Here’s what we learned:
1. Where do gamers go to share their thoughts the most? Turns out, Facebook
Interestingly, Facebook has the most posts regarding these 20 games, by far. Out of over 100K posts and discussions we analyzed, Facebook has more than twice as many game-related discussions overall than Twitter, and 1.4 times as many as the app store.
2. Where do gamers go to rant or share rainbows and butterflies?
Across Facebook and Twitter, we found that most posts expressed neutral sentiment. Twitter leans negative, with around 14% of the games-related posts expressing negative feedback and only half as many — 7% — for positive responses. Facebook has a fairly solid balance between its positive and negative posts, with 5% negative feedback and 6% positive.
However, the app store stands out as far more polarized, with 57% of the comments expressing positive opinions and 35% sharing negative responses. This difference is understandable; the app store is geared more towards reviews than discussions, so someone would have to feel strongly one way or the other to feel motivated to write a review.
The overall average number of neutral posts was 21% for
gamer posts across geographies. A handful of countries
stood out with much lower neutral numbers – below 10%
3. Which countries are most passionate when it comes to communicating about their games?
It’s no surprise that players in different countries have different game preferences and different online behavior, but what we didn’t expect was that different geographies would be so varied in terms of the positive or negative sentiments that they expressed online. Taking Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and The App Store together, the overall average number of neutral posts was 21% for gamer posts across geographies. A handful of countries stood out with much lower neutral numbers (below 10%) and strongly split sentiment between positive and negative, meaning gamers in these countries share their game passions in the form of much more extreme opinions. These countries include: Canada (41% negative sentiment / 43% positive sentiment), Russia (40% negative/ 49% positive), Japan (42% negative / 45% positive), Thailand (35% negative / 54% positive) and Malaysia (41% negative / 47% positive).
The game with the highest level of positive interactions is
State of Survival
4. Which game has the most positive sentiment? What’s considered a “good” positive sentiment level?
We took a look at the levels of positive, negative, and neutral sentiment about each of the top 20 games separately. We found that the average level of positive sentiment is 24%, which can serve as a benchmark for games running sentiment analysis.
The game with the highest level of positive interactions is State of Survival, which left the average a long way behind with 63% positive interactions! Individual feedback includes “Tbh I just got this today and it’s really good” (App store) and “I’ve never had one issue ever and it’s been over a year.” (Facebook)
5. Positive sentiment travels far. Negative, not so much.
Typically, we’d think that negative sentiments get shared more widely than positive ones, so we got quite a surprise when we investigated which posts are shared the most often.
It turns out that positive Twitter posts are 20x more likely to be shared than negative ones, and positive Facebook posts are an astonishing 68x more likely to be shared than negative ones. Turns out that if you want your game comments to go viral, you’ve got to keep it positive.
On average, for every one post published by a game
developer, the community posts 18 discussions across
various platform
6. The games generating the biggest buzz
On average, for every one post published by a game developer, the community posts 18 discussions across various platforms. But that figure hides some pretty large differences. Homescapes, Free Fire, and Gardenscapes topped the list with over 100 community posts for every one game developer post. It’s clear that these brands have extremely vibrant communities, with high engagement levels and plenty of conversation and buzz.
7. You’ll never guess the top three languages used in gamer posts
You won’t be surprised to hear that the most common language that gamers use in their social posts is English. Spanish is the second most-used language, but the third language is not Russian, or French, or German. Nope, it’s emoji! Perhaps we’re moving towards a universal single language after all.
What about you? Would you like to know what your players think about your game on Social, Discord and App review sites?