Game of the Year: Skyrim | CLARA

March 9, 2012 written by Gummi Gulla

Gummi is a community researcher with a twist of marketing in him. Gummi tweets under @gummigun on Twitter. He's interested in everything from community research, social media and behavior analysis to eating chips! more info

Love it or hate it? Skyrim took home the main prize at this years GDC Choice Awards. There were 5 games competing for the Game of the Year title and to say the least the competition was hard. We were interested in seeing what the discussion about the different games have been in some of the gaming communities (NeoGaf, Gamasutra, Gamespot, Gamebattles and Edge Online).

Skyrim won the Buzz

In the trend graph above we see the discussion quantities in selected gaming communities about the top 5 games. Looking at the last 30 days we can see that Skyrim had the most discussion before the Choice Awards. However, there was no clear winner in the pre-awards phase. On the day of the event and after the Choice Awards we can see that the two winners of that night, Skyrim and Portal 2, get a lot of attention.

Skyrim was voted the Game of the Year but Portal 2 won in 3 other categories. Lets dig a bit deeper into these two games.

Skyrim vs. Portal 2

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The figure above shows where the discussion was happening and the amount of buzz going on. Skyrim won in every category. Most of the discussion about both games was going on in forums and in social media. There were some blogs and news that covered the awards themselves but little pre-awards buzz.

What is interesting to see is that the discussion was highly polarized. Both games apparently have some lovers and some haters. A higher percentage of the discussion for Portal 2 was positive than for Skyrim. A likely explanation for the high negative discussion is that people who are dissatisfied tend to voice out their opinions more often. In addition, events like the choice awards bring about more opinionated discussion. As a comparison this graph about the general sentiment for Skyrim confirms this:

We can see that there is a high neutral discussion going on during most of the time period. However, as the Choice awards draw closer the polarization of opinions grows.

As a closing statement I want to congratulate Bethesda Game Studios and Valve for their victories. We?ll be back with a summary of GDC when everybody has calmed down, the wine is finished and people need to remember WTF happened!

Gummi

Who is CLARA?

CLARA is the leader of community analytics in the gaming industry. We are connecting marketing teams, developers and executives with the community managers and the community itself. We provide the tools that allow them to listen carefully in order to create better games, and grow faster organically | more info

Source: http://www.clarahq.com/game-of-the-year-skyrim/500

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