Sony Failed To Get People Talking About Move. Have Some Statistics.
As a lover of statistics the new trending tools (soon to be made public) provided by Wire.vg are going to give me endless hours of amusement. For those who don’t know, Wire.vg is a new news tracking site that’s taking feeds from all the big gaming sites and bringing them into one central location. During E3 it collected a huge volume of data, and now we can play with it.
As people have been throwing around the idea of “winning” and “losing” E3, I thought that it would be an interesting topic to shine the statistical light on. Below, you can see charts of relative volumes of results for key search terms; Company names, console names and the name of each company’s respective “main” announcement.
These graphs show the number of posts published during the E3 week with each of the phrases in. Each of the three graphs is scaled so they’re all the same size.
Interesting, to me at least, is how Nintendo got nearly as much coverage as Sony and Microsoft combined (Nintendo were mentioned in the titles of 142 posts, while Microsoft and Sony were in 91 and 89 respectively). Nintendo had far more articles written about their press conference than either of the other two, and during the rest of the week they consistently held the fictional “most discussed company” spot.
Most likely due to the re-design, the word “Xbox” was used in more titles than both “Playstation” and “Wii” combined, which is rather an impressive statistic to get. The coverage-victory continues for Microsoft who had far more people talking about Kinect than both the 3DS and Move. To see how that coverage panned out during the week, have a graph:
Microsoft already had quite a buzz about Kinect going on the Sunday (13th) and only added to the situation during the Monday of their press conference. On the Tuesday, Nintendo’s 3DS announcement kicked up nearly as much of a storm and then stayed strong for the rest of the week. Sony’s Move, perhaps because they didn’t really show much new, failed to get even half the coverage of either competitor and quickly fell into third place for coverage.
Obviously this is a very simple look into how the big three stack up, but I think it’s fair to say Sony didn’t do quite as well as many were expecting, at least as far as quantity of coverage goes.
[Edit: The second chart has been updated since this article was first published due to confusion over the x axis labels.]
Maybe sony failed to get people talking about move around E3 because they’ve had people talking all year, whereas Microsoft and Nintendo kept everything a secret, causing people to speculate. Does that make sense?
because ms promised natal would change the world, of course idiots believed them
@Brian S.: Indeed, that’s one of the main factors. Though Kinect was also shown, arguably more, at last year’s E3.
Also, for those wondering (a few people have asked); no, the x axis markers on the second graph don’t align with the data points, and yes, it is still accurate. These graphs are taken from a very early Wire.vg trends build so it has some quirks, lol.
What did Mark Twain say?
There are 3 kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Seldom can stats be relied on to convey context, sure they look good in bar graphs and charts and cater quite nicely to a short attention span, again, they can easily butcher context.
I’ve worked with stats a long time and it’s not a controversial statement that you can get whatever answer you like from statistical analysis.
I think it’s quite clear why Kinect has such a high volume of articles – just wade through the endless list of articles on N4G over the problems with it – what doesn’t work, how all the games are casual etc. etc.
Nintendo had a considerable number of articles written about it because its surprised people. Nobody was expecting it to deliver as much as it did, so there was plenty to write about.
I can’t quite explain why the term ‘Xbox’ is so high though, but I’m sure someone else can suggest something…
I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic or not, usually well written articles don’t have the word “fail” in the title.
So my conclusion is that you’re a racist.
It would be interesting if you could apply this to “negative” or “positive” metrics – which you can’t without some sort of basis inferred.
Which makes all these graphs and charts sorta… pointless?
Just as an example, if Sony had gotten 100,000 posts written about Move, but all of these posts were focused on deriding the product, your wonderful charts would illustrate none of that context for your reader.
@tim: I think the article quite clearly states that the graphs are measuring how much the consoles are being written about, regardless of whether it’s positive or negative press, so I don’t see why what you’re suggesting is necessary. Sure, if lots of people had written an article saying that Move was shit, then it would have a big spike on the graph, which would be quite consistent with lots of people talking about it.
I think my original comment quite clearly states that I understand this article does not relay the negative or positive nature of each posting tallied in the data. It’s why I indicated as such in my very first sentence – and in fact is the entire basis of my issue with this article.
Your comment fails to address the absolute inanity of an article that assigns value to stats that have no context.
Think about that a bit and please do get back to me. And maybe next time, take into account my entire comment – from the start?
@tim: No, actually, your comment seems to show no understanding whatsoever about what the article is for. Whether that happens to be positive or negative or neutral press, it seems to me that it’s interesting in itself that one product or company might be getting more press than another. It give an indication of what the real talking points are, regardless of what people are actually saying. It hints, for example that perhaps Kinect is a name that casually interested people are far more likely to be familiar with now than Move just because it’s had more coverage over E3.
Oh god. This is your evil business plan, isn’t it? ;-)
You’re going to be able to fund your Jet full of infinite super models by selling tracking data from across all major sources of video game news to marketers as a one stop shop instead of them going to the sites individually.
It’s brilliant.
Well to be fair sony already showed off the Move at GDC. If sony really pumps up the marketing for Move around lunch then I think it will sell well.
Math and stats are boring, what about a graph of the physical attributes of booth babes? ;)
I think there is a sub-text to this story about the marketing teams at Sony vs Microsoft. Changing “Natal” to “Kinect” immediately would spike news reports because outlets would need extra posts to just update the name change.
Sony’s one marketing success story, Kevin Butler, has had very little to do with the entire PSMove project. Hell they’ve got him working on reviving PSP right now.
Nice work Wardrox. Good to see you can still write ;-)
@Peter Silk: rather it be good or bad news, people are still talking more about Kinect other then they are with the move. Im sorry its true.
yes but as time goes on 3ds will be massive i heard some teenagers talking about 3ds in a bus stop its getting noticed quick