Anyone with a Twitter account could see that as Nintendo's live broadcast from E3 sprung to life, it started to trend and generate a lot of online buzz. Nintendo, of course, didn't utilise the press conference format that draws attention for a 60-90 minute burst, instead focusing on its Treehouse format for this year. Did the move pay off? Well, yes and no.
Let's start with the big positive. Brandwatch, a social media monitoring tool that extrapolates results from 10% of data and posts, has shared some analysis with us on how Nintendo fared in terms of social media 'mentions'. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has been declared as its winner of E3, earning more attention online than other major games of the show.
Even accounting for the nature of the data, it's pleasing to see such terrific interest in the title. That said the story changes a little when the attention shifts to mentions of 'Nintendo'. Due to the nature of Nintendo's broadcast its results are mixed - there was a pleasing spike in interest when the Treehouse stream started, but 'Nintendo' as a name has lagged behind the spikes seen for publishers and hardware manufacturers off the back of their conventional live conferences. That said it may catch up a little if it has a strong second day with the Treehouse broadcast.
Overall, we suspect Nintendo will be rather happy with the impact that Breath of the Wild has had, with social media buzz combining with positive previews. Now we just wait for its 2017 release.
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Comments (61)
So far I agree. Nothing has been as wowing as Zelda yet.
Was not expecting this. Good job Nintendo.
Definitely deserves all the attention it got! Great job Nintendo
Good for Zelda. And Nintendo. For a company that barely showed up and really has nothing new to announce - we've known about Zelda for 2 years now - I'd say they've done much better than could have been expected.
Death of the wild? Sounds a bit heavy!!!
Zelda looks fantastic. Nintendo in general as well as Treehouse stuff is lackluster. Sounds about right.
When Nintendo announced that the focus of E3 would be Zelda and little else, I immediately assumed this E3 would be worse than last year's in terms of interest. I'm glad I was wrong.
I imagine Mother 3 would reach those kind of highs if announced today.
Those results represent short-term buzz. Are we really expecting Zelda to continue on with the buzz for the next year? I don't think so.
People are going to forget about it as the other companies continue to market their games and get fans pumped.
I find it incredibly stupid for anyone to declare a winner of E3 in the first place, but making the argument because Zelda was tweeted the most for an hour of the day is just stupid.
Zelda is definitely my top moment from this E3.
Followed by the Last Guardian actually getting a release date.
Apart from that, it's been rather poor overall, although there were a couple of decent trailers and announcements. But everybody except Nintendo and Sony fell completely flat really.
Still, it's quite over yet, but nothing is going to top Zelda now.
For Sony and Microsoft : Hah, in your face !
Nintendo stuffs is not an underdog things.
@G0dlike hahaa
"a social media monitoring tool that extrapolates results from 10% of data and posts" - that doesn't sound like a very accurate model to me.
Because 10% is an accurate sample size...yeah, no.
Deservedly so. See, Nintendo, it's these really ambitious, exciting games that inspire people! Zelda looks 100% on the right track, and, with the same amount of effort, I'm sure they could get people just as interested in other franchises like Metroid and Kid Icarus.
@HeroOfTime32 I think you'll find there's a lot of statistics work done in the modern world based on sample sizes of much less than 10%. How the sample is determined is often more telling than the size of said sample. If you can get a fairly representative sample, then the size of the sample is less important.
In the UK (and probably other countries too) there's a Blue Flag scheme for beaches, to indicate the water quality at various seaside hotspots. Blue Flag status is obviously very important nowadays for tourism - fail to get the blue flag and the world sees your beach as Poo Paradise, Sewage Shore etc.
...but the data that is used to determine whether a beach gets a Blue Flag is based on just a few litres of water sampled very occasionally. A few litres, over the course of a whole year in all that water that beaches typically get washing in and out all day every day...
It's an interesting topic - the business decision to focus almost solely on one game. It obviously gets more attention than any other game because it's been given more exposure than the other games, but because Zelda is a flagship Nintendo title, one might say giving it such focus could pay-off as people completely oblivious to Nintendo and Zelda might get sucked in to our special world. But the other side of the coin is that if Breath of the Wild didn't win people over to Nintendo, nothing else will have done at this E3. Eggs and baskets and such.
I knew Nintendo could do this all along!
Death of the Wild? The game just took a darker turn!
Breath of the wild sounds like the latest Garnier fruit shampoo line.
