User Experience, Narrative Continuity, and Monetization in Interactive Full-Motion Video Games: Evidence from Steam User Reviews

Although monetization has been widely discussed in digital games, less attention has been paid to how it is discussed in narrative-centered Interactive Full-Motion Video (FMV) Games, where user experience depends heavily on continuity, completeness, and emotional engagement. Addressing this gap, this study analyzes 8676 Steam user reviews of Road to Empress I using NLP-based preprocessing, semantic analysis, sentiment analysis, and LDA topic modeling. The results indicate that the review corpus was organized around several interconnected dimensions, including narrative progression, character engagement, audiovisual performance, interactivity, and payment structure, with narrative-related concerns occupying a central position. Compared with the full corpus, the identified monetization-related review subset showed a less positive sentiment distribution, suggesting that monetization-related discussion within this subset was associated with more negative evaluations. Topic modeling further indicated three prominent concerns: interrupted narrative continuity, perceived incompleteness, and dissatisfaction with value for money. Overall, the findings suggest that, within the identified subset, monetization was discussed not merely as a pricing issue, but as part of the broader experiential structure through which continuity, completeness, and value were judged. The study contributes to research on Interactive FMV Games by foregrounding monetization as an experiential dimension and offers practical implications for designing less disruptive monetization strategies in narrative-centered interactive products.