This study examined whether users’ negative emotions of fear could be positively associated withtheir satisfaction with immersive virtual reality (VR) sports and how exercise intensity modes of VRsports moderate this relationship at the individual leisure player level. The proposed hypotheseswere examined using user-generated reviews (N ¼ 57,047) generated by individual leisure playersabout their VR sports usage experiences, collected from the Meta Oculus platform. Sentiment ana-lysis and fixed-effects ordered logistic regression were applied to test the hypotheses. The resultsshow that fear affects user satisfaction positively, and exercise intensity modes of VR sports mod-erate the positive effect. This suggests that incorporating elements designed to evoke users’ nega-tive emotions of fear within VR sports can contribute to enhanced user satisfaction under certainconditions (such as exercise intensity). The findings also provide practical guidelines for VR sportspractitioners to improve immersive VR sports design.