The Buzz/Friday#

The Fri-Up: The Fri-Up: E3

Last night the biggest gaming event in the world drew to a close. An industry-only event, E3 is less about the gaming gimmicks, and more about leading industry trends for the year and showcasing real prototypes of what’s to come.

This year predictably involved the first big face-off between the Xbox One and the PS4 and the news just in (from Sony) is that ‘PS4 preorders went through the roof’. There was also the usual raft of new game releases prompting a cameo appearance by Luigi greeting Nintendo’s high-profile conference guests, beautifully captured in this Vine clip.

Without any further ado, let’s allow the data to do the talking by checking out the top hashtags of E3 2013 via Brandwatch’s Twitter Insights component.

Fig 1. E3 2013 Top Hashtags.

In this view, the Top Hashtags component shows hashtags in order of their reach. Although PS4 comes top in terms of actual times it was tweeted, the RT figure and therefore impressions for Call Of Duty: Ghosts is significantly higher. This was hugely aided by a competition running to win an exclusive Call of Duty E3 swag bag.

Nintendo, despite owning a significant part of the press coverage from E3, still struggled to make much of an impact against COD, despite the cute Luigi Vine video ranking fifth in the top E3 stories, according to our data.

Fig 2. E3 2013′s Most mentioned Tweeters

Moving on to most mentioned tweeters, @callofduty cleaned up here, amassing the largest number of of tweets (as well as retweets). Games news site @IGN also did very well and was the only media brand to feature in the top 10 thanks to their incessant coverage of the event (8 posts per hour).

As the final figures come in on PS4 pre-orders at E3 and Xbox reveal their groundbreaking offline gaming offering to be the: (drumroll please) existing Xbox 360, we’ll keep you posted.