Minecraft

Over the two years, the sentiment around Minecraft has held consistent, hovering within the 0.80 to 0.95 range. Looking back over the last five years, sentiment has only dipped as low as 0.75. The only significantly change in sentiment occured from february to april in 2018, which coincides with its lowest article volume historically. Minecrafts steadfast positive sentiment is a testament to its timeless gameplay and visuals.

After a successful launch that cemented Minecrafts place in gaming history, article frequency began to decline substantially beginning in mid-2014. This trend may have continued into the future, however, the COVID-19 era push video games into the mainstream as people were forced to stay inside and were looking for new ways to pass the time. After hitting a historic low of one article in November 2018, Minecraft made a dramatic return, hitting an all time peak of 87 articles in a single month in April 2023. Although in the months since, the growth in coverage looks like it has plateaued. Saturation of the open world genre and the release of much anticipated titles such as Hytale will likely put pressure on the coverage of Minecraft.

The top three most active authors covering Minecraft are split amongst three seperate news outlets, Andrew Heaton (191 articles) from Game Rant, Luke Plunkett (176 articles) from Kotaku, and Eddie Makuch (163 articles) from Gamespot. Despite their high article publishing for Minecraft, none of these authors entirely dominate the title's coverage as there is a plethora of smaller authors covering the game. Combined these authors account for 530 articles or 11% of the articles published on Minecraft.

Game Rant currently boasts the highest average sentiment at a score of 0.89, which is 0.03 above the Minecrafts historical average of 0.86 and 0.07 of the lowest score of 0.82 from PCGamer. The high sentiment score is largely bouyed by Game Rant, as no other source manages to stay above the average with Kotaku, IGN, and Gamespot all sit at 0.85 just one point below.

Given Game Rant accounts for nearly half of all articles, it is not unsurprising that it holds three of the six lowest and highest sentiment journalists, Chris Birsnet (19 articles) with the lowest sentiment at 0.56, Tyler Shipley (56 articles) with a perfect score of 1.0, and Zackari Greif (11 articles) with the third highest at 0.99. Only one other journalist manages to report a perfect score, Samuel Heaney (14 articles) from IGN. Since scores tend to polarize on opposite sides of the sentiment score scale, authors must have published a minimum of 10 articles to be considered for the ranking.