With E3 2017 in our rearview mirror, it’s time to get down to the important business of deciding who “won” the show. We already brought you a ranking of the most talked-about games on social media (Assassin’s Creed Origins topped the list), and most-viewed games on YouTube (Star Wars Battlefront II won that one), but perhaps the surest way to decide who claimed the show is to look at what the video game press focused on. E3 is, after all, still nominally a press event, and while a lot of gamers get their news for social media these days, a good chunk still go to websites like this one for their updates.
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Well, market consulting firm ICO Partners broke down all the E3 2017 coverage, and, according to them, Microsoft and the Xbox brand were the narrow winners of this year’s show. In all, 19,774 stories were written about the Xbox One, while 19,393 touched on PlayStation, and 10,103 were about Nintendo consoles. That said, Nintendo had the biggest gain this year, nearly doubling their amount of coverage.
Obviously the newly-announced Xbox One X drove a lot of interest for Microsoft, but even without it, the Xbox One generated more chatter than the PlayStation 4 this year.
As for individual games, Assassin’s Creed Origins was the clear winner. Surprisingly, “Skyrim” was the second-most reported-on term, although that covers several games including Skyrim VR, the Nintendo Switch port, and The Elder Scrolls: Legends’ Skyrim expansion. Following that, Destiny 2, Anthem, and Super Mario Odyssey were all running more-or-less neck and neck.
Finally, when it came to third-party coverage, Ubisoft was the big winner, which isn’t surprising as they had a killer E3 press conference. Surprisingly, Bethesda beat out EA, but that’s probably because most of us games blogging types hate writing about FIFA. What? It’s true.
As someone who’s probably written nearly 100 E3 2017 stories at this point, this lines up pretty squarely with my experience. Microsoft has done a great job of monopolizing the E3 coverage this year with the Xbox One X reveal and tons of interviews. Not all the coverage has been positive, but hey, any publicity is good publicity, right?
You can check out a selection of WWG’s E3 2017 coverage, right here.
[via ICO Partners]
