CoD: Warzone

Call of Duty: Warzone came out with a bang, with its large lobbys, gulag mode, and CoD brand awareness bringing in millions of players at its launch is the battle royale genre was in need of somethign new. However, reports of bugs, crashing lobbys, constant downtimes, cheaters, and toxic community have dragged the games sentiment down initially. As the game continues to smoothen out the edges and develops a core player base, its sentiment has gradually began to rise, hitting a peak of 0.833 in October of 2022. However, like many Call of Duty titles the coverage of Warzone is beginning to fade across the gaming media as the lack of headline content updates and newer title launches give no reason for news outlets to continue posting about the game.

After hitting a peak of 206 articles in April of 2021, article count covering Warzone has steadily decline apart from a spike in November 2022 when the announcement of Warzone 2.0 was released to the public. However, the newest installment of Warzone has already been released, and is not simply branded as Warzone so as to not confuse players. Instead of branding it as a standalone game, Warzone is largely considered a gamemode of Call of Duty rather than an independent title. This fact will most likely forecast a future stabilization of Warzone in news outlets as is it may no longer be covered as a standalone game but rather a feature of future Call of Duty titles.

The two most prolific journalists covering the Warzone title, Richard Warren (447 articles) and Joshua Goodpastor (487 articles), are both published by Game Rant and comprise nearly a quarter of all articles and 33% of Game Rant's articles. Gamespot also manages to publish two of the top five journalists, as its coverage of Warzone is largely consolidated rather than comprised of multiple authors, with S.E. Doster (301 articles) and Eddie Makuch (184 articles) making up 73% of Gamespots articles. However, since Gamerant is even more consolidated across its journalists, despite accounting for 72% of the articles it only comprises only 67% of the journalists. Conversely, despite PCGamer and IGN comprisingly only 5.8% and 1.3% of articles they compose 9.4% and 6.3% of journalists, respectively.

Across the gaming news outlets, IGN and PCGamer report sentiments of 0.63 and 0.52, respectively, above the game's historical average of 0.48. However, since Game Rant and Gamespot comprises the vast majority of articles and report sentiments of 0.48 and 0.47, the average sentiment for the game is largely pulled down to this level.

Despite Game Rants negative coverage of Warzone, it still publishes all three of the top sentiment journalists, Mohsen Baqery (35 articles) with 0.90, Jake Selway (39 articles) with 0.86, and Robin Meyer-Lorey (39 articles) with 0.84. Not only do these authors report positive scores but they also publish a substantial amount of articles, meaning that the game is enjoyable to many but still suffers from substantial draw backs that may throw off potential new users.