In today’s modern and media driven society, being talked about is often paramount to being successful. This reigns true in all areas of entertainment, including video games. If a game is well received and/or talked about in the media or in articles, it is reaching more and more eyes which often translate into more sales. With 2015 come and gone, this article will look at the top games and platforms in the media during 2015 to see just which games and platforms got in front of the most eyes and made the biggest impact during 2015.
The info, statistics, and numbers I will be using for this article were supplied by a recent ICO Partners study. I will begin by looking at the top 15 most talked about topics in a general sense, look at some potential surprises within the statistics and then look at the top three in a bit more detail and try to explain why those titles were the most talked about. Following this, I will then do the same for platforms.
The list of the top 15 games of 2015 based on the number of articles is littered with the titles that you would expect. Of course, you have your heavy hitters like Call of Duty BOPS 3, Halo 5, MGS 5, Fallout 4, Star Wars Battlefront and Destiny that appear, but there are also a few that most of you wouldn’t expect. For example, the solid performance of Splatoon with 20,637 articles is quite impressive. The reason it is so impressive is not only because it was released about half way through 2015 (yet still appeared in the top 15) but also that it was only released on a single platform (The Wii U, which also has the lowest installation base of any of the major consoles). Continuing with the idea of exclusives reaching a ton of eyes, Bloodborne is another surprising title on this list. Bloodborne is the action RPG that is exclusive to the PS4 and actually came in at #11 on the list with 26,169 articles. Even more impressive is the fact that Bloodborne had only a little under 1000 articles less than Destiny, which is actually the most expensive game of all time. But likely the biggest surprise is the fact that Minecraft, even though it was initially released over half a decade ago, still comes in at #5 on this list with 32,278 articles, which is a testament to the love fans have for this game. Minecraft is also one of the steadiest titles in the media as it never had a month in 2015 where less than 2,000 articles were written about it. Now that we have a good overview of what is included in the list, we can look at the top three (which are all very different games) and see why they likely did so well in 2015.
Coming it at number three (in what was a surprise to me) is Grand Theft Auto 5 with 49,002 articles written on it in 2015. Even though it was released in 2013, the game STILL appeared in the top 3 of the list two years after its release, which shows its strength as a franchise and the pull it still has in the media. The number could have also been helped by the PC release of this game in 2015, but no matter what year or time it is, there always seems to be interest in the newest GTA game.
The game that received the second most articles about it in 2015 was Fallout 4, with 50,144 articles. Let’s face it, most of you were probably expecting this to come in at number one. I know I was. But the reason this came in at number two was because it was announced almost half way during the year and released with only a month and change left in 2015. The fact that it was still able to come in at number two in about half the time as other games is a testament to the unbelievable amount of hype it received. Fallout 4 also had the best month when it comes to the number of articles produced as, in its release month of November 2015, there were 16,099 articles written about it, much more than last year’s winner of 11,000 articles that Watch Dogs received in its release month in 2014.
And the title that had the most coverage in the media in 2015 was The Witcher 3, which garnered 51,098 articles. Witcher 3 is the third installment in the RPG franchise which was historically a PC franchise. The fact that the game itself is very good and how much its audience wanted to read about it largely helped propel it to the number one spot. The communication around the title was also done very well, including post-launch with their great plans for DLC. Where this game won is that not only did it have a strong release, but it managed to sustain this success throughout the year, whereas most games slowdown in the media quickly after release.
In terms of platforms, there is a good chance you know who the top dogs are, but we will include them anyway. Not surprisingly, the PlayStation 4 came in as the number one console with 460,043 articles on it, which is more than 100,000 more than the Xbox One had (337,818). IOS and Android both had stellar showings as they both came in with around 300,000 articles each. VR tycoon Oculus even appeared on the list, but only had 26,522 articles about them, but I expect that number to skyrocket when the 2016 data is analyzed.
If you want to check out more of the analysis and research done in this study by ICO Partners, you can check it out here.