or using questionnaires. While traditional questionnaire formats present it through web-based survey tools (out-VR), recent studies investigate the effects of presenting questionnaires directly in the virtual environment (in-VR). The in-VR questionnaire can be defined as an implemented user-interface object that allows interaction with questionnaires in VR that do not break the immersion. Integrating questionnaires directly into the virtual environment, however, also challenges design decisions.