The Effect of YouTube Reviews on Video Game Sales

Abstract

Purpose—This study examines the effects of consumer engagement behaviour towards game reviewsposted on YouTube on video game sales. Design/methodology/approach— An empirical research was conducted after analyses of 140 YouTubereviews about top games selected from the video games titles released within 2010-2019. The impactsof social media engagement activities (total views, the ratio of likes/dislikes to total views, reviewsentiment) of YouTube reviews, consumer and critic reviews on games sales were investigated withordinary least square (OLS) regression model. Findings—The findings indicated that consumer engagement behaviour of YouTube reviewssignificantly influenced sales; however, the effect is not larger than critics’ and consumers’ text reviews.Consumer reviews have the highest positive impact on sales. YouTube review sentiment did notinfluence sales and YouTube reviews posted by an influencer (i.e., user) compared to a firm (i.e., marketing generated) did not have higher sales.Discussion— The results draw attention to the importance of engaging video game reviews onYouTube and consumers’ and critics’ online textual reviews for video games sales. This researchcontributes three streams of research: Digital word of mouth, consumer engagement behaviour on socialmedia and predicting video game sales. The contribution is to indicate the predictive power ofengagement of YouTube game reviews on game sales, to compare reviewer type (user/influencer - versus firm-generated) and to compare the effectiveness of video reviews to textual critic and consumerreviews.