Sentiment analysis, also known as opinion mining, is the process of analysing a body of text to determine the sentiment expressed by it. In this study, Natural Language Processing techniques and Machine Learning algorithms have been applied to create multiple sentiment analysis models customized for the gaming domain to determine the sentiment of game reviews. The dataset was collected from Steam and Metacritic through the use of web API and web scraping. This was followed by text preprocessing, data labelling, feature extraction and finally model training. In the training phase, the effects of oversampling and hyperparameter tuning on the performance of the models have been evaluated. Through comparison between Support Vector Classifier (SVC), Multi-layer Perceptron Classifier (MLP), Extreme Gradient Boosting Classifier (XGB), Logistic Regression (LR) and Multinomial Naïve Bayes (MNB), it was evident that SVC had the most superior performance.

Sentiment analysis is one of the major topics of natural language processing which is used to determine whether data is positive, negative or neutral. It is often performed on textual data to help businesses monitor brand and product sentiment in customer feedback to understand their customers’ needs. This paper explores various machine learning algorithms including Logistic Regression (LR), Multinomial Naïve Bayes (MNB), Support Vector Classifier (SVC), Multi-layer Perceptron Classifier (MLP) and Extreme Gradient Boosting Classifier (XGB) to build sentiment analysis models tailored for the gaming domain to classify reviews into positive, negative and neutral. The models were trained on game reviews obtained from Metacritic and Steam. Various data preprocessing and model optimization techniques have been employed and the performance of the models were evaluated and compared. SVC has been determined as the best-performing model among all the models. Keywords: Sentiment Analysis, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Support Vector Machine, Game Reviews