Learn more about the public sentiment of more than 30 popular video games
Game Sentiment* allows you to explore data on news articles covering todays popular games. Using the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) Sentiment Analyzer, the historical positive and negative engagement with specific video games can be determined. Be sure to check back in the future as more games and sources will continue to be added.
693,978+
Articles
1,778
Authors
29
Video Games
5
News Sources
Most Popular Games
Rise of Video Games
Although video games have existed in some form for several decades, this list focuses primarily on games released since the turn of the century, with the first article appearing in this data set covering Electronic Arts's release of Madden to the Nintendo64 in 2000. In fact two of the gaming news outlets covered in this analysis, Kotaku and Game Rant, were founded several years after this date in 2004 and 2009, respectively. Most of the activity seen prior to the 2008 revolved around the sports franchises Madden and NBA 2k, as well as other legendary video games such as World of Warcraft and Halo. Following this year, several of todays most well known titles such as Minecraft, League of Legends, and Skyrim hit the market, leading to the first surge of observed articles.
After a brief period of stagnation in publishing frequency from 2010 to 2015, the number of articles began to rise as more gaming block busters such as Rocket League, Overwatch, and Fallout 4 hit the market. The most dramatically catalyst in the video game industry came during the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, where gaming went mainstream as people spent more time at home and looked for new hobbies to take on. Since then the publisher Game Rant has exploded in activity, becoming by far the largest publisher of articles across the covered titles.
Variety of Video Game Coverage
Game Sentiment* currently a covers a total of 29 games at the moment, spanning a variety or genres, release dates, and publishers. The most frequent publisher in the repository is Electronic Arts, with a total of 6 games being covered. The earliest to be released was the Madden franchise, which originated in 1989 but was later acquired by Electronic Arts in 1997 when the development was centralized in-house. Among the games that are covered, Destiny 2 has had the greatest coverage by news outlets for a total of 10,015 posts with 64.2% of these articles published by Game Rant. Following close behind Destiny 2 with a total of 9,250 articles is the popular battle-royale Fornite, which was initially released just 3-months earlier but had considerably less coverage by Game Rant at 49.9% of the total Fornite articles.
The treemap to the right provides a detailed breakdown of all articles collected by their game titles, which each game sized propotional to the count of articles affiliated with it. Other notable games include the recent Bethesda release "Starfield" which has an extensive publishing history due to a leak that first made headlines over a decade ago, as well as League of Legends, which despite its long history and widespread popularity has a relatively modest coverage of 1,618 articles.