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The Investigation of Online Reviews of Mobile Games

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E-Life: Web-Enabled Convergence of Commerce, Work, and Social Life (WEB 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 108))

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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.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Kaohsiung Normal University, No. 116, Heping 1st Rd., Lingya District, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, 802

    Shu-Chun Ho & Yu-Chung Tu

Authors
  1. Shu-Chun Ho
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  2. Yu-Chung Tu
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA

    Michael J. Shaw

  2. The University of Maryland, Baltimore County, MD, USA

    Dongsong Zhang

  3. HKSAR, City University of Hong Kong, China

    Wei T. Yue

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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Ho, SC., Tu, YC. (2012). The Investigation of Online Reviews of Mobile Games. In: Shaw, M.J., Zhang, D., Yue, W.T. (eds) E-Life: Web-Enabled Convergence of Commerce, Work, and Social Life. WEB 2011. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 108. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29873-8_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29873-8_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-29872-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-29873-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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