League of Legends

League of Legends has observeably gone through two stages, the first one ranging from October of 2008 until June of 2016, and the second stage from June of 2016 until the present. In the first stage, League of Legends had first only been a Warcraft mod was yet to release on its own platform. Follwoing its officialy release, the game quickly gained steam, constantly hitting new highs and garnering international recognition for its annual 'Worlds' Championship, with the first one taking place in 2011 and results in the games first spike in media coverage. This continued until October of 2015, where is reached its first peak of 38 articles in October after SK Telecom T1 won their second title. That year the final was watched by 36 million people, beating out other sports finals such as the Stanley Cup and NBA finals. However, articles inextricably fell off the following year despite record viewship and playercount. This is the beginning of the second phase, where article count stagnanted until the outbreak of COVID-19, which force people to stay at home and look for new ways to past the time. Videogames were an obvious solution for many, and subsequently article counts took off. The November 2021 'Worlds' Championship sparked the game high spike in article count for a total of 51 articles in that month. The following 2022 and 2023 failed to garner similar levels of coverage, and the game may follow a similar pattern it has had before and coverage may begin to decline.

Sentiment surrouding the League of Legends coverage has been incredibly volatile, especially since volumes reach lows during the non-ranked periods of the seasons as well as when there are not esports tournaments to cover. However, therehas been a discernible upward strend in sentiment within the last year, with League of Legends hitting an all time sentiment of 0.99 in 2023 in the month of December. This is markedly above the games historical average of 0.73, almost a 0.30 point difference.

Kotaku with 603 articles, is the largest gaming news outlet covering 37.3% of the total 1,517 articles. The next three sources, PCGamer, Gamespot, and Game Rant covered 23.7%, 17.9%, and 20.6%, respectively. Only IGN was largely unpresent with a dismal 7 article covering the game title. This may largely be because of IGN's' focus on video format when publishing content on League of Legends.

Although sentiment amongst the highest and lowest sentiment gaming new sources is large, this is mostly due to IGN's low article count which leaves it susceptible to the extremities. The remaining sources all hover within 0.05 points of the average sentiment score. The highest sentiment outlet, Kotaku with a score of 0.77 largely pulls the titles sentiment upwords as it composes the largest portion of articles.

All of the lowest and highest average sentiment journalists are either from Game Rant and Gamespot, although none of them managed to report a perfectly positive sentiment score and only two reported a score below 0.50, George Coutiritsas (16 articles) from Game Rant and Jason Fanelli (19 articles) from Gamespot. Additionally, despite comprising only 20.6% of the articles, Game Rant features almost 33% of the total journalists covering League of Legends, or 89 of 271 journalists.