How to Export Steam Game Reviews for Player Sentiment Analysis

Steam reviews are unusually rich feedback. Every review is a thumbs up or down, it comes with how many hours the reviewer had played, and other players vote on whether it was helpful. For game developers, publishers and analysts, that's a sentiment dataset most industries would envy.

Steam shows reviews nicely on the store page, but not in a form you can analyse. This tutorial uses Valve's public reviews endpoint through the Steam Reviews Scraper to export them, then looks at a couple of analyses worth doing.

The endpoint

Valve documents a public endpoint:

https://store.steampowered.com/appreviews/440?json=1&filter=recent&language=all&num_per_page=100

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It returns reviews in pages with a cursor for the next page, plus a summary like "Very Positive".…