Game looked decent though, not as great as say Horizon Zero Dawn but still sweet. I think some people are still in disbelief that Nintendo can actually create games which fit in with the modern era of gaming, took me a while to wrap my head around it! Lol
@Ichiban I don't know much about Horizon on PS4, but directly comparing BotW to Horizon and other open-world games is problematic. Sure, Horizon may look better to you, but Zelda games will probably always be designed for audiences that include kids under the age of 10, therefore it has to retain a certain accessibility and simplicity, something which BotW is probably stretching more than Zelda has done before. Horizon et al would overwhelm under-10s far more, I suspect.
Not like there are alot of other games for Nintendo fans to tweet about though
@gcunit Under 10s are more honest than most "mature" gamers trying to look cool playing the "grown up" games.
@LUIGITORNADO Why did you came to this site? You are always hating everything that Nintendo does on IGN for a long time, now you go to a Nintendo focused site to do the same.
@rennandovale Your comment has been edited to remove unpleasantness. Please interact with other users respectfully and do not make personal attacks. Thanks.
Here's hoping for Zelda: Breath Of The Wild to have earned its status as most talked about game of E3 on its own merits, rather than because it's... well... the only big WiiU title coming out in the next months. Color Splash aside.
I don't get it. I like Zelda, but the game has nothing interesting going for it that sets it apart from the many other similar games that were shown.
But I guess since it's Zelda of course it'll generate more buzz.
Based on what I saw yesterday, I say Breath of the Wild has earned it!
I knew it. Big press conferences are literally information overload. Nintendo crushed it.
Does not really surprise me if Zelda does end up being declared the winner by other magazines and gaming sites as it has to be one of the best looking games i have seen so far besides FF 15.
If the new RPG to be announced today is Mother 4, those results may change
Let me preface by saying I don't even own a Sony console.
God of War and Horizon impressed me more than what I saw out of Zelda. Zelda looks amazing for a Zelda game but only on that scale alone.
@nab1 If I could give you 64 hearts for that suggestion I would, but please take my 1.
Though I assume you are joking. As legendary as it is in these parts, I'd never heard of Earthbound/Mother before I started coming here 2 years ago, so using myself as a sample size of 1 I would imagine it's got a fair way to go before it reaches the level of mainstream awareness that Zelda has. But I am in the UK, so I guess my life experience of Nintendo games is hardly representative of the whole globe.
Sony's conference was great. They gave me one good reason to buy a PS4: Resident Evil VII - franchise that I am a huge fan of. Microsoft's was alright. Ubisoft was depressing and annoying for plenty of reasons.
Now, Zelda...
I know it's not the first time a game with the same premisses is released. Skyrim works like that alright. Plenty of games use similar mechanics. But having those mechanics and premisses brought to Hyrule is something HUGE. I'm all in for sure. Counting the days to play that beauty for years to come - and replay it with my daughter Sophia!
@rjejr no need to be sarcastically snappy and huffy my grumpy friend...microsoft and your Sony did quite well in my opinion...regardless all is subjective but the top winners for me are Breath of the Wild, Last Guardian and Recore...another good year for gamers...maybe this year I will finally be able to finish my PS3 and Gamecube back log ;P LOL!
Love Ninty, love zelda, but sorry, Sony totally won E3 this year, hands down. I think every game they showed I will be picking up, and most had release dates this year, unlike last year, lol remember that?
Death of the wild 😱😱
@HeroOfTime32 I worked on the E3 research above. When we liveblog, as with E3, we use a representative sample of 10%. This is many times more than is needed to achieve 95%+ accuracy for the whole dataset and means we can release data swiftly while the event is still going on.
Good job Nintendo, the game looks beautiful!
Hype!
@WanderingPB I was actually being sincere, I thought Ntineod and Zelda both did well. Especially under the circumstances. I thought Zelda wold be lost under a barrage of NX questions, but NX has hardly come up, it's been all Zelda, all the time. Meanwhile Sony is talking about PSVR while trying to avoid Neo, and people are wondering why anybody would buy an Xbox S w/ Scorpio coming out next year. Or why buy ANY Xbox when it's all playable on PC?
Crazy leadershipless Nintendo may actually come out on top of this thing - still have a day to go - and then, after "Winning" E3, they can announce NX in a few months. That was unthinkable to me 4 days ago. It seemed possible after EA and Bethseda and Ubi and MS. Sony is still a contender though, many games.
