Rocket League

Although Rocket League was announced in February of 2014, there was very little coverage leading up to its release, with only 16 articles being published prior to July 2015. Despite the lack of word-of-mouth marketing, Rocket League's release was quite successful, reaching an initial peak of 27 articles the same month which was reached two more times in Februaru of 2016 and June of 2017. However, after approximately three years interest began to fade as new content became scarce and its core player base developed. It was not until the outbreak of the COVID-19 lockdowns when interest in Rocket Leagues revived as people stuck in their homes were forced to find new ways to pass the time. However, as life regains some of its normality and people venture outside their homes again, the trend of decreasing coverage of the game has begun.

Despite Rocket Leagues low article volume, as it has only averaged approximately 7 articles per month, the game has historically seen relatively stable sentiment as it normally maintains a score above 0.70 with occassional lower drops as article volume reduces. This is unlikely to change, as the game enjoys decicated supports by its development studio and its player base is staunchly supportive of the title.

The five gaming news outlets covered on Game Sentiment* were largely even in their coverage of Rocket League, with the largest source Gamespot comprising only 27.6% of all articles while the smallest source Kotaku covering a modest 12.4% of articles. However, journalistic diversity was not so equitable, with Game Rant comprising 35% of the journalists despite publishing only 19% of the articles while Kotaku only featured 7.6% of the journalists while having 12.4% of the articles.

Gaming news outlet sentiment was overwhelming positive, with the lowest average score only reaching 0.87 at PCGamer while reaching an astounding high of 0.96 at Game Rant which notably has a sizeable article volume of 154. This is reflected in the highest sentiment journalists, with Payton Lott (13 articles) from Game Rant being the only journalist with more than 10 articles to record a perfectly positive sentiment score according to the data. Conversely, even the most negative journalists still reported positive scores, with Andy Chalk (26 articles) from PCGamer still publishing with an average sentiment of 0.82 despite being recorded as the lowest sentiment journalist.