The release of Sony's next-gen console is a major event for the video game industry. The Japanese multinational's announcements punctuated the year 2020, with varying degrees of interest from consumers, who were also widely solicited by the communications of the direct competitor. microsoft Unveiling his console Xbox Series X. As part of an exploratory work of his R&D team, The Metrics Factory has set up a technical system based on machine learning to draw up a retrospective of announcements concerning the PS5.
Our methodology consists in collecting only the most relevant articles based on theGoogle News API. Our corpus counts ~3600 links to media articles “selected” by Google. Our results are therefore necessarily “truncated”, but provide us with a synthetic vision of the news concerning the console “from the point of view of Google”. We will then capture the content of the articles, as well as the commitments on Facebook in order to have the raw material necessary to our machine learning treatments. In total, these are nearly 560K interactions on Facebook who have been captured. After cleaning, we apply a series of Natural Language Processing (NLP) treatments or automatic language processing) consisting of:
- identify mentions and quotations from personalities and brands
- detect the topics mentioned in the articles
- Sort the articles according to the topics selected
All these results can then be consulted within an interface, allowing the analyst to formulate his hypotheses and possibly correct the automatic classification errors linked to our algorithms. Indeed, for this experiment, the accuracy of our classification was 88% : the vast majority of content categories could be classified finely, and only certain potentially confusing topics required the analyst to adjust the results.
First of all, we are seeing a clear increase in media coverage concerning the Playstation 5 as it approaches its release. As of October, the number of articles listed on Google News will tripling, then doubling again in November. It is of course November 20, the official release date of the console, that we observe the strongest peak in publication (166 items). At the same time, we can see that the resonance of the articles (i.e. the volume of commitments on Facebook corresponding to the publications) follows, in general, the same trend.
The main topic covered during the year was all video game franchise announcements, representing more than1 article out of 3. The console's key features have been dissected as the announcements have been made, and also represent about a third of our corpus: the design, backwards compatibility, controller, fan, accessories, and SSD have received significant coverage. The announcement of the release of the console, the promotions and the follow-up of the stocks concerning it total a little less than 300 items over the period. Finally, we list articles that highlight the competition between new generation consoles, as well as with PCs (approximately (300 items).
Comparing media coverage to the resonance of articles on Facebook allows us to give “weight” to each subject, and to perceive the interest of consumers in each of them. Si game releases correspond to the most engaging content category, this remains in a smaller proportion than communications relating to Sony's commercial strategy: the sale and stocks, the price of the console or its design have caught the attention of consumers.
Articles about console features also have an average engagement rate that is above average. Articles concerning the integration of the SSD drive and the graphical qualities of the console have been widely shared on social networks. Finally, if we are only interested in the comments, the competition with other consoles seems to have aroused more controversy among players than the other topics.
The release of the PlayStation 5 is a subject covered by a large number of media (There are 292 distinct ones in our corpus). Therefore, it is possible for us to position these media according to the intensity of their publications, and the effectiveness of their social media resonance. If the local news site Marseillenews published more than 260 items concerning the console, theEngaged interaction on Facebook is very low (on average, 1 interaction every 4 articles...). Conversely, specialized sites such as jeuxvideo-live.com or gameblog.fr generated a large number of commitments on all of their publications. Established media, but not necessarily specialized in video game news, such as PhonAndroid have nevertheless widely relayed information about the console.
We could continue this analysis by drawing up the typology of these media (what is their editorial “mix”? What are the media with an affinity according to the nature of their publications?) and by further breaking down their performances by subject.
In summary, here are the lessons we are learning from this exploration, from a methodological point of view:
1 — By relying on the results of an unsupervised classification (topic modeling) to train a supervised classification model, we greatly accelerate the data processing process
2 — The analysis of media coverage weighted by social media resonance allows us to assign a weight, corresponding to the interest shown by the audiences, to each subject.
3 — Based on the results of the Google News API — although it truncates our data set — allows us to quickly have an overview of a current topic.
