UCL School of Management is delighted to welcome Masakazu Ishihara, Stern NYU, to host a research seminar discussing DEI’s Double Edged Impacts: Machine-Learning-Based Causal Evidence from Steam Game Sales and User Reviews.

Abstract

Firms increasingly incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) themes into entertainment products, yet backlash toward DEI in gaming communities suggests that the commercial consequences may be highly heterogeneous. We study the causal impact of DEI-related game characteristics on sales and user-generated review texts in the Indie PC game market.

Using a dataset of Steam games released between 2014 and 2023, we define DEI content as the presence of either a female-protagonist (FP) tag or an LGBTQ tag. We first estimate the causal effects of FP/LGBTQ content on total sales using double/debiased machine learning (DML). To address endogeneity arising from game theme–DEI correlations, we embed game descriptions and cluster titles into six thematic groups. Treatment effects vary sharply across clusters: FP content reduces sales in action-intensive and strategy/survival clusters but increases sales in visual-novel and narrative-heavy clusters; LGBTQ content shows similarly polarized effects, with negative impacts in action titles and strong positive effects in narrative-driven visual novels.

To uncover why DEI succeeds or fails across themes, we apply a large language model-based causal inference on text to estimate how FP content shapes the linguistic properties of user reviews. Clusters exhibiting significant sales effects also show significant divergences in review discourse. In negatively affected clusters, reviewers focus on socio-political framing, para-textual moral judgments, or philosophical critiques of design, whereas unaffected reviewers focus on mechanics and technical execution.

In positively affected clusters, FP content elicits deeper narrative, artistic, or identity-focused engagement. Our findings provide both practical guidance for developers and theoretical insight into the mechanisms through which DEI content interacts with theme-specific player expectations, cultural schemas, and the interpretive frames that shape consumer responses.