But really, one 2 year old game wins E3 for an entire company which left its new console at home? That's very impressive.
Great Job Nintendo!
The reveal was amazing. Everything was something we have seen before but its how it comes together that is the secret sauce. And woo did it ever come together. I need it to be March right now.
Seems like it really did help for Nintendo to be forward in saying, "Dont expect much other than Zelda."
But the concern is that this could now set a precedent. Will/should Nintendo continue to have a bigger presence at E3 next time, or will they just show off their biggest couple of games, and present the rest at a later date?
I guess the sales of the game will ultimately be the decider, since it's supposedly releasing before next E3.
Not surprised, Zelda always wins.
It's incredible to see the Zelda formula being changed so much with Breath of the Wild, but it's not like anything they showed yesterday was exceptional or anything. It's clearly borrowing ideas from other games, and still remains to be seen if those ideas will even be implemented as well as they are in other games.
How did Sun and Moon not get as much attention...? Holy cow that's shocking...
@HeroOfTime32 10% is really not a bad sample size. Outside of census data, I think most of the statistics that we regularly use (and that newspapers base their stories and 'opinion pieces' on), are taken from sample sizes of much less than 10% of the population they're referring to.
Providing that the 10% is distributed sensibly, there's no reason to turn one's nose up at it.
@Rhydas It's possible that Sun and Moon weren't mentioned directly in a lot of the buzz, with the new Pokemon and other features being mentioned instead.
It's looking fantastic.
@LUIGITORNADO Zelda is the winner so far as being the game of E3. Did you see the setup they had for it, absolutely incredible. One of the most awesome displays I've ever seen. I want that Link statue. I have no where to put it, but I want it. And the game look amazing too.
When it comes to which company won, Nintendo didn't win because they really only showed off the one game. M$ got the most mentions as shown above (likely due to the XBOne S announcement), but it seems to me that Sony won when it came to the games announced/shown for the PS4. Though until I dig deeper into everything showcased it is hard to pick between the two.
It's not that Nintendo fans have much of a choice in voting.
It's no surprise. This game was the main focus for Nintendo, so it needed to be big.
I'm surprised horizon is so low. In some ways it had Zelda beaten.
Zelda is gonna be awesome though and probably rock everybody's socks off because of its gameplay and design.
And that art style... Awesome.
@Maxz yeah, I understand that to a large degree. I was just under the impression that ALL data was available, because it's well, online and available.
Can't you just search hashtags and see FULL statistics, or no? I'm not familiar, as I don't use Twitter at all.
But yes in the scheme of things, and in comparison to other surveys it's acceptable. I just thought this could potentially be different given that you're not actually surveying or pooling, but rather just observing what's currently available online.
Well Breath of the Wild had to win E3, once you show Link shirtless you know the game will be good
Really, you've had to be blind and deaf to avoid the news of Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.
Of course it's the most mentioned game.
It would also have been the most mentioned game if people from Nintendo had just lined up at random places at E3 with megaphones, yelling: "THE LEGEND OF ZELDA: BREATH OF THE WILD! COMMING TO WII U AND NINTENDO NX!"
@LUIGITORNADO If you think Nintendo won't continue to market and make their own games throughout the rest of this year, you're not giving them fair credit.
@gcunit Who are you and why do you have my face?
@AlexOlney Hello Alex. My name is Axel Elnoy, and I come from a place far away from here. I have travelled many ages to find you, for I have something to tell you, Alex, something you must know.
@rjejr I know my friend i was just being sarcastic...except for my PS3 and GCN backlog...
overall im content with this E3 content especially Ever Oasis which is like the spiritual successor to Secrets of Mana we've all been waiting for and honestly the only disappointing thing is the entitlement of some gamers who are adamant about giving games like Color Splash and Federation Force such negativity...I remember when we used to play games for fun and had multiple consoles for variety of games....but now its just "gimme games i only want" and "my console is better than yours".....
too much negativity for me my firend im just going to play some MvC2 on my Dreamcast to clear my head
@WanderingPB Yeah, E3 has become too much of a contest dividing gamers rather than bringing them together. I'd like to think there was a place we can all just talk about games we like rather than just "my systems games are better than your systems games" but I don't think that place exists.
I think the 3DS won E3.
@rjejr i concur my friend
@gcunit Then pray, do not keep me waiting.